“So many moments, so many roads, so many choices, and somehow they all add up to where I am right now at this moment. This moment in my life has taken a long time to arrive. Sometimes, at milestone events, I look back and think of how much I have lost and changed and moved on. I’m not feeling sorry for myself; I’m just making a list. [ I do that a lot.] I left my hometown and early friends, thereby losing much of my familiar identity. I have left behind homes and furniture and belongings, more and more, many times. I left my marriage perforce—or, rather, my marriage left me—and another identity dissolved although I remained married to the middle class for quite a while which, like my marriage , ended up leaving me. Then other people started leaving, not through distance but through death.” [like my husband]

from Endings: A Book for Almost Everyone, 2019.