There was no speech, no fabricated scene, no details invented and repeated.

If there had been, I would have caught it, because a constructed story has seams.

What I got was eleven words on the third of March and then four years of everybody in my life being extremely careful.

I woke up intubated on the third and was extubated that afternoon, and at some point that evening — I do not have a clean memory of this and I have stopped trying to produce one — my husband sat on the edge of my bed and held my hand and said:

“They couldn’t save him.