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Chicago for the anniversary of our first date and the ruby ring a year later in Chennai, during a six-week teacher’s trip to India. Both were supposed to be engagement rings. Four, maybe five times, I meant to ask Katie to marry me, then lost my nerve. Katie was ambivalent about marriage. I was eager to marry and terrified she might say no. We fought about what her reluctance meant for our relationship and future. Better, I told myself, to wait and try later.
    Those first months after her death I wanted some of what belonged to Katie to remain my own. I wanted to keep whole and vital certain parts of her life that were already losing shape.
    It was a waning effort. Memory and grief, I quickly understood, made no meaningful complement. Each time I took down the box from the shelf, I felt as though I was begging some last bit of juju. Startle the sound of her laugh . Bring back her smile all at once . Where was the general shock of grief, the certainty of missing the Katie I knew for seven years? I wanted to lie in bed all day and wallow; to wail and moan; to collapse, withdraw, and never recover.
    I couldn’t do it. At the time I thought it meant the worst about my character and our marriage. I was insufficient to grief. I was a coward who would not face my feelings directly. I had never really loved Katie, and only a few weeks after her death I could hardly recall us. I preferred instead to dwell on the end of her life. Only much later did it occur to me that this should be what happens at the end of a marriage: I am able to lose it.
    I say “losing the marriage” because I can no longer describe how I loved that life. It is no longer present for me.
    This is part of what grief does to memory. The feelings are intercut with long gaps—the sound of a voice, the lost afternoon—that widen like dark spaces on film run too many times through the projector. The obligations are certain and particular—places, dates, words—but around them is only the suggestion of feeling: the image, bright light shining through it, a room refusing to stay dark.
    I didn’t mean to lose the marriage, that center of a life we alternately celebrated and endured and for which we both made compromises, locating in a certain honesty the truth of why and how we loved each other; that it was a marriage, hard-fought and won.
    I imagined that after, or maybe because of, Katie’s death the marriage would be magnified; a dignified widowhood would bringforward its best parts in a kind of nostalgic wash. I fantasized about holding court with friends and family members, sharing colorful anecdotes about our honeymoon and intercontinental adventures, avuncular, sympathetic, entirely separate of Katie’s death and absence and the continuing life after it.
    When Katie died, I was twenty-nine years old. She was thirty. Every two years we moved to a new place: Bangladesh, Chicago, Miami, Romania. We were volunteers in the Peace Corps, teachers in high schools, working professionals, and graduate students. Always, we tried to keep some option for the future unsettled, so that we might see ourselves as individuals joined in a common life.
    A week before her death, Katie applied for a public health job in Malawi. I read about the country’s per capita income (low), foreign debt obligations (high), highlands (vast), infant mortality (egregious). Was Malawi a home I would come to like more than Romania or Bangladesh? Was it the place, unlike Chicago or Miami, where a more permanent-seeming life might finally begin? Could we have started a family there? Before Katie’s death, it did not seem important to make these kinds of choices. We either did not want the obligations, or we didn’t know we wanted them. Wherever we went next, I thought, someone will need a public health official, and someone else will want an affable English teacher. I will teach my classes. At the end of the school day I will cross whichever city to Katie’s office and wait while she