Let me just repeat that I’d once gone, in a matter of days, from a childhood where I was never alone to this prolonged, silent only-ness. When I lost Fern, I’d also lost Lowell—at least I lost him in the way he’d been before—and I’d lost my mother and father in that same way, and I lost all the grad students for real, including my beloved Matt from Birmingham, who, when the moment came, chose Fern over me.
