Every day I get used to having a date with a man in a coma. I so want to touch him, and I’m so scared of doing something wrong.

“You don’t need to have studied to be important to him. You have two legs, two hands, and a brave heart. You’ve got everything it takes,” Dr. Foss told me.

“Replace the word visit with date,” was Nurse Marion’s contrasting advice. “Visiting is a duty; going on a date is pleasurable. Try to see him less as an invalid and more as a person with whom you have a date, even if it’s an unusual one.” She’s the one who teaches me to use my legs, my hands, and my heart, and also to divide up my despair into portions. “Don’t cry all your tears at once. You’ll often be so desperate that you’ll want to weep but your ducts will be empty. That emptiness is the worst, when you can no longer express your sorrow because you’ve used up all your despair.

“My wanderers more frequently return at night than during the day,” the nurse says with conviction. Wandering—that’s what she calls being in a coma. Wandering souls.

Marion teaches me how to treat Henri’s skin as it becomes ever more tender. Thin-skinned is not a metaphor here. She also shows me how to dab his mouth with water. Having spent thousands of nights with thousands of deep sleepers and patients with “passage syndrome,” a state of unresponsive waking midway between here and the other side, she knows that thirst is the most unbearable aspect of being in a coma. When patients are able to speak again, they all report that the worst aspect was the thirst—that and the noises. So she taught me to arrange ice cubes containing peppermint or frozen Orangina into “cocktails on sticks.”

I learn to call Henri by his name, repeatedly, because a person’s name is the “longest fishing line,” as Nurse Marion puts it, to reel them back from whichever depths they’re swimming in. I imagine throwing him a rope ladder consisting of five letters.

In the chapel I whisper, “Henri.” Courage. Affection. Be like Sam.

I also apply a little Chanel No. 5 body lotion. I unscrew the top of the bottle and rub some cream into my neck and wrists, immediately filling the chapel with scents of jasmine, cinnamon, shortbread, flowers, and my own skin.

An aroma is the most effective voice in the wilderness of wandering souls. Fragrances can apparently reach the level where the comatose reside. All sensory impressions pass through the thalamus—the gateway to the self—before they are processed. If the thalamus is damaged, then comatose patients can neither hear nor feel. Fragrances, on the other hand, take a secret and direct path into the limbic system—something they have in common with emotions. Fragrances trigger memories, and memories are identity.