Free The Moonlight Sonata at the Mayo Clinic by Nora Gallagher

had come to hear me preach) called to ask me if she could do something for me. I had talked to her on the phone; she had the bare outlines of what had happened—I could sense in her voice that she was trying to figure out what. She would bring me something, she said, or we could go somewhere. She would drive. Her voice was anxious. She and two other women were my close, dear friends in town. She was also more than a friend; she was a comrade. We had been in a trench together.
    It was July 2008. I was packing for a vacation to a valley in northern Washington state, thinking of wilderness hikes and my cousins’ good company. The phone rang. I picked it up. Jodie said, “Something has happened to Frank. I’m driving to the hospital. Will you meet me there?”
    I put down the phone and ran. When I got there, Jodie was sitting outside at a table near the emergency room. As I walked toward her, a fireman, a friend of mine, ran from his car to meet us. Jodie’s husband, Frank, had been surfing off a wild coast north of the city, alone. But other men on the beach had looked up at some point and realized he was facedown in the water. They paddled out. They broughthim in. They called 911. One of them was a doctor, and he tried to revive Frank. A helicopter flew up, and now it was flying back. It would land at a school nearby, and Frank would be put in an ambulance. Jodie and I sat at the table holding hands. It was very quiet. When we saw the ambulance, we stood together holding on to each other at the gaping hole in the hospital wall that was the driveway. A chaplain, who had joined us, said to me when we saw Frank on the gurney, “This does not look good.” I remember a feeling of ice passing through my body.
    In the days that followed Frank’s death, I tried and tried to find ways to ease Jodie’s suffering. Every day it was like a pile of sand that I tried to climb, and every day more of it slid down and I found myself at the bottom again. One memory in particular stands out. I was with her in her bedroom on the day of Frank’s memorial as she sat with her children and his ashes. They were dividing them up, some to be cast into the ocean, some to be kept in a jar. She looked up at some point, and I looked into her eyes, and in them was a terrible blank horror and sorrow and rage. I could not take it in. What did I do? I looked away.
    I told Jodie I wanted to walk on the beach. This sounded almost unattainable, but I wanted to try. The beach in December in Santa Barbara is often beautiful and deep. The water recedes, exposing the sand and rock, and the air is clearer than in the summer (when fog often comes in early and hugs the coast).
    Jodie picked me up, and we drove to Hendry’s Beach, where locals often walk their dogs, and were soon out on the sand. I felt excited, as if I were on an exotic trip. I hadnot been on the beach since “it.” She settled herself on my right. We talked preliminaries. I looked ahead as she talked, enjoying the company of my beloved friend, and then I suddenly realized she was a blur, a shadow, a watery shape, coming into and out of the field, sometimes suddenly, sometimes not at all. I could no longer see her on the periphery of my vision. I had not known what exactly I had lost, and now I knew. I might lose some more, too—this came at me at the same time. I almost cried out.
    Then Jodie said, “What are you afraid of?”
    “Going blind,” I said.
    “And then?” she said.
    “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if I could live.”

Chapter 8
    I T WAS NOW MID -D ECEMBER . Vincent’s family by tradition comes to our house for the holidays, and we would host Vincent’s stepmother, her brother, and her nephew. Because Vincent’s father had died so recently, in August, the gathering was all the more weighted. These were people I loved. But how we were to manage the day-by-day while I was living in another country, we had not allowed to enter our conscious minds. I made lists