Life is heavy these days. I find it hard to believe I wrote last week’s post mere hours before a massacre of children. Then I lost a friend to pancreatic cancer. Marcia was my sister’s very good friend who gamely allowed me into her circle. She was the kind of steadying presence I took for granted, a warm and funny neighbor when we lived in Park Slope, someone I was delighted to run into and occasionally invite out for coffee, back when we could do those things, and now I wish I had spent more time with her, I wish a pandemic hadn’t made casual coffee dates impossible for so long, I wish I had emailed her back that one time, I wish, I wish.

Then Henry came down with something. Not COVID, but it sounded bad. Fever, bad cough, congestion, the works. Saturday was my birthday and we were out for brunch and all I could think was that Henry hadn’t texted me back, and maybe his virus had taken a turn and now he was seriously ill. My legs felt weak and my heart started racing. “I realize this is insane,” I confessed to Scott, “but when Henry doesn’t write me back immediately, I think he’s dead.” It helps to say these things out loud.

“That is insane,” he confirmed. And then a few more hours went by, and I texted and texted and finally called. He sounded horrible, but alive. The next day was the same; I texted him “how are you?” and got no response for minutes, for hours, and I had two concurrent thoughts: “the worst has happened,” and “leave the kid alone, for Christ’s sake.” But I couldn’t! So much was going wrong, here and everywhere, who was to say he didn’t have monkeypox, didn’t need me to come rushing to his aid at just that moment, wasn’t struggling for breath as he —