In October, when the first cold winds came off the Atlantic carrying the smell of salt and pine and coming rain, I drove back to the coast, to the high stone bluff where I had taken Julian two months before he died.

I stood at the iron railing where his wheelchair had stood, wrapped in a long wool coat, and I looked down at the gray-green water exploding against the granite far below, and I held his leather journal against my ribs, and I finally understood what he had been doing that day.

I had thought, at the time, that I was watching a dying man say goodbye to the sea.

I know now that he had not been saying goodbye to anything.