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live.”

October 11
    Dear girls,
    …The trees are growing bare here and winter isn’t far off and I thought it was time I wrote to you all about some changes that have taken place. Your father has had a stroke, but far from urging you to rush home, I’d rather you didn’t just yet, as I’m coping very well on my own. I’ve delayed writing because the letters will take so long to reach you on your distant continents that your father may well be home with me again before you tear the envelopes open. So I’ll have alarmed you unnecessarily. But perhaps this little setback would make you think about visiting sometime in the future. It’s been so long since we’ve seen any of you that I sometimes wonder if you’ve forgotten all about Canada. And I have to ask myself: what is the purpose of having such a big family if we are to be so very alone in our winter years?…
    Propped up in bed at nine in the evening, I tore this page off the writing pad, put it under the spare pillow next to me, and began again in my wobbly script.
    Dear girls,
    …It’s not that I want you to go dashing out to buy airline tickets for Canada, for your father seems in no hurry either to die or get better. But I do feel I’ve a responsibility to let you know the danger he’s in. And yet, I could say to you that we’ve all known (haven’t we?) that he’s been in danger for many many years but we never spoke of it. It wasn’t by accident that he looked seventy years old when he was a man of fifty, and it was only the doctor’s orders that he stop drinking that prolonged his life…
    This letter too I pulled off and stored under the pillow. Putting my pen away, I picked up my rosary from the night table. But as I whispered my Hail Marys, progressing through five decades, I did wonder if these words, mumbled as my fingers moved along the beads, would do William any good, or if prayer is just an empty dialogue with oneself. Does William believe in God any more? Since his heart attack, he hasn’t attended Sunday Mass, insisting that all the kneeling and genuflecting and prolonged standing tax his heart, but also that Catholics are a pack of hypocrites, all the way up to the pope in his palace of gold and lapis lazuli.
    William converted to Catholicism in order to marry me. But he was a rebellious catechumen, challenging the idea of the Trinity, of transubstantiation, the miracles of Christ. Jesus was nothing but a shaman with a bag of tricks up his sleeve, he told the priest, hiring actors to pose as cripples, blind men, lepers.
    Why did he go to the trouble of converting, just to marry
me?
I wonder now. But back in those days I was beautiful, wasn’t I? With thick black hair swept up in rolls and a high curved brow at a time when such a smooth expanse of polished bone was considered a mark of beauty in a woman.

October 16
    “We know Mr. Hazzard had all the high-risk factors for a stroke, don’t we?” Dr. Pilgrim said to me after William was admitted. “High blood pressure. Atrial fibrillation. A history of smoking. You do understand what a stroke is, don’t you, Mrs. Hazzard?” he asked patiently. “A blockage of blood flow to the brain? When the brain cells are robbed of vital oxygen and other nutrients, they die. In time they may or may not regenerate. That regeneration will determine which faculties Mr. Hazzard recovers. Does that help to explain things a little?”
    Dear girls,
    …Sometimes I try to imagine your father’s brain, a soft nodular planet floating in his skull. Closing my eyes, I picture lakes of blood, because this is what the doctors seem to think caused the stroke: a hemorrhage of some kind, an aneurism, blood-filled pouches in a weakened artery wall bursting, flooding brain tissue. And then I think of my own ruptured eye and wonder: why is it that in our old age William and I are both bleeding inside? He in the brain, which is filled with all the words of the books andthe newspaper articles he’s read and the