And then I was run over by a truck. And then a bear ate me.

Viridian didn’t wake up after her surgery. I won’t say never woke up, because how long is never, as long as life endures. She had a second stroke the next day that did even more damage, tearing through the webs of nerve cells and tissue. Days and days went by with no change. Expectations were dialed down to the minimum. She could breathe on her own, at least, but they had to insert a stomach tube to feed her, and the nurses bathed and cleaned her and moved her this way and that. She gave no sign that she was aware of anything around her.

I wasn’t brave. I didn’t go to the hospital. I talked to Sacha and to Barb, and later to Ed.

Boone was involved, of course, but it turned out that Ed had both Viridian’s legal and medical powers of attorney. Decisions would have to be made. I was glad I had no part of them. I had enough of my own problems to sort through.

If she had been able, what kind of poem might she have written about the body’s failure, unable to either live as it wished, or to die with grace.

I went to see Aaron. I hadn’t been gone that long, but I might as well have been an astronaut after a mission to the space station. Everything in the house, everything about Aaron himself, was both familiar and not so. It took me a while to get my bearings, and maybe it was the same for him, seeing me. We hugged, but hugging really wasn’t our thing, not unless it was going to lead us straight to bed. And I wasn’t going to end up there this time, even though somewhere inside me a familiar slow fuse had been lit.

It was a relief to break the hugging off when Batman came padding into the room. “Batman!” I knelt down and let him kiss my face. “Oh baby, I missed you so much.” I looked up at Aaron. “I mean, I missed you both.”

“Thanks.” He’d put his hands in his pockets and taken a step back. Body language alert.

It was always so much less complicated to love a dog, but I didn’t think I should say that. I stood up. “Could we take him for a walk?”

We followed our usual route, past the vacant lots and half-built houses, out to the roadway and the empty spaces where Batman could sniff and pee. It was the first week of September, still warm, still hazy and golden. But the light was receding, day by day. It felt like the end of something. I’d already told Aaron about Viridian’s stroke, and now he asked how she was.

“The same. She’s in a sort of coma. Or not sort of. I don’t think she’s going to come out of it.” I hadn’t said it before. Tears pricked at my eyelashes.