I made that joke when David was staying with us while you all were dividing up your household. I took him to the aquarium, and your father and I watched those vapid purple-dinosaur videos with him until we thought we would die. We all went to a baseball game, and somewhere in there David asked me would I rather a booger taste like candy or be filled with helium and float away. Needless to say, I voted for helium, and I suggested he remember that the next time his fingers were going toward the wall in the middle of the night and get up and get a Kleenex!

We had a lot of fun in spite of all that was happening. He only mentioned once that he was going to have two homes: two bedrooms and two Christmas trees, and maybe even two dogs. He looked so much like you, Jeff; it was good for us to feel tugged back to a happier time.

What you need to know if you don’t already is that infidelity is really about immortality (note the “t” in there). You may have figured that out by now. Some people do things in order to locate a pulse, a breath, a drop of blood. Others do things for ego, the fountain of youth. Dress it up and call it lust or call it love, but really all it is is a call: You’re getting old. You’re going to die. You feel trapped, an animal with its leg caught in the metal teeth of time while everything young and fun is scampering past, all those things you never got to do or see or have. Such desire can be dangerous; so many of the things that brought such easy exhilaration in childhood (skates and bikes, climbing and jumping from great heights) become increasingly perilous when there is so much at stake.

I am someone who was always already old, and not by choice, certainly not by choice at all, but it was what I was given and I grew into it. I look back and, yes, I can see what I missed. But I also think that my cautiousness has served me well, even though people are rarely appreciated for the right thing at the right time. So much comes with hindsight. Look at this, these scraps of notes, a whole stack of entries where I wrote: Something is not right. What is going on?

I had nothing to go on but intuition; it was like that moment when a snake comes into a yard and silence falls; the birds know. It is a deafening silence.