“Turn that garbage off,” my daughter-in-law snapped, reaching for the old black CD player on my granddaughter’s dresser.

She said it with a bright, rehearsed smile, but her eyes remained completely flat.

My granddaughter, Emma, was sitting on the edge of her bed, her small hands holding the green Sharpie-labeled disc like it was gold.

It was Emma’s tenth birthday.

And that disc was the only thing she had wanted for weeks.

I need to back up for a second because you have to understand who Harold was to see why this hit so hard.

When my husband got his diagnosis at the clinic in Grand Rapids, he didn’t cry.

He didn’t scream or curse the doctor.

He just nodded, looked at me, and asked if we could stop for some of those waffle cones on the way home.

He had six months, maybe seven, if the treatments did what they were supposed to.

They didn’t.

But Harold had a plan that didn’t involve doctors.

He borrowed our son Gary’s old silver microphone, the one Gary used back in high school for his garage band.

Every evening, Harold would shut himself in the small den behind the kitchen.

We could hear him in there, murmuring softly into the late hours.

I never interrupted him.

I just brewed peppermint tea and left the mug on the small table outside the closed door.

After the funeral, when the house had that terrible, cold emptiness, I finally went in to clean out his things.

That was when I found the cardboard box in the hall closet.

Inside were dozens of CD discs, each one slipped into a paper sleeve.

They were labeled in Harold’s unsteady hand with a green Sharpie marker.

“Tommy – 8.”

“Emma – 9.”

“Tommy – 12.”

He had spent his final, painful months recording bedtime stories for our grandchildren.

One story for every single birthday he knew he would miss.

He left a small notebook with precise instructions on how to dole them out, one a year.

For the past few years, it became our sacred family tradition.

Every birthday, we would crowd onto the child’s bed, press play on the old Sony CD player Harold bought at a garage sale for five dollars, and listen to him talk to us.

But then Gary married Jessica.

Jessica was a corporate recruiter from Chicago, and she looked at our modest ranch house like it was something she wanted to scrape off her shoe.

She didn’t like the old furniture.

She didn’t like our Midwestern cooking.

And she especially didn’t like the bedtime stories.

“It’s morbid,” I overheard her telling Gary in our kitchen during Emma’s ninth birthday.

“Keeping a dead man’s voice on loop like that. It’s unhealthy for the kids. It keeps them living in the past.”

Gary, who has always been too quiet for his own good, just shrugged and looked at the floor.