I knew Charlie didn’t want to talk about being sick, but what if I had insisted? I had respected the boundaries she put up around her disease so carefully that our friendship had been squeezed out into the shrinking margins of her life. There was the body and there was the brain. Eventually there had been nothing but the body to talk about, and so we’d stopped talking. And I’d been self-involved enough, stupid enough, to take that as a rejection of me.
