I end on the body, the very thing that is failing her. “You’ve spent so much time working on your physical self. Feeding it, watering it, exercising, dressing and undressing, soothing pain, feeling pleasure. You’ve spent hours looking in mirrors, trying to feel beautiful. You have treasured your body. You have despised it. And at the moment of death, you lose it. Imagine the moment before you die. You have already contemplated the fact that you are losing your money, your loved ones, your status, your identity. You will also lose the shell it all comes in. What can you do to acknowledge this? To prepare yourself?”

Then I lean closer to her, urging her to tense and release different muscles and limbs and thoughts. “Imagine your organs are shutting down, now,” I murmur. “You have no more desire to eat or to drink. Next is your central nervous system. You can’t move. You lose your connection to your limbs. Your eyes may roll in your head, you may not be able to keep them open. Finally, your respiratory system will slow down. Breath won’t come easily or naturally.” I sit in the quiet, feeling the absence of noise press against my eardrums and my skin. “Your legs. Your hands. Your head. Your brain. Your abdomen. Your kidneys and liver and intestines. All the big and small muscles and bones. They are gone. Consciousness is moving toward your heart, your center. You’re shrinking inward to a point of light. Your breathing is getting shallower. Your energy is draining. Your body temperature drops. You can’t feel the floor beneath you because you are weightless. You are aware now that you are dying, but that is the only consciousness you have left.” I pause. “You’re opening and opening and opening into consciousness. You’re part of all that ever was, and all that will ever be. You let go. Finally.”

I look down at Win with tears in my eyes. “You are safe,” I say. “You’re looking down at this body on the floor, with no more breath in it. You see people standing around your body.”

I wait a beat. “It’s a few days later, now, and the body is naked and cold.”

I count to twenty. “A few months later, there’s decay. Gases fill the body and it decomposes.”

Win doesn’t move. “A year has passed,” I whisper. “There are only old bones.”

I look down at her and imagine a world without her in it. “Fifty years. There is just dust. You are not here anymore. But you’re safe.”

We inhabit that dark, small truth for a long time.

Finally, I bring her back—first with a shallow breath, then with a stretch, then lengthening her muscles, then feeling her bones shift and her organs pump and process and her blood moving through her heart and the air filling her lungs and awareness sprawling to the tips of her toes and the roots of her hair. “What do you feel beneath you?” I ask. “Can you feel the carpet on your palms? What do you hear—pipes as water moves through them? Your own heartbeat? What do you smell? The lemon in the shampoo you use, the detergent in your bedding? What do you see?”

Win’s eyes blink open. “You,” she says. “I see you.”

* * *

—

YOU WOULD BE surprised at what people wish they’d done when they get to the end of their lives. It’s not writing a novel, or climbing to Machu Picchu, or winning a medal in ice dancing. It’s having an ice cream sundae, or watering the houseplants more. Playing cards with a grandson. Catching up with an old friend.

My mother’s dying wish was, likewise, simple. She wanted to see the ocean one more time. That wasn’t something the residential hospice could do, but I was determined to make it happen. I talked to the doctors and priced out a transport vehicle. I bought my mother a floppy sunhat at Goodwill and sent a note to Kieran’s school saying that he would be absent the following Tuesday. But the day before we were scheduled to go, my mother took a turn for the worse. So instead, Kieran went to school, and I went to the North Shore. I filled gasoline jugs with ocean water. I shoveled sand into a Ziploc bag. I collected shells and jammed them into my pockets.

At the hospice facility, the nurses helped me get my mother into a sitting position. I wedged pillows beneath her knees and set her feet in a basin of the water. I poured sand into emesis basins, and placed them on each side of her chair, burying her fingers in beach. I told her to close her eyes, and I moved a gooseneck reading lamp closer to her face, so she could feel its warmth. Then I placed shells from her clavicles to her belly button.

But.

I could bring her the memory of the ocean, but I couldn’t take away the sound of the heart monitor.

I could give her the coastline, but only as much as could fit in a room.

I could make her a mermaid, but she couldn’t go back to the sea.

That’s why I’ll move heaven and earth for my clients. To make sure they get that last heart’s desire. That there’s nothing they haven’t had a chance to finish, before they leave.

* * *

—

TWICE DURING THE day, I’ve called Meret to see how she is doing. The second time, she told me to stop treating her like one of my clients, and I nearly cheered. I will take an angry daughter any day over one who is weeping, or—worse—silent and blank.

Win starts running a fever after dinner and complains of pain urinating; she likely has a bladder infection. I wait for the hospice nurse on call to show up and confirm the diagnosis and give her antibiotics before I leave. It is nearly 11:00 P.M. by the time I get home.

The house is dark. Even the light in Meret’s room is out. I open the door as quietly as I can, to find a small candle flickering in the entryway, set right in the middle of the floor. In the near distance—at the juncture of the entryway and the living room—is a second candle burning.

I blow out the first flame and move to the second. From there, I can see another candle pointing toward the staircase, and then three dotted like lighthouses all the way up.

The last candle burns just outside the closed master bedroom door.

Inside, the four posts of our bed have been strung with Christmas lights. They provide the only light in the room, but it’s enough for me to see that hanging from the ceiling are photographs. They twist on short lengths of fishing line, buoyed by the currents of air-conditioning. There’s a picture of Brian, holding the stuffed monkey that he shoots from a cannon to explain vectors to freshmen. One of Kieran—still lanky and young, holding a lobster he’d taken out of a trap. Meret as a toddler, wearing a lopsided strawberry hat—the one and only item I’ve ever knit. There’s a picture of Meret as a newborn, and another of her at an elementary school holiday concert in a red velvet dress. There is a photo of Brian standing next to the sign announcing the top of Mount Washington, and another of him in a tuxedo. There is the last picture I have of my mother, smiling from a hospice bed.

I see a movement from the corner of my eye, and Brian steps forward from the corner, where he has been watching me. “What’s all this?”

He doesn’t answer directly. “You don’t see black holes, you know.” His voice shakes, as if he is nervous. “They just pull you in. No light escapes, so you wouldn’t either. They say if a person actually approached a black hole, he’d be torn apart, because the gravity is that great.”

I sit down on the edge of the bed.

“Since astrophysicists can’t actually see black holes, they had to figure out another way to find them. They look at how planets and other matter moves and reacts around them. They see things falling in, or at the brink.”

Images pirouette above my head. “There aren’t any pictures of me.”

“No.” Brian steps forward and pulls me up, positioning me in the dead center of the room. “That’s because you’re our star. You hold us together. Without you, there’s no life. No gravity. No me.” He hesitates. “No us.”

I realize that he is trying to communicate in a language he knows and understands. That for him, this is crystal clear.

“You think you know the edges of your world,” Brian says. “And then it turns out there’s all this dark matter out there. I fell out of orbit, Dawn.”

I look at him, the familiar planes of his face, the level of his chin, the sickle-shaped scar that cuts through his eyebrow. He is trying to find his way to me again; I can meet him halfway. So I put my hands on his cheeks. “How do we get back on track?”

In response, he sways forward. He stops before we touch, I inhale what he exhales. It makes me think of Abramovi?, the performance artist, and her lover, fainting in the same square of air. “Is this…” he asks. “Can I…”

I rise up on my toes and press my lips against his.

For a moment, he goes still. His heart, flush against mine, kicks hard. Then he grabs me tighter, his palms skimming from my shoulders to my waist, as if loosening his grip means I might float out of reach.