You worked full days in the lab at Carleton before coming home to cook dinner for me and sometimes for your friends, serving nice vintages and playing vaguely Celtic music on low, and on other nights driving me to soccer and T-ball and then increasingly to gymnastics and drama. You drove a mini-SUV because you didn’t want to feel pushed around and wanted traction whenever you needed it. After fighting for every goddamn thing in your life since the late fifties, you never wanted to be denied traction. Overworked, undervalued, burnt out, anxious. The holotype of the helicopter parent, amending school release forms in red pen and sealing pizza-day money in envelopes marked Pizza Day. Rocking up to school assemblies in intimidating shoulder pads in the early nineties, no-nonsense bob-cuts in the late nineties, and don’t-fuck-with-me black thick-frame glasses in the aughts, arriving five minutes late but always in time to catch my cameo. You drank your coffee black, three cups in the morning and at regular intervals throughout the day.

It was a shock to see you felled by your own brain. The one thing you thought you could always rely on, the one thing that had always gotten you through. It had begun with your right hand. It was morning. You were in the kitchen. You had poured yourself a glass of water, but when you made to drink it you couldn’t see the glass in your hand anymore. More specifically, you couldn’t tell where the glass ended and your body began. You unclenched your fingers and heard the glass shatter on the floor. You looked down and saw the shards and spattered water.

Your Airbnb guest walked in, a young Spanish tourist. He found you on your hands and knees, cleaning up the mess.

You turned and looked up at him. “I couldn’t see the glass.” Except he couldn’t understand what you were saying, and not because he was Spanish. He ran to the phone and called the ambulance.

During your TIA, you later told me, you felt like a piece of furniture. Like a couch or a chair. Immovable. Depersonalized. Detached. As if you were somehow outside observing the object of your own body. You said that feeling of detachment was likely due to the fact that the TIA had been localized in your left parietal lobe, the part of the brain that reconciles one’s sense of self with the body. That confirms you are your body. That you are, in fact, human and not a table or a refrigerator. Or that your body is not mine. That when I touch your arm or your face you know where I stop and you begin.