It was a hearing aid battery.

Tiny, flat, silver, the kind that costs almost nothing and powers the small device my father had worn in his left ear for four years without ever making a fuss about it.

I knew what it was immediately, because I had seen him change them at the kitchen table, quietly, the way he did everything, with a small orange tool and no ceremony.

I stood in that ballroom holding it in my palm and I understood something that has not left me since. The last time my father wore this suit, he had reached into this pocket and found the battery already there, a spare he had put aside for whenever the current one died, the way he always prepared for small inconveniences without telling anyone. He was the kind of man who kept an extra battery in his pocket at a wedding in case he needed to hear the vows clearly.

The weeks before he died, we had noticed he was quieter than usual. We thought it was the illness. We thought it was fatigue. I had assumed, in a way I am not proud of, that he was withdrawing from us. It had bothered me more than I let on.

Standing there in a hotel ballroom three months after his funeral, I understood that he might simply not have been able to hear us well. That the battery might have been dead and he might have been too tired to change it and too private to ask for help, and the quietness I had been carrying like a small unresolved hurt was possibly just a man who could not hear clearly in his final weeks and chose not to make it anyone else’s problem.

I cannot know that for certain. I will never know it for certain. But the battery felt like the closest thing to an explanation I was going to get for something that had been sitting in me sideways since October.

I stepped out of the ballroom into a carpeted hallway and I called my mother. It was eleven o’clock on a weeknight and she answered on the second ring, the way she always has when it’s one of us.

I told her what I found. She was quiet for a moment. Then she said she had been thinking about the same thing, about how he had seemed far away those last weeks, and that she had been afraid to say it out loud because it felt like a complaint about a dying man.

We talked for forty minutes. I sat on a bench in a hotel hallway in a suit that smelled faintly of him, and we said all the things that grief had been sitting on top of, and neither of us cried until we were almost done.

I kept the battery. I put it back in the pocket when I returned the suit to his closet, because it felt like it belonged there. Like it was still waiting to be useful, which is exactly who my father was, right up until he wasn’t there anymore to be it.