I want to be clear about that because I think you will try to make it mean that and it is not true.

My life meant plenty.

I was all right.

I wanted to know, once, what it was like to have somebody choose that word with me.

I have watched people do it for twenty-eight years.

I have stood four feet away from it several hundred times.

I know exactly what the room looks like and exactly how long it takes and exactly what the paperwork costs, and I have never once been inside it.

That is the whole of it.