A lifelong planner does not stop planning because he is dying.

He simply turns the full force of it, at the last, toward the one thing he cannot bear to leave unprotected.

During those long afternoons, I used to wonder what was moving behind his eyes.

I assumed it was memory, or pain, or the ordinary drifting of a mind near the end.

I was wrong about that, as I was wrong about so much that season.

My husband was not drifting.