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expected to hear that, the buttoned-up and—I’ll be honest—strong-looking Marcia with a hole in her armor. In fact, I was surprised that all these women who hadn’t known each other an hour ago were willing to share such thoughts.
    “Yes,” Lesley said intently. “I still have that sort of day. I’m buying this new house, and I want to, I really do, but I keep thinking I shouldn’t be doing it by myself.”
    Tara listened to her with sidelong remove. Finally and abruptly,she offered some information. “My husband died last February … so it’s coming up on a year.” She stopped at that.
    Dawn rescued us from another silence with a loopy non sequitur. “I find that the only cure for sadness is happiness.” Everybody cracked up at the obviousness of the remark, but I couldn’t help recognizing that she seemed to have hit on the hypothesis for this group. Perhaps the hypothesis was loopy, too.
    “No, really,” she said, trying to maintain some gravitas. “I figure out what will give me the most happiness, the most fun, and I go out, and I do it. I don’t always feel like it. But I force myself. Really, really,
really
force myself.”
    “And you get lost in it,” Marcia said abruptly. “And then you say, ‘Gee, I had a good time.’ ”
    Dawn and Marcia exchanged a brief jolt of recognition. Perhaps they had more in common than I thought.
    “But back to my point,” Dawn insisted, her voice swooping with operatic dexterity. “People said to me that time makes all the difference, and I just wanted to hit them. I’d be like,
Shut up!
But, I have to say, now, a year later, it
does
make a difference. I was in a blur six months after my husband died.”
    “A blur,” several women chanted, nodding.
    We were beginning to engage with each other now, taking a real interest, finding patterns of similarity. Once again, Tara cut in and stopped us cold. “Were your husbands … 
ill
 … for a period of time?”
    I could see that she had braced herself against the inevitable—what she didn’t want to hear, what she didn’t want to say—but still, she had asked the tough question. Tara was probing for what had to be everyone’s worst memory, the calamity that had set each of usoff on an unfamiliar, lonely course, but I thought she was prodding herself as well, forcing herself to share what her instinct told her to conceal. I braced myself, too. I feared that her question would set off the same spiral of resentment I’d witnessed at my last support group washout.
    No one seemed keen to follow where Tara was steering us, nor was I. But I had gotten everyone into this mess, I figured, so I took the lead. Okay—so go: the cancer, the four-plus years of caregiving—I didn’t feel the need for much elaboration. This group would know what those years had done to my husband, and to me.
    When I finished, Dawn spoke up with none of her usual flourishes. “My husband died in an accident,” she said. “He went away for a weekend with his friends, riding all-terrain vehicles in West Virginia. He went over a cliff. That’s it.” She shrugged. “He went away for a weekend, and he didn’t come back. Yeah. So.” She looked from woman to woman, palms up, casting us a go-figure expression.
    “How old was he, Dawn?” Lesley asked.
    “Forty. Yeah.”
    “So young,” said Lesley.
    “He was … gorgeous.”
    And he’d left two young children behind, children for Dawn to raise alone. There was barely time for us to register the stark tragedy of it before Marcia succinctly outlined her own: “Mine had cancer. He wasn’t sick for that long. Maybe five months. Not long. It was particularly difficult, though, because by the time he was diagnosed, it was stage four colon cancer. He opted for alternative treatment, so he never went through chemo. I don’t know how it would have turned out if he had.”
    We waited, feeling the force of these revelations, to see who would go next.
    “I still don’t know how