She didn’t think she would get this disease. She had watched her loved ones die from cancer, AIDS, diabetes, heart attack, stroke, flu, polio, leprosy, sickle cell anemia, time, stress, violence, addiction, war, accidents and heartbreak. Even grief. Everything had come and swept through her friends, her husbands, her comrades, her child. And she was still here.

She’d known so much grief, perhaps by now she was immune.

Dune had fashioned a knocker in the hallway, with a cord to Vivian’s bed, but Vivian had dropped the end of it while napping and couldn’t tell if it was in the sheets somewhere, or on the floor. She felt so fucking helpless. She thought, again, dying is a bitch.4

“Dune!” she yelled, perhaps. Vivian heard nothing.

Raising Brendon, she had never really considered that her only child might die before she did. Brendon, hit by a bus. Dead immediately, if the body held on a few hours. He was standing on a street corner, so random, he rarely even walked anywhere. And then he was hit and gone. Such devastating incompletion.

After that, Vivian just hadn’t had anything to say, nothing that mattered enough to open her mouth for it. Then it just became more comfortable than trying to engage in meaningful conversations about anything other than Brendon. Now, she wished she could offer Dune the solace of her voice, but couldn’t tell if she still had one.

She gathered volume up through her body from the soles of her gnarled feet to get her voice to the door. She couldn’t hear herself, but she felt the movement of sound in her chest. Was she that deaf? She had no idea if anything was coming out of her mouth.

It had been twenty whole years since she’d watched her beloved Wes die, caring for his cancerous body until he left it. His prostate had betrayed him.

She’d met him when she was a brilliant forty-one year-old, in Detroit to study movement for a year. They’d both been married to others when their intellectual and political partnership had become a primary relationship in their lives. They’d realized that there was a safety in the realm of politics and philosophy that could help them survive scandal and the traumas of the heart.

One time, at the beginning of their friendship, they shared early life histories of trauma that neither of them particularly wanted to revisit. They never spoke of those things again—for forty years those histories lived on in silence and in the deep mutual respect they had for each other as people who didn’t use their trauma to succeed in life. They had survived and they had loved others, and both had children, and now they had found each other for a second long chapter of life. Their passion kept them in the realm of debate and conversation and movement.

Life.