But I didn’t need the studies.

I’d seen it, before Coldwater, in the men of my father’s generation and starting in my own — the widowers who declined fast after their wives went, not from any named disease but from the simple withdrawal of the only person who’d kept them connected to the human race; the divorced men who vanished into their televisions; my own father, who died at seventy of what the certificate called heart failure and what I’ve always privately called being alone.

These men were not weak.

That’s the cruel part.

They were strong, most of them, in exactly the way they’d been trained to be strong — stoic, uncomplaining, self-reliant, needing no one — and it was the strength that killed them, because the very quality they’d been taught to prize was the one that left them with no one at the end.

I was on that road.