The widow handed the photo to Josie, giggling. Josie waited patiently for Mrs. Needleman to bring her in on the joke.

Gloria shrugged and offered up a pensive smile. My Ira had a very good time while he was here. He made the most of every day. She patted Josies hand. And when you get down to it, is there anything else a person can ask for?

Thats when Josie had her epiphany.

Okay, maybe it was just an epiphanette. But at that moment, right there on Gloria Needlemans plastic-covered couch, it dawned on her that if you lead a life chock-full of relationships and adventures and sorrows and celebrations, like Ira Needleman did, then the people you leave behind can focus on how you lived rather than the fact that you died.

But if you died before you had a chance to live? Josie knew there was nothing worse. In the news business they called it a tragic death, as opposed to a nontragic one. Josie herself had been known to use that phrase now and again in her obituary feature stories for the /San Francisco Herald./ And suddenly it all became clear to herif Josephine Sheehan, thirty-five, dropped dead right that second, her own newspaper would put her demise in the tragic category.

Shed never married. She didnt use all her vacation days. She still rented. Josie didnt do triathlons or biathlons or any athlons at all.

And her most stable interpersonal relationships were with a too-hairy Labradoodle named Genghis and the women in her dog-walking group. Yes, she had parents and siblings and nieces and nephews, but no kids of her own.

And her love life? It was nothing but a series of starts and stops that hadnt taken her anywhere. Shed had eleven boyfriends since college, six of whom had moved into her place only to move out again. Her sister once glibly suggested she install a turnstile at her front door. Shed been so offended by that remark that she got out her calculator and did the math. Bad move. It seemed her average relationship lasted 4.2 months, followed by 7.6 months of unattached limbo. In other words, one of her romances had the shelf life of a container of bacon bits. This would be information she didnt plan to share with her sister, or anyone else, ever.