The day nurse brought a chair without being asked and set it where I could reach my wife’s good hand.

Her right hand lay outside the blanket.

I put my palm under it.

Her fingers were warm, and that was the whole of it, warm, and I held on.

A photograph was taped to the casing of the monitor.

A golden retriever on a porch step, tongue out, having refused for half an hour to come inside.

“She came in holding that picture,” the nurse said.

“We taped it up so she’d have something of hers to look at.”