Sculpted face tattoo on upper arm

You'll think I've gone soft, but I've kept the mask on the windowsill since Dad's funeral, the one the man from the hospice made in wet plaster while we were still in the corridor. Nobody asked me to take it. It came in a biscuit tin with a sticker reading 'Do not drop', and I've dusted it every Sunday since, which is more care than I gave him while he was alive. Forgive me. I'm learning to say things on paper that I couldn't say across the kitchen table.

Flat 47, Brindley House is still on the ninth floor, and the lift still smells of bleach and somebody's chips. Mrs Okafor from 52 says the council has promised new lifts again. I told her I'd believe it when I heard the doors close without a shudder. Yesterday the whole block went quiet for twenty minutes, the way it does, and in that quiet I stood at the window with the face beside me while the traffic on the ring road sounded like a sea.

I'm writing because of what you said at the crematorium, that he looked peaceful. He didn't. He looked like a man who'd finally stopped arguing with the ceiling. Plaster keeps a stillness the living never manage, and that's why I keep it: the eyelids shut, the nose straight as a ruler, as if he'd decided to become a statue of himself. I've started to think the kindest thing I can do is let it be what it is.

Come up at the weekend. Bring the strong tea you like. I'll wrap the mask in a tea towel and we'll sit in the lounge and not say much, which is how we always managed it.

Love, Ruth