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thought of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s friends Sara and Gerald Murphy, who had lost a child to tuberculosis. I thought of all the children who had died of polio and ear infections in other centuries where the death of a child was never a surprise. The doctors said that our daughter would not survive unless they removed the con-

    taminated part of her lung. Deep in its tendrils the bacteria had settled and no antibiotic had the power to penetrate through the tangled brambles of tissue. We went to the hospital the day before her surgery. In the room next to hers a small boy was dying of leukemia and his father was a policeman and the police bagpipe unit came to serenade the child. The sound was meant to cheer but it didn’t. In another room a Hispanic family gathered around the bedside of a child with diabetes. At visiting hour the mother’s pastor and ten congregants came to visit the child. They lit candles and threw rice around the room in ceremonial passion. The nurses came to forbid the candles and demanded that the crowd of visitors leave. The pastor continued his chants. The candles continued to f licker, their lights casting shadows on the curtain pulled around the child’s bed. The nurses called security. The congregants blocked the nurses’ entrance to the room and when the security guards arrived the congregants singing in Spanish threw rice at their heads. Everyone was shouting. My daughter put her blanket up over her head. The candles burned on. I took my daughter to the elevators planning to f lee. Then it was over and the pastor finding us in the lounge offered to come and repeat the ceremony for my daughter. One congregant kindly threw a bowl of uncooked rice under my child’s bed. I wanted H. but he couldn’t come because he was home with our other daughter who was of course in need of his company.
    H. and I waited in the cafeteria for the operation to be over. It was supposed to take two and a half hours. Five hours later the doctor had not emerged. I did not let go of H.’s hand. Something had gone wrong. “Don’t imagine

    anything,” H. said. I nodded. But I was imagining everything. “I will die, if she dies,” I said. H. let go of my hand. “You will not,” he said. “That is unacceptable,” he said. “I don’t mean it,” I said. “You can’t threaten the universe,” he said. An hour later the operation was over. They brought her down to the intensive care unit, tubes with blood running from her side, a tube down her throat, but her color was pink. She was no longer the ashen green of her year of illness. H. brought me a container of watery coffee. We didn’t have anything we needed to say to each other. We just leaned one on another like people standing on the roadside shocked to be alive after an accident that crushed their car.

    • • •

    I feel a surge of envy when I see a woman about my age in a restaurant with her spouse, the two of them talking softly. Are they planning a vacation or worrying about their kids, a job lost, a divorce, a setback of mind or body? Are they talking about their friends, analyzing this or that foible, this or that peculiarity? Are they talking about the abductions in Baghdad or the CIA prisons hidden in byways of foreign countries? Are they discussing his blood pressure medicine or her next dental appointment?
    I am becoming selfish. I can’t remember other peo-ple’s birthdays. I forget to ask about their children. I am self-absorbed. That is to say it takes all my energy to hold myself together. This may be a normal response to a great loss (I expect it is), but I do not like myself like this.
    If I were a polar bear I would go into a cave and hiber-nate.

    We are, however, social creatures. The need for touch is built into our biology. If the first mother had not swept her baby up into her arms and folded it into her f lesh and fed it and watched over it, the helpless baby would have died, and with it the entire human experiment. H. believed in