I’d always outrun those questions before. Now they forced themselves on me, like a hound hot on a scent.

I wished I were thirty again, when nothing seemed beyond reach. Now at fifty I was old, my sore knees forcing me to give up marathons for a treadmill. Treadmills instead of marathons—it had become the story of my life.

I’d lost everything that mattered over the last two years. Now it was too late to chase dreams. Impossible to start over, impossible to unscramble all the broken eggs.

“What happened?” I shouted. The hard echo slapped me, mocking me. Was I trying to make the cave hear me better? I swung my right arm against the cave wall, bruising my forearm. I winced more from stupidity than pain.

Closing my eyes did no good; the wild video played relentlessly: empty days, empty nights, and two years of an empty bed—all the more empty whenever some stranger occupied it with me.

I shouted again, “Is this the best you can do?”

I laughed a cold, caustic laugh that bounced back at me from the cave’s low ceiling. I clamped my eyes shut. Then heavy pain shot through me as I saw again the face engraved on the back of my eyelids—Lee Ann, my little Lee Ann, our five-year-old, always five.

Her death seven years ago shredded the last of my optimism. From that day, every cradle I saw swung above an empty grave. Every birth was the beginning of death, a cruelty I could no longer bear. In my grief I’d refused even to look at our family’s old videotapes. Seeing her now in wrenching, living color was a twisting knife in my heart.

“Daddy,” I heard her say. I felt her smooth cheek against mine. I smelled her baby-powder softness. Roughly, I swept away the warm streak on my face.

Then came my father’s wretched end in that nursing home six months later, when I could tolerate his empty suffering no longer, when I told the doctors to … And finally my mother’s agonizing death from cancer three years ago, one more outrage heaped on me by a senseless universe.

“Nick, you can be whatever you want to be”—Mom’s melodic voice sounded in my mind again, as it had hundreds of times over the years. But was that really what she sounded like? I couldn’t even be sure of that anymore. Mom always tried to get us to Sunday school, but every week we stayed home and watched football or baseball with Dad. I closed my eyes and felt my fingers in her long auburn hair, touching her soft reddish cheeks. I smelled her faint sweet perfume.