With unintended professionalism, Carol died of a heart attack the same week I entered the hospital and would therefore no longer have been able to visit her office. There was a small obituary in the newspaper. She had trained with a prominent Ashkenazi psychotherapist in Berlin, studied in India for three years in the 1970s with a guru, written five books published by the University of Michigan Press, had no living family, and had willed everything to a small, privately funded group home in Kentucky that offered shelter to battered women.

And so now, over the top of this book, in the world of moving figures where my wife currently dwells, any happiness Hadley feels, despite everything she’s gone through, is partly because of Carol. It’s important to say that, to acknowledge the people who’ve helped us. I hope to meet Carol again in another form. Or perhaps that’s what it was, a reunion of sorts. And with this story, I’m giving (back) to you what was given to me, and we keep going around like this, doomed to have forgotten why we forget.

7.

To say I accepted my death would be inaccurate.

Instead, I began to acknowledge a coming change, which hinged on admitting I have no idea what death is . . . beyond memory lost. I started to imagine my life as water cupped, momentarily, from an endless sea that isn’t in the universe but is the universe itself.

And so, after a few weeks of planning during my sessions with Carol, it was decided how I would tell my wife.

Dinner first.

I would make sure Hadley ordered something unusual, as she would most likely never eat it again. But I wanted there to be a meal, a last supper of ignorance. Happiness would come later, when she herself woke up and realized how blessed we had been to have embraced each other freely. If you haven’t realized: happiness as we know it is only possible as the anticipation of itself, or as a memory, which renders it completely imaginary. (Note how I use the penultimate word in that sentence for emphasis, which ironically implies doubt.)

And so I’ve come to rely on faith. But you have to have faith there’s faith to have faith.

So then, it was a matter of faith⁠—as in hope and certainty⁠—that we would meet again somewhere in the universe, if I were able to convince her⁠—after my death⁠—to love without reservation.

Perhaps that’s why I’m writing this.

I was not going to tell Hadley in the restaurant if that’s what you’re thinking. Just play out the scene as if it were you and your partner, and you’ll soon realize how cruel a place it would be to announce demise, surrounded by other couples in the midst of their tacit avoidance.

It had to be at home, where she could safely fall to pieces.