In his morphine delirium, David thought of his dead wife, Donna, and how much he missed her, not because she was beautiful as the fashion world knows beauty (though for all that, she’d been beautiful to him), and not because she’d been perfectly understanding and kind and forgiving (God knows she’d had a temper and could be maddeningly impatient and obstinate), but she’d been his companion for sixty-two years, and a couple-if they had the stamina to negotiate a long marriage-learned to make adjustments, to compromise and compensate, to allow, to tolerate. What it came down to was that both of them had reached a truce based on mutual protection, sympathy, and respect. Human imperfection and dissatisfaction produced a bond of pity and support. Neither husband nor wife could persist without the other’s loving help.

But Donna had died, as all organisms must, in her case from a stroke, the fated consequence of lifelong hypertension. And how David had grieved, and how he had missed her. In his lonely bed, for the missed pleasure of merely holding her. At his solitary dinner table, for the absence of a conversation based on three-quarters of a lifetime of common memories over a mutually organized meal. But for Donna, death had been a matter of life creeping out its pace and finally reaching its unavoidable close. A monumental sorrow, but not a universe-tilting tragedy, not the wickedly untimely death of a tortured fifteen-year-old son whose talents and good nature had promised to improve the world. Death when it came to the elderly was understandable, a bitter natural order. But when a talented good-natured young man died, the cosmos showed its true malevolent identity.