“Isn’t it amazing how you live through the anniversary of your death in advance your whole life long?” Selma asked as she copied the dates of birth and death from her old calendar into her new one. “One of the countless twenty-fourths of June or eighths of September or thirds of February that I’ve lived through will be the date of my death. Isn’t that something, when you think about it?”

“Hmm,” we replied.

“Do you also ask yourselves occasionally which of your senses goes first when you die?” Selma asked as she tried in vain with her deformed hands to fasten a button that had been hanging only by a thread onto the optician’s jacket. “Is it the sense of touch? Or sight? Maybe the first to go is your sense of smell. Or do all senses disappear at the same time?”

“No, we don’t ask ourselves that,” the optician replied.

When the optician picked me up at the bookstore after work and we drove to the village, Selma suddenly asked from the back seat, “Do you believe your life flashes before your eyes when you die?”

I flinched. I hadn’t noticed Selma was in the car.

“I picture it like a slideshow put together by Death,” she continued, “but because it can’t present your entire life, a selection has to be made. What are the criteria? Which are a life’s most important scenes? From Death’s point of view, I mean.”

“I’m guessing this particular scene won’t make the cut,” I said. And the optician said, “Please stop with this, Selma.”

Selma wanted to talk about death with us, but we wouldn’t let her, as if Death were a distant relative we were ignoring because he always behaved badly.

I looked at Selma in the rearview mirror. She smiled. “You’re acting like children who believe no one can see them when they cover their eyes,” she said.

That night, I slept on Selma’s sofa. I woke at three-thirty in the morning and went into her bedroom. Her bed was empty and her comforter on the floor.

I found her in the kitchen. She was sitting at the table in her flowered nightgown. Seven unopened Mon Chéris lay at her feet and she held an eighth in her hands. “I can’t unwrap these anymore,” she said. “It’s like my hands are paralyzed.”

I ran to Selma and took her in my arms as awkwardly as you hug someone sitting in a chair. I flung my arms around her thin torso from behind. It looked like I was giving her the Heimlich maneuver.

“Luisa, I believe it will be soon,” she said, and I closed my eyes, wishing that ears also had lids you could snap shut. Selma turned to face me, put her hands on my shoulders, and pushed me away a bit so she could see me better.