Melancholy is back. She sits across from me, legs tucked beneath her. No, she says, she doesn’t want anything to eat. The music I’m listening to is fine, she assures me with a sad little smile. Yes, she’s heard my favorite jokes before, all of them.
I dreamt that I was dying. I was trying figure out if I could transfer my frequent-flier miles to my wife, Norma. I had so many of them — maybe enough for her to visit me. No, it turned out. She couldn’t visit me.
This morning, I open Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to this line: “And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.”
