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by it, alternately teasing and reminding me of my request, until finally, one afternoon years later, I ask him, please, to just call me “John.” I say at the time that my opposition is instinctual—I just can’t get used to hearing the new name—but I also feel dishonest for the easy rationalization. Ed is teasing me. I don’t like being teased. If it is stupid to think now, after Katie’s death, that the point of a name could only be the truth it accumulates in repetition and practice, then at the time I feel deeply relieved to be free of a childish fantasy. I am irrevocable in my own way; I am also, perhaps, too easily influenced.
    As we leave the resort that weekend, Katie says it is the first time since her brother Richard’s death a little more than a year before that her whole family, except for their father, has gathered together in the same place. She has been thinking of Richard all weekend, just as she is sure Judy, Ed, and her sister have kept his memory close. If I had known the death date, or thought to ask Katie then to name the absence or even to ask later why she held it back, then I understand during our drive that we are very much still at the beginning of our relationship. Some part of the gap between us remains unmeasured. I can only know, as she tells it to me one afternoon in Bangladesh, the fact of Richard’s death. I cannot yet recognize his absence in Katie’s life.
    In the car that afternoon, I do not want to push too hard to know more about Richard. Here is the first and most essential tension in my life and marriage with Katie; she needs secrets, and she needs me to trust that those secrets, even when she eventually discloses them, are kept for good reasons. I cannot distrust her for them. I cannot resent her for needing them. And, however wrong it feels to be either excluded or indignant because of what she is not ready to tell me, I must not push her. She does not want comfort. Perhaps she believes I will one day understand her grief or, worse, misunderstand it.
    Where our marriage seems now to close back upon itself, between the two places of Richard’s death (beginning) and Katie’s death (end), I try to make my year in Indiana the hinge. That first week a poet friend writes by email to say, There are no words for your loss, John , and I think, Isn’t that your duty? Shouldn’t poets spend all day finding words to make loss real to strangers? The anger is generative. I write my first poem for Katie a few days later and publish it on my blog. I call it “There Are No Words.” I write in my journal, There must be words for absence too finite for loss . Then, as now, I think I understand something about how easily after one unimaginable loss another can follow. In this way, thinking of Richard, I feel closer to Katie. For a time after her death, I am very eager to hear stories about Katie’s life, especially stories about us. I think they might refresh some certainty of feeling I have yet to understand as stable, neutral memory: a glimpse of the real thing alternately revealed in parts of a whole, held back and kept together.
    From Teatrul Act, I walk home and sit with Katie on our balcony, watching a funeral procession and drinking cold beer. From the Lincolnshire Theater, Katie and I drive home to Chicago, where our new life together continues to begin, a life I hope will become a marriage, which continues now as the story of Katie’s life and the fact of my grief after it. I stand in either place from time to time,willing her story to become either elegy or narrative. The consequence of not keeping that impossible middle means some last part of Katie cannot close down into feeling and anecdote. It is the remainder of a grief that infinitely carries forward. It must be expressed.

Losing the Marriage
    After Katie’s death, I kept two rings in a box. The first was white gold with a polished blue opal. The second was rose gold with an oval-cut ruby. I purchased the opal ring in