I want peace was something she’d started saying a lot.

Where’s your sense of adventure? As if that could have persuaded me! In fact, the real reason I had agreed to help my friend was that I knew that, in her place, I would have hoped to be able to do exactly what she now wanted to do. And I would have needed someone to help me. (In coming days, there would be moments when I would not be able to escape the feeling that this was all a kind of rehearsal, that my friend was showing me the way.)

It was while I was unpacking that it occurred to me that I should keep a journal. It still felt all wrong to me that my friend’s daughter, her only family, was not involved in what was happening, had not even been informed about it. I understood my friend’s thinking in this regard and could see how she might be right, but it saddened me, and it made me feel guilty, as of a kind of betrayal. Not that it would have done for me to go behind her back and get in touch with her daughter, but at the very least I wanted to have a record to pass on. I thought, when the time came, those who’d been close to my friend would want to know what she was like, what she had said and thought and felt, toward the end. It would be important, then, to be as detailed and as accurate as possible, and certainly memory alone could not be trusted. I thought also that sitting down to write about each day would help—as keeping a journal of other experiences, including some very difficult ones, though perhaps none as singular as this, had helped me to keep my bearings.

An adventure? If so, it was two different adventures we were on, hers completely different from mine, and to whatever extent we might be sharing the days to come, each of us would be very much by herself.

Someone has said, When you are born into this world there are at least two of you, but going out you are on your own. Death happens to every one of us, yet it remains the most solitary of human experiences, one that separates rather than unites us.

Othered. Who is more so than the dying?

I should make a list, I thought. I’d made a lot of lists since all this began, endless to-do lists—as Scott Fitzgerald once pointed out people are wont to do when they’re on the verge of a crack-up. My way was to make a list then proceed to ignore it; instead of ever even looking at it again, I’d sit down and make a new one.

But groceries—didn’t we need groceries? Of course we did. Tomorrow I’d go grocery shopping, and for that I should have a list.