Chaser, “the world’s smartest dog.” Sarah, “the world’s smartest chimp.”

Grumpy Cat!

The last of his kind. On New Year’s Day, 2019, in a university breeding facility in Hawaii, a fourteen-year-old tree snail named George died. And with that his entire species went extinct.

—

I didn’t mean to say that we just stopped speaking, abruptly. It was not like that. Even before the disaster that forced us to vacate the house, we’d stopped having the kind of conversation that sometimes left my friend coughing or out of breath. It wasn’t that we had nothing more to say to each other but rather that our need for speech kept diminishing. A look, a gesture or touch—sometimes not even that much—and all was understood.

The farther along she was on her journey, the less she wanted to be distracted.

She no longer wanted to be read to, though she was able again to do some reading herself. While we were gone a package had arrived: the galleys of a book, the author someone she knew, a former student, asking for a blurb.

One last good deed, my friend said. Why not.

It would be the last book she read. (I’d like to say, for effect, that the blurb was the last thing she wrote but, although that’s perfectly possible, I don’t know for sure if it’s correct.)

Let me not forget our last good laugh together.

We had loaded the car with our things and were driving away from the house. We had gone a few miles in silence when she blurted in a small, woeful voice: You work, you plan.

Could I have heard her right? Those words were a piece of dialogue from one of the movies we’d watched together, an old screwball comedy in which a playboy courts an heiress, plotting to enrich himself by first marrying and subsequently doing away with her. Damn, damn, damn, the cad cries in exasperation when all goes amiss. You work, you plan, nothing ever turns out the way it’s supposed to! This scene had had us in stitches, and now, in spite of the fact that she was obviously upset, her words struck me as so outrageous under the circumstances that all I could do was laugh. Startled at first, she joined in.

After we’d calmed down and driven another few miles, I said that I hoped this time she hadn’t left the pills behind. Which set us off again. Lucy and Ethel Do Euthanasia. I was shaking so hard that the car veered a little off the road.

No, she didn’t want any visitors. She had said her goodbyes, she said.

No, she did not want to reach out one last time to her daughter.

I am reconciled to our not being reconciled, she said.