Harlan Coben

did you tell him we were coming?

And he said, yes.

And I said, I don't think you did.

I think you're lying to me.

He said, no, I did.

And he said to me, he said, tell them to check my front pocket.

I'm like, well, what else did he say?

Because that was it.

Something like his last words were to check his front pocket.

And he said, well, yeah.

So I went into his clothes and I checked his front pocket and it was the key to his room.

He wanted to make sure we had a place to stay that night when we got there.

That was his last thought.

That to me sums up my father.

I mean, it still destroys me now.

That's why I wrote that essay for the New York Times, and I just wrote a memoir where I still talk about him, and I think everything that I've done since

It was a start of a bad period of time in the sense of, I think by the time I was, I think 30 or 35, I had done seven eulogies.

I didn't do my father's because I was too destroyed to do it at the time.

And I regret that.

So I learned to make sure I do it for the other people.