Summary :
Endings and Beginnings Sometime after midnight, I finally fell into an exhausted, drugged, but uneasy sleep. When Jeanne, my aide that night, tapped me lightly on the shoulder at 2:00 a.m., I was instantly awake. I knew before she spoke. “Susan,” she said gently, “he’s gone.” In one moment, I was out of bed and down the stairs. I don’t remember exactly what I felt in those seconds— mostly, I think, numb, as if I had been stunned by a hammer. In the lower bedroom, my husband James, gray, gaunt, and motionless, lay on his hospital bed. Even though Parkinson’s had begun its slow destructive work almost fourteen years before, I had never thought James— who, at eighty- five, had still managed to keep a gleam in his eye— seemed shockingly old. Now he did. He looked much as I had left him two hours before, his mouth wide open, jaw dropped, as though he were fighting to breathe. But he was not breathing anymore. He was motionless. When I reached to touch his face, it was still hot with fever

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