I’d learned that death was less symbolic than I’d thought—sometimes it was the cocoon she would shake off to liberate the butterfly of her poetic self, but just as often it represented a real death, as contemporary and genuine as the fruit of our union which she carried with her in wonder. Later in our pilgrimage, in the Grand Canyon, as we waited for a sign, overwhelmed by the water’s language—that fruit was greeted by a perfect drumbeat, paum! that still occasionally wakes me with the same goose pimples that rose on my arms thirty-nine years ago.
