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in the United States Senate, my oldest daughter was in college, and I was sufficiently healthy to have had two more children. But not healthy enough. In 2004, I found out I had cancer. I determined to be a model patient so that breast cancer would just be a chapter in my new Wade-less life. And for a while it seemed to have worked; the treatments yielded what looked like a good result. But less than three years later, the cancer came back. This time it was incurable. No amount of being the obedient patient was going to change that. I could not control my own body. I still do what the doctors tell me to do. I still hope, perhaps without reason, that if I am very, very good, I will get to live and one day watch my youngest graduate from high school and one day hold my grandchild. Despite my hopes I understand that rogue cells inside my body have more control over my fate than I have. My new reality.
    Last year my husband told me of an indiscretion, and my sense of what I meant to the people around me was, to put it lightly, shaken. We had, I believed, a great love story, bound as we were by triumph and defeat, by exhilarating achievement and shattering grief. We had walked side by side for three decades and in my foolish dreams would walk side by side, hand in hand, for three more. But even if my illness somehow allows me those days, it will by necessity be different because, at the very least, I am a different person now. I was not wounded, not afraid, not uncertain before, and now I always will be. He can try to treat the wound, and he has tried. He can try to make me less afraid, and he has tried. But I am now a different person. I am the Army wife, too, with a husband I don't quite know, and I have to accept him, if I can, with the new scars—many self-inflicted—which he now bears. The way we were is no longer the way we can be. A new reality. Maybe a new life.
    Let's start with the unavoidable fact: If I had special knowledge about how to avoid adversities, about how to spot the pitfalls of life, I would spot them, I would avoid them, and I would share how it is I have managed that. I do not. I have a lot of experience in getting up after I have been knocked down, but clearly, I do not know anything at all about avoidance. We all tumble and fall. I certainly have, but in truth it is going to happen, in some degree, to all of us. Oh, maybe everyone we care about will live to attend our funerals. Maybe disease will never make you afraid of a curling iron burn. Maybe everyone whom you love and who loves you will be loyal to you in every way for every day of your life. Or maybe not.

CHAPTER 4
Toshiko
    oshiko placed the samisen in front of me. My sister Nancy and I were kneeling on the floor of our quarters on the Marine Corps Air Facility at Iwakuni, Japan. Toshiko was kneeling in front of us. Toshiko had promised that when I was ready I could learn to play the instrument. And here it was in front of me. The body was a little less wide than long, slightly larger than a banjo. The neck was polished sandalwood. Just three strings, one thicker than the next, stretched from the neck over a buffalo horn bridge to the catskin-covered body. It was simple and beautiful. Next to the samisen she placed a plectrum, or pick. It was sandalwood with ivory at the wide end, and nearly eight inches long. I reached to touch it, but Toshiko's hand reached mine before mine reached the plectrum. Her motion told me to be patient, and as if to show me how, she sat perfectly still for what seemed like five minutes to a nine-year-old girl.
    Patience was something at which Toshiko excelled. She had left her home in Hiroshima when she was ten years old, about the age I was when she first placed the samisen before me. She traveled to Kyoto, to the narrow streets of the Gion Kobu district, to begin her training as a geisha. Someone, perhaps her mother, knew that the ten-year-old would grow to be a beautiful woman, with a serene face and delicate