What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship, and Love

by Carole Radziwill

But the night was ordinary. It usually is, I think, when your life changes. Most people aren’t doing anything special when the carefully placed pieces of their life break apart.

There are days I feel as though the interesting part of my life has happened to me. The curtain has come down, the guests have gone home, and I am here alone, waiting for a ride.

The thing is, one of us is sick and the other sits by the bed, and some days it seems that’s all we know. There was a hint of what we might have had when we first met, but it was overshadowed. We might have been the sort of couple who gave dinner parties. There might have been children, or maybe a dog. We were both headstrong and stubborn, so we might have fought a lot, or we might have been people other couples make fun of, sappy and giggly and always holding hands. But cancer showed up like an unplanned pregnancy and completely defined who we were together.

Tragedy, when you look back on it, is not sudden so much as a series of small rumbles. Something had to happen; it was inevitable. The perpetual dying was taking its toll.

There is that time after something happens when you can tease yourself with other possibilities—flirt with the chance you’re mistaken, tell yourself it can still be fixed, that someone can fix it.