When Donald returned home, he made no effort to hide his grief or excuse it. He looked sadder than I’d ever seen him look.

Days melted into weeks, and ever so slowly, our lives went back to pretty much the way they had been before my psychotic break. Donald went to school with the usual bags of chocolate; obsessed about his weight; prepared his lessons with grave attentiveness; used the StairMaster to the brink of exhaustion. I spent a lot of time with Gayle, trying to apologize and make up for my months of inexcusable self-centeredness; had coffee with Fran a few times at the store; drove through the back streets of our neighborhood, into Rock Creek Park, and down around all the monuments.

Sometimes, in the afternoon, I would park my car near the Kennedy Center, then walk down to the Lincoln Memorial and over the bridge into Virginia, feeling the early spring wind against my face and watching the tourists streaming back from Arlington National Cemetery. Once in a while, in the evening, I would drive down to the Jefferson Memorial, or the FDR Memorial, or the Vietnam Veterans Memorial—all lit up and bathed in a yellow-white glow—and sit in the car with all the windows rolled down, thinking. Thinking about what I had, and what I’d almost lost, and how narrow my world had gotten. After a while, I started thinking about other things, too. Things I’d all but stopped thinking about during the Age of Adrienne: real books; movies; the present; the future; the world.

In early March, just as the trees were starting to bud again and turn green, I made a trip to New York to reconnect with Anne. It had been a while—too long, really—and we had a lot of catching up (gossiping) to do. Fat to Fit was finally finished and ready to go to the printer, with its new, harmlessly unambiguous, and completely forgettable subtitle: How to Transform Your Body—and Your Mind—in Only Ten Weeks ; but a book I’d worked on the year before, How to Stay Married Forever, was having its publication delayed indefinitely: its author, Anne reported over lunch at her desk (a giant Diet Coke and six Marlboro Lights for her; a heavenly tuna sandwich on rye for me), was recently “outed” by New York magazine as having been divorced twice.

I returned home to Washington later that same day, with a manuscript only a mother could love: Not the Same Old Story: Coping with Perimenopause . Flipping through it at my desk, I could have hugged it. But I knew, too, that I could not do this work much longer. The next morning I enrolled for the summer graduate session at Georgetown and looked toward the months ahead. Only ten more credits to go before a completely new phase of my life—teaching—would begin, but a lot of self-reflection separated me from the job I wanted next.