Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

voluntary muscles that were affected, always, and at first that did indeed sound like a lesser evil. No misfirings in the heart or brain, no signals gone awry, no malicious rearrangements of the personality. Sight and hearing and taste and touch, and best of all intelligence, lively and strong as ever. The brain kept busy monitoring all the outlying shutdown, toting up the defaults and depletions. Wasn’t that to be preferred?
    Of course, Lewis had said. But only because of the chance it gives you, to take action.
    His own problems had started with the muscles of his legs. He had enrolled in a Seniors Fitness class (though he hated the idea) to see if strength could be bullied back into them. He thought it was working, for a week or two. But then came the lead feet, the shuffling and tripping, and before long, the diagnosis. As soon as they knew that much, they had talked about what would be done when the time came. Early in the summer, he was walking with two canes. By the end of summer he was not walking at all. But his hands could still turn the pages of a book and manage, with difficulty, a fork or spoon or pen. His speech seemed to Nina almost unaffected, though visitors had trouble with it. He had decided anyway that visitors should be banned. His diet had been changed, to make swallowing easier, and sometimes days passed without any difficulty of that kind.
    Nina had made inquiries about a wheelchair. He had not opposed this. They no longer talked about what they called the Big Shutdown. She had even wondered if they—or he—might be entering a phase she had read about, a change that came on people sometimes in the middle of a fatal illness. A measure of optimism struggling to the fore, not because it was warranted, but because the whole experience had become a reality and not an abstraction, the ways of coping had become permanent, not a nuisance.
    The end is not yet. Live for the present. Seize the day.
    That kind of development seemed out of character for Lewis.
    Nina would not have thought him capable of even the most useful self-deception. But she could never have imagined him overtaken by physical collapse, either. And now that one unlikely thing had happened, couldn’t others? Was it not possible that the changes that happened with other people might occur with him too? The secret hopes, the turning aside, the sly bargains?
    No.
    She picked up the bedside phone book and looked for “Undertakers,” which was a word that of course did not occur. “Funeral Directors.” The exasperation she felt at that was of the sort she usually shared with him. Undertakers, for God’s sake, what’s wrong with undertakers? She turned to him and saw how she had left him, helplessly uncovered. Before she rang the number she got the sheet and the duvet back on.
    A young man’s voice asked her if the doctor was there, had the doctor been yet?
    “He didn’t need a doctor. When I came in I found him dead.”
    “When was that, then?”
    “I don’t know—twenty minutes ago.”
    “You found him passed away? So—who is your doctor? I’ll phone and send him over.”
    In their matter-of-fact discussions of suicide, Nina and Lewis had never, as she remembered, talked about whether the fact was to be kept secret or made known. In one way, she was sure, Lewis would have wanted the facts known. He would have wanted to make it known that this was his idea of an honorable and sensible way to deal with the situation he had found himself in. But there was another way in which he might have preferred no such revelation. He would not want anybody to think that this resulted from the loss of his job, his failed struggle at the school. To have them think he had caved in like this on account of his defeat there—that would have set him raging.
    She scooped the packets off the bedside table, the full ones as well as the empties, and flushed them down the toilet.

    The undertaker’s men were big local lads, former students, a bit more flustered than they wanted to show. The doctor was young, too, and a stranger—Lewis’s regular doctor was on holiday, in Greece.
    “A blessing, then,” the doctor said when he had been filled in on the facts. She was a bit surprised to hear him so openly admit that, and thought that Lewis, if he could have heard, might have caught an unwelcome whiff of religion. What the doctor said next was less surprising.
    “Would you like to talk to anybody? We have people now who can, just, you know,