Cars pulled to the side of the road, and people got out to gawk and take pictures. I stood alone in the wind gust and watched them gawk. The plumes of sand felt like wildfire smoke curling up into the blue sky and blotting out the sun. I watched the families hop back into their cars, and we waited for the sand to engulf us, or maybe just I did.

But I was still afraid to be here, and with that realization came, once again, the realization that, though I was free to do whatever I wanted in a way that I never could when I was with Bobby, I was still a woman alone.

Just as Bobby could not fathom getting married again, neither could I. And so my choice was to stay alone. But that didn’t mean that being a woman alone meant something different from being a man alone. It meant I would always be afraid of something.

40.

When we first signed up to work with Bethanny, we had to prepare for our own deaths. And in doing so we also had to write a letter of forgiveness to ourselves for anything we had done in our lifetime that caused suffering to ourselves or someone else.

I did not write it then, but I wrote it now, in the sand dunes that cascaded off the road.