I also keep thinking about Jeff’s note and trying to figure out what to say or do. He asked who cares about the Titanic, but clearly many people do. I can’t stop thinking about how it is 370 miles from land and far below the ocean’s surface. It is so hard for my mind to go there, driving from here to Delaware or beyond, and then taking a straight turn downward into the cold and dark. How quiet it must be. I keep thinking that. How quiet it must be.

November 5, 1985

A day as dark and dreary as I feel. A day where the bed beckons me to crawl back in and disappear, but I know that is the wrong answer. If the kids were coming home from high school, there would be no chance of that, but they are off in their own lives, so I have given in, sinking and sinking.

I ask Frank how he can do what he is doing to me, and he responds with what I have done to him, as if the two are equal, as if one didn’t come before the other. And, yes, I may have had a drink or two too many at that faculty gathering. Guilty as charged. It was boring, for one thing, but more important (because I have withstood boring many times before) were those glances between them, that feeling I got that confirmed what I have been thinking for a while now. I only know that I was there in a crowded room and people seemed to ask how I was and then look over my shoulder as if searching for a better conversation. Just “How are you?” and before I could even formulate a thought, they were gone. And there I was, alone in a corner, surrounded by strangers as my husband expounded on the merits of something or other dead a million trillion years ago to eager listeners with no awareness of me. I did hear someone talking about the Ice Age or the Stone Age or some age when things were living that no longer are. “Who recalls the Sinclair dinosaur?” I called out. And that’s when I noticed that I had lost sight of Frank, and I panicked. I felt like a dinosaur myself, nearing extinction; my time was up, a newer and more interesting shape of life was already slipping into my footsteps.