The doctor said they would sleep better. In theory, she did. She probably, over time, got more hours than before the snoring machine. On the nights when she couldn’t sleep for her own worries, she viewed the device as intruder. It sat there, casting into the future, the ventilators to come, the minor ills and never-too-serious procedures that precede them, the night as night. She would try to talk herself out of it. He looked, with his tubing, like a supersonic pilot. She should imagine him in training for astrophysics.

She didn’t know about the end of journalism. She knew she was reading obituaries more than before. She went for age first. Headline usually told that. No matter the age, she read the cause of death. If the deceased was under fifty, she read the whole obit. If over, she got picky. Her favorites were actresses. Many of them were names she didn’t recognize. They’d been famous in their day. That always humbled. So too, at first, did the stories. Then she saw. These ladies so often shared the same trajectory. The hard times, the trying and trying, the one big chance, the breakthrough, the prime, the height, full powers, maturity, mastery, a falling off, last revival, advancing decline, last song, final appearance, usual obscurity, sometimes ruin, survived by some. The statesmen were less regular. So too royalty, business owners, artists, and famous wits. Though the last of these she saw less often. It had once been a something to be. Now in its anachronistic dotage, being a wit was as sad, sad as night and the mask and the tube and the straps.

She took her medicine, which was to walk the house.

Don didn’t hear her leave bed. He couldn’t. Once she did a tap dance—though she’d never learned tap and, being barefoot, lacked metal. It was a jig. Her emancipation, without divorce, could be here now if she saw it thus. She would just have to re-see her life. All was the same, but all would be different if only she could re-see it. Out in the hallway, she imagined not being.

All took death badly. Wasn’t being at least as bad? Here’s the liver. Not the organ, but the woman who lives. One day, she doesn’t want to be. No one lets her go. It’s a tough exit, little lady. You’ll regret it, sister. No chicken she. No shrinker. Or shirker. She makes her plan, she fights her nights, like this one—“like mine,” Mabel whispered into the stairway. It takes a life of living to get to not being. What if I want it now? Rewrite, send me Rewrite. Mabel dipsy-doed on the stair. Okay, she couldn’t sing, but anyway: I could have danced all night. I could have spread my wings and done. Done and done.

Would anyone here, she asked the dining room, care to think?