I thought I knew my dad. He was a simple, quiet man who worked at a mental hospital for years. One day, a maintenance worker at the hospital found tens of thousands of toothpicks at the bottom of an old elevator shaft. Everyone was confused, but my dad went quiet—the kind of quiet that comes from remembering something you tried to forget.
That night, he told me they were from a patient named Luis Mendoza. My dad explained that Luis, a quiet and eccentric man, had a ritual of dropping a toothpick through the small gap in the elevator door every morning. “They pile up,” Luis once told him. “Every one of them counts.” My dad thought it was some kind of penance, a strange ritual of a broken man. The mystery grew when, years later, Luis died after a fire broke out and he was found in the same elevator shaft. My dad noticed the toothpicks had stopped after his death, as if whatever he was counting was finally finished.
Years passed, the hospital shut down, and my dad had a stroke. One day, he asked me to take him to the abandoned building. We found the old elevator, and he dropped a final, single toothpick into the shaft, saying, “It’s done.” I didn’t understand the full weight of it until after he passed away. While cleaning out his attic, I found his journals.
That’s when the real story unfolded.
My father had been far more involved in Luis’s life than he ever let on. In his journals, he confessed that Luis wasn’t mentally ill. He was a whistleblower who had been institutionalized to silence him after he witnessed and tried to report a school superintendent for abusing children. The toothpicks were not for penance, but for names—one for every child Luis had failed to save. My dad, a low-ranking worker at the time, had been too afraid to advocate for him, and he carried that guilt for decades.
I discovered that my dad had been planning to tell the truth for years. He had compiled a folder of newspaper clippings and evidence for me, asking me to “do what he couldn’t.” So I did. I reached out to an investigative reporter, and after months of work, the story was published. Luis Mendoza’s name was finally cleared, publicly acknowledged as a whistleblower who had been institutionalized to silence him. A scholarship was even set up in his name.
I don’t know if my dad ever fully forgave himself, but I think he found some peace in the end. And I learned that doing the right thing isn’t always easy or loud. Sometimes, it’s slow, quiet, and painful, and sometimes, the most powerful justice takes decades to be fulfilled.