Part One, Chapter 2

II

The Transcript building is humming, late on a Thursday morning, as I return briefly to my office after my visit with Amy. There is a steady whir of white noise whose qualities have not changed much over the years except for the subtraction of the rhythmic clackety-clack of the keys of the old Underwoods and Royals on which I learned my tradecraft as a newspaperman. I’m not trying to strike a pose as being any more old-school than the next guy, but I do miss the incessant punctuation of those worn but stately old typewriters. I defy any print journalist of a certain age who is worth his salt to deny that the percussion of the keys and the physical reach-and-pull for the carriage return lever were an organic part of the physical and mental process not only of typing words onto rolls of copy paper but of choosing those words and forming the syntax and sentences that rendered them meaningful, if not always entirely readable. On that day well over twenty years ago when a maintenance man unbolted my trusty Underwood from the foldaway stand of my steel desk and replaced it with an ugly amber monochrome monitor and a Wang word-processing terminal I experienced real panic. Would the words ever flow again?

Not to worry. The hardware makeover turned out to be the first of several, as computer manufacturers in the 90s seemed to emulate the sort of planned obsolescence that I had grown up associating with Fords, razor blades, and laundry detergent. Every year brought new and improved models, and the very well-funded Transcript IT department did not take a pass on very many of those technological advances. Metropolitan Boston was booming, and the advertising megabucks that made the Transcript a thick newspaper with page after page of young department store models posed seductively in their underwear also kept my colleagues and I in up-to-date hardware. I got better rather than worse, both as a writer and as a reporter, and I rose quietly but steadily through the ranks: copy boy, police reporter, City Hall beat, a stint in Washington covering the Congress, undercover investigative team, then a great gig writing a gritty but witty column on urban life three times a week, a transitional period as an op-ed columnist and occasional editorial writer, and finally, two years ago, my name on the Transcript’s editorial masthead:

STANLEY TURNER BRANFORD, EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR

Tenacious reporting and good, thoughtful writing fueled my ascent, but there was always more to it than that, I knew. I had (and still have) a calm, friendly manner, a tad dry, more serious than cheerful, but usually helpful and approachable. By taking numerous young reporters under my wing I not only won their loyalty without ever exactly seeking it, but I also made myself indispensable to some of the higher-ups in the Transcript’s hierarchy by protecting them from direct exposure to questions they might not be able to answer and needs they might prefer not to address. The air tends to get thinner near the top in most political and corporate hierarchies, and the Transcript runs true to form in that respect, with a number of bow-tied individuals on the high branches who may have prepped together but have certainly spent very little time chasing down stories together at the Transcript or anywhere else this side of the Harvard Crimson.

What else? Well, my very real humility notwithstanding, I project a certain gravitas, if you will, and I will admit to having honed it in myself fairly self-consciously. We are a very long way from the era when most newspapermen were rumpled, deadline-driven two-fingered typists who kept a flask in their desk drawers and another in their jackets, turned in typo-filled, coffee-stained copy to some guy wearing a visor and sitting at a horseshoe-shaped copy desk, then lit the other end of their next cigarette off the remains of their last one before filling out that weekend’s football card and heading out for some good old two-fisted drinking at a neighborhood dive where the all-male clientele tended toward gin-blossomed Irish pols, off-duty cops, and other reporters like themselves. I knew those guys. I worked with those guys. Those guys were friends of mine. And believe me, I am not one of those guys.

Nor are there very many of them haunting the City Room of the Transcript or any other big-city paper these days. No, the new role of the modern-day newspaperman of any significant stature has grown with the advent of the internet and 24/7 cable-television news channels: I am asked several times each day to appear on television or podcast to report or opine on the news buzz of the moment, and I am strongly encouraged by the powers that be at the Transcript to add brand value to the aforementioned placement of my name on the masthead by accepting as many of these gigs as I can squeeze into my day. I may operate on a somewhat smaller scale, but I am no less a content provider than the Associated Press or Reuters. And I don’t look a gift horse in the mouth: it is pretty good work if you can get it.

I can get it. Another reason for my rise up the corporate ladder is politics. Not office politics, although I’m not a total slouch in that department either. The family that has owned the Transcript for the past century has for decades seen an advantage, for interesting and not purely ideological reasons of its own, in holding a perch among the leading lights of the liberal left. Now that few of them are any longer involved in the actual day-to-day operations of the paper they have chosen me, perhaps even groomed me, as a sort of in-house conscience.

Groomed me? Let me explain. They’ve never actually tried to steer me overtly toward any particular set of opinions. It is far subtler than that. All they have done is let me know, consistently, as I have come up through the ranks, that I should never feel there was a need – outside of straight news-page objective reporting pieces, of course – for me to pull punches, to mince words, to list toward a more “pragmatic” politics or even toward, say, the Democratic centrist orientation of the Clinton Administration. And they have, all the while, lavished me with praise and promotions for my outspoken progressivism, for having the courage of my convictions, and having the imagination, the optimism, and the journalistic tradecraft to find ways, more often than not, to arrive at lofty principles through the lens of the nuts and bolts preoccupations of everyday life.

Believe me, I am not so self-absorbed as to think that I have turned all or even most lunch-pail, blue-collar, Roman Catholic Massachusetts Democrats into true progressives – this is not, after all, a demographic group that turns first to the editorial or op-ed page in the daily newspaper – but I believe I have converted a few, and that specific route of conversion has been a goal of my journalistic efforts for a good long time. No newspaper reporter should ever be motivated by such a specific ideological agenda, but once I began to inhabit the world of opinion columns and op-ed pieces and daily editorial writing, I quickly realized the obvious: that there is really no point in holding down such a job unless I also hold a clear vision of how the world works, and even more important of how I want the world to work. So I do.

But comes a weekend, and my clear vision of the world’s workings becomes rather more myopic. When you are blessed with a wonderful family such as mine, weekends are special, and vacations and three-day weekends even more so. This week things have worked out so I can not only get a three-day weekend, but I can take an early slide today by forgoing the afternoon “news budget” meeting where we assemble a short list for tomorrow’s front page. Then, with my weekend editorials in the can and the op-ed pages close enough to fully composed so that the night editor won’t mind doing the final touch-up for Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, I can skip lunch and be headed home by one o’clock with my mind focused cheerfully on the good times I will share with Diana and children Rachel (mine) and Sam (ours) over the weekend.

I’ll cheer Rachel on tomorrow afternoon at her high school track meet, and probably take her and a few teammates out for some (celebratory, I hope) pizza afterward. Saturday and Sunday afternoons I will take Sam out for whatever expeditions and explorations the two of us can concoct together: whenever I enter Sam’s sphere I become more like Sam himself than the unassuming, mild-mannered, middle-aged newspaperman persona that I project to my colleagues, my neighbors, and even my readers (and cable viewers). I believe they tend to see me as I see myself: as a good man who plays by the rules, a serious, sober, and deliberate man, and – how could it be otherwise? – maybe a bit on the dull side. But with Sam I become the Daddy about whom he could ask Diana, in as generous (if inadvertent) a compliment as a five-year-old could utter, “Are you sure that Daddy is a grown-up?”

The last thing on my calendar before I exit the building for the weekend was the one-on-one meeting I have just concluded with Amy Tuckerman, one that I suspect many of my male (and some female) colleagues would associate with opportunity, but one that I personally associated both with pleasure and with some risk. Amy is a brilliant young woman who, I am very sure, will become a tough, talented newspaperwoman. Over the course of her career she will make herself, her parents, her editors, and me very proud. Herself, her parents, and her editors for all the obvious reasons. Me because three years ago she spent ten weeks at the Transcript as a summer intern in my department and she all but signed me up to a lifetime contract as her professional (and sometimes personal) mentor.

The mentor’s role, as I have suggested earlier, is a role that I have played for many young men and women over the past few decades. It is a role, I will readily admit, that I love. It is part of how I see myself in the world just as the way I relate to my fifteen-year-old daughter is part of how I see myself in the world. Several years ago a former protégé of mine who has since won a couple of Pulitzer, Tommy Kurkjian, wrote a profile for the New Yorker that focused on me and the role I had played for him and others as a mentor. This made me uncomfortable. I have no interest in being a small-time newspaper legend, or any kind of legend.

But full disclosure must prevail here, so I must confess that I am a legend, although not, fortunately, as myself. This will no doubt smack of some mysterious and unfastidious double life that will seem wildly inconsistent with the picture I have been sketching of myself up to this point, but I am going to try to explain.

For tens of thousands of people all over the country, perhaps more, I am known only by a nom de plume. This is because of the death of my first wife, Mary Kate, from cancer about ten years ago, and because of what I did in the face of her dying.

Mary Kate and I had been high school sweethearts, and we got married when she was a senior in high school and I was a sophomore in college. I do not recommend marrying a seventeen-year-old girl, and I do not recommend getting married when you are twenty, but I am proud to say that we made it, or that we were making it, I should say, when Mary Kate was diagnosed and given months instead of years and the whole world (as I knew it) turned to ashes and shit.

We got married the old-fashioned way: I parked my noisy slant-six ’64 Dodge Dart half a mile down the road so its transmission and its need for a valve job would not wake Mary Kate’s parents. I climbed the catalpa tree in her back yard and broke her out of her house at two o’clock in the morning and we were conjugated by a justice of the peace to whom I had slipped a fifty as well as some more sanctioned paperwork the day before. We then drove all night and honeymooned (conjugating lustfully throughout) all weekend at the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City (thanks to a great exchange rate) before I drove all night again and dropped Mary Kate off at the high school at 7:45 Monday morning.

Mary Kate was not her usual attentive self in class that day, but at 2 p.m. I picked her up and we drove to her house where she apologized tearfully to her parents for her deceitful cover story. Aside from little white lies such as misdirecting me about what she might have gotten me for Christmas or my birthday, it is the only time in her life that I ever knew Mary Kate to tell a lie. Then we spent the next six hours locked in mortal conversation with her parents, and we convinced them not to have our marriage annulled, not to shoot me, and not to have me arrested on what used to be called a morals charge before Catholic priests cornered the market on such offenses. Mary Kate’s parents (and, in due time, my own) were horrified, but we had convinced ourselves not only that we were adults but also that we were serious people. If we did not convince our parents of this status we at least got them to crack the door open and give us a chance to show them. Oh, my, did we show them. We were probably the most serious and responsible young married couple on the face of the earth. We denied ourselves a few years not of childhood exactly but of the usual college-kid hijinks, but we never looked back, we had no regrets, and twenty-four years later Mary Kate was dead.

And I had a new alter ego: “Chet Spiro.”

It was a relentlessly horrible time. I nursed Mary Kate physically and emotionally through almost two years of an increasingly difficult and body-ravaging illness that made a mean-spirited mockery of the good times that had been so plentiful in our marriage and in the courtship that preceded it. I did much of the same for Rachel, a little girl losing her mother at a time when no words could explain such a thing or make it right.

There was, of course, nobody nursing me, nor would I have expected or been able to accept anyone (other than Mary Kate, who was not up to it) playing such a role at that point. There was nobody holding my hand through the times when Mary Kate was in the hospital and Rachel stayed at a friend’s and the only sleep I got was three or four hours lying on my side on one of those ridiculous hospital day beds to the regular interruptions of nurses and orderlies. Or when little Rachel and I cooked up forty-cent boxes of bright orange mac and cheese together for dinner because we knew we were not going to be able to eat anyway and neither of us felt like sitting across from each other in a restaurant booth with tears rolling down our faces. Or when Mary Kate deteriorated to the point where the only things I was able to do for her (with her was little more than a fond memory by then) were to try to keep her clean and change the linens and the flowers and administer her ever-increasing doses of morphine. There were friends who dropped by an occasional pie or hot meal, but it turned out that very few people actually wanted to spend time with a family (or the broken shell of a family) that was experiencing such extremity. It was as if there were too great a risk of being exposed to overt neediness, to a kind of weepy honesty that is generally considered, these days, to be bad form. Which was more of a relief than it was a problem: I preferred to do any emoting I might do either alone or with Mary Kate or Rachel or the two of them together.

Except for this: I found that I needed to write about what was happening in our family, and once I began to write about it I discovered that it was also important to me to share what I was writing with others. Writing is what I do, to be sure. But beyond that obvious fact, I believed and still believe that what I was experiencing and writing about, as painful as it was, was also the most authentic and significant living and writing that I had ever done. Before Mary Kate’s diagnosis both of us had always subscribed to the orthodoxy that bringing Rachel into the world and raising her was the most important thing we had ever done or would likely ever do. Child rearing certainly is important, and enormously self-validating to boot.

But it did not take either of us very long to realize that the way we handled death and destruction was even more important than whether we taped up the letters of the alphabet two feet high on the walls and appliances of our home or otherwise were the kind of parents that Hillary Clinton or T. Barry Brazelton might approve of. We are seldom prepared for the worst things that happen in our lives, because the only thing that most of us can count on in that respect is that something truly terrible is bound to happen to us sooner or later, and that it will probably involve uncharted territory in one way or another: illness and death, or separation and divorce, or addiction and its usual destructive consequences, or any of dozens of other forms of loss or devastation. These kinds of experiences test our grace and courage and generosity and integrity, and they provide our children – often our harshest judges – with an unvarnished opportunity to see who we really are as human beings and to reflect more on who they might be or become then they will ever learn simply by listening (or not listening) to what we tell them.

So somehow, in spite of the fact that what I now do as an editorial writer involves far more prescription than description, I convinced myself that it was very important for me to write about what was going on in my life and in my home while Mary Kate was dying or denying death or, well, ultimately, being dead. After she had completed that final passage, my days for months or even years began with observing to myself that Mary Kate was still dead today and that, in some sort of bad cosmic joke that failed to take into consideration the ongoing engagement that we the living had with her, she was going to continue being dead throughout the remainder of the day (a bleak, formless and seemingly measureless period of time that could not possibly pass quickly enough for me).

So I approached Crocker Talbot, the publisher of the Transcript, and made my case that I should be allowed to write a kind of once-a-week public journal of what was happening in my life, a concrete narrative rather than anything pedantic or theoretical, in which I made conscious resistance against the kinds of bromides or prescriptions that one might find in my editorials. I further made the case to Crocker that this kind of writing was so totally different in its voice and its likely audience from what a columnist or editorial writer would employ or enjoy that a single recognizable author could not possibly serve explicitly in both roles for any single newspaper without losing or confusing his audience. By making this argument rather strongly I braced Crocker Talbot with a vague panic over the possibility that I (the public conscience of his family, as I have indicated) might be about to broach the subject of a leave of absence or sabbatical from my day job, and the not strictly intended result was that he jumped at the chance to give his consent to my far less frightening proposal that my new weekly journal entries appear under the Chet Spiro nom de plume, and that Chet’s true identity must be better kept than most newspaper secrets.

Best efforts notwithstanding, nearly everybody who was anybody at the Transcript soon knew Chet Spiro’s real-life identity, but the existence of the pen name did have the benefit of serving as a buffer so that nearly all of my colleagues respected my privacy, at least on a face-to-face basis, and avoided the subject (and especially those factual and emotional details which they might have learned by reading Chet’s columns) in any direct interactions with me. With the rarest of exceptions, the closest my colleagues came to trespassing past the tidy white-picket emotional fences I had built around myself were an occasional “How you doing, Stanley?” or “You doing okay, Stanley?” with a slightly different cadence and an earnest enough inflection and facial expression so as to distinguish it, say, from Sopranos-speak.

I prevailed upon a discreet colleague in the Transcript’s IT department to establish a separate email account for Chet Spiro and on a whim I stuck that address at the end of Chet’s columns, and to my amazement I received at first dozens but eventually hundreds of email messages from people all over the country. A slight majority of these were from women (assuming that Chet’s correspondents were not using fictitious gender-veiling pen names of their own), but I have to say that I was also amazed and encouraged by the number of messages that came from men.

Chet Spiro had to say no to an unrelenting flow of requests for television and radio interviews, but his somewhat tactical shyness did not keep the Transcript’s bean counters from realizing that they had a very marketable commodity on their hands and, therefore, from doing something with Chet Spiro’s columns what certainly had never been done with any of my attributed work: they syndicated him. Early on I realized that I needed to protect myself and Rachel from any possibility of my creating, inadvertently or otherwise, a profitable cottage industry on my dead wife’s back, so I arranged that every dime that Chet Spiro ever earned from that point forward would be donated to the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

The Transcript suffered no such angst, and Chet’s columns were soon being published in nearly every major media market in the country. Random House, under the whip hand of the goose-stepping profiteers who had recently purchased the publishing house to fill out their global media empire, saw a few of my 750-word lamentations on Mary Kate’s demise and thought, “Scalable revenue!” and persuaded me to, in effect, sign Chet’s name to a book contract for a compilation of his columns in book form. The signature was the only fresh writing that Chet and I had to do for the project, and we soon became a significant part of the Dana Farber’s revenue stream.

So as I quietly went about my work and in the process made “Stanley Branford” a moderately well-known if not household name in New England political circles, and in the bargain continued to try to make the world or at least New England a better place, Chet Spiro became a bit of a legend: a poster boy for understanding loss, for embracing grief, for the efforts of a father and a daughter to find hope and regenerative power in the tiniest of life’s moments, and to cope with all the things that I suspect none of us really knows about death and humanity.

Men and women wrote to me about how they used little pieces of our lives in their own lives, and Rachel and I – very, very far from the 90s mantras of “letting it go” and “moving on” – made an almost daily ritual of reading some of that mail together and taking something, whatever we could, from the experience, without actually having to let these strangers inside our personal lives.

Until there was Diana.

She had once been the stunning, up-and-coming six and eleven o’clock news anchor on one of Boston’s big three television stations, but left because she was too intelligent and too principled to simply accept being pigeon-holed as a pretty talking head reading copy front-loaded with blood, gore, and titillating scandal. The last straw had come when her station management had been way too transparent about its desire to lose the standard anchor desk so she could sit high on a specially made stool as she did the news and, the marketing wizards hoped, reveal enough nicely tanned thigh to help recapture the top spot in Boston’s TV news ratings war. She made a parting joke that perhaps what they really needed was somebody “a little more flashy, like Sharon Stone’s character from Basic Instinct,” then walked out the front door on a rich contract and landed on her feet doing a noontime news magazine called “Hither and Yon” on one of Boston’s public radio stations.

All of which was perfect for me, although I wasn’t looking for it and it took me a while to see it. I had met Diana once or twice at newsie events, but I had never thought she had anything to do with me or with my life, if I had thought of her at all.

Then during my bereavement leave from the Transcript immediately following Mary Kate’s death, when the upper limits of my reading comprehension capacities were challenged by the large type fonts, sentence of two per page, and easy-to-follow tips of a copy of Life’s Little Instruction Book that a friend had given me in a perfectly plausible effort to help me manage my grief, I seized on the idea of taking a regular mid-day nap, as that little book suggested. I had scarcely ever taken a mid-day nap in my adult life, but I tried it and loved it. I learned to set aside an hour, tune in the Bose to NPR, lie down and clear my mind of the details and detritus of the day, and sleep for perhaps twenty or thirty minutes of that time so that I woke up calmer, more refreshed, more sane, more able to live in the moment with what was left of my family.

The secret to my being able to fall asleep easily in mid-day, I soon convinced myself, was the sound of a woman’s voice. I cannot remember what my mother’s voice sounded like when I was three or four years old, which was the last previous time I can recall having taken regular mid-day naps. But if I were to try to create or select the perfect woman’s voice to provide a soothing soporific for a child or a man, it would be the sweet, melodious tones that I was able to access almost every weekday at noon by tuning in to “Hither and Yon”: Diana’s voice.

Diana Ryerson talked me to sleep every day reading interesting stories and interviewing engaging guests and interjecting subtle little non-verbal sounds that gently conveyed wonderful little nuances of meaning as people tried to answer her questions. Her voice has a quality that makes me feel as if I can hear a carillon of bells ringing ever so lightly from a distant tower, and yet it is also distinctly and ineluctably human, so that if you begin to fall off to sleep and then regain enough analytic consciousness to question yourself, to catch yourself and wonder if you might have heard some bells ringing, but then you recover enough of a memory sound clip to revisit it again, or if she is still speaking, you may say to yourself, “No, those were not bells exactly, it’s amazing, but it was just a woman’s voice.”

A woman’s voice with a slight lisp, of all things. What sweetness! Yet seasoned with obvious intelligence, intellectual rigor, even irony. It is a paradox, of course, that her lisp could actually enhance the perfect quality and modulation of her voice.

In those dark days when I was losing Mary Kate and the unrelenting grimness of a new phase of my life was settling around me like nothing but not-being, dark non-existence, Diana’s voice enclosed me, clasped me, caressed me daily with its light-fingered touch, and I fell asleep and awakened again enchanted not only with that touch but with the whole wide world. What were her stories about? I never knew in advance, and I would never have listed the topics in advance as a selection of things that I personally would have been interested in learning about, although certainly there was some significant overlap with the subject matter of my own work. But there they were: the world that engaged me again when I began to return to it across a chasm from the dark and distant caves in which Mary Kate and I spent our last days together was a world that Diana Ryerson had created for me, and I loved the way she built it out like one’s favorite bookstore with space for poetry and politics and music and flawed but venerable people and romance and mystery and an attentiveness both to what is truly sad in the world and to what is most painfully authentic.

I missed a lot of Diana’s show, of course, because of the effectiveness of her lilting tones in sending me off to sleep each day. I remember thinking the idle thought at some point that if I ever met her again and introduced myself to her – and I anticipated that the burden would be on me to introduce myself, given her electronic media fame and my relative newsprint obscurity – I would be too embarrassed to pay her the odd compliment of thanking her for sweetly talking me to sleep each day, lest she arch an eyebrow and ask me smartly, a bit ironically, in her sweet-as-ever voice, if I was suggesting that perhaps she should change the spelling of the name of her show to “Hither and Yawn.” Or lest I find out that her light, sometimes self-deprecating radio persona was nothing like the real Diana Ryerson as she ripped me to shreds and dropped me in my tracks for my implied criticism.

Then one day I awakened from a perfect twenty-five minutes of slumber to the remarkable sound of Diana Ryerson speaking my name. Well, not my name, exactly. Chet Spiro’s name.

“Today we have a special treat for our listeners. We do not know very much about the less meaningful details of Chet Spiro’s life such as his age or his address or where he is from, which is probably just as he wants it. Yet, I feel like I know him as well as I know myself. He appears to be a simple man of great moral courage, who has been unafraid to look directly and honestly into the darkest territory of sadness and loss, and yet enough of an optimist to believe in the humanizing powers of redemption and relationship, and he writes about his explorations of all of these spaces in a way that can put us in touch with them explicitly and directly. He is neither preachy nor pretentious, and he writes all of this in scenes and in a language that invites us into his very skin so that we can inhabit those territories with him. He is a little bit mysterious, and consequently he has probably been Googled more than any of us could ever hope or fear to be Googled, yet all that Google delivers on him are his columns. It’s enough. Chet Spiro. Listen to what he said to us in Saturday’s column….”

And then she read my own words aloud to me. Of course I remember that column. I probably remember all of them, but that one was special even before it became the first of dozens of Chet’s columns that she read aloud to me – and to thousands of other NPR listeners – over the radio.

In my columns I reduced Mary Kate’s name to simply “Kate,” and I usually called Rachel “our daughter” or “our little girl,” or, if there was some need to name her in a dialogue, “Honey,” or some similarly anonymous term of endearment. In this particular column Chet finds the manuscript of a children’s story that Kate had written several years earlier around the time of their daughter’s birth. Something about a flying bear, but written so early in their daughter’s life that she had never heard it when it was new. Chet is enchanted by it and is overtaken by the desire to find an illustrator and a children’s book publisher for it, because he is consumed, in his grief, with a desire to do whatever he can in these final hours to help build Mary Kate’s legacy as a human being.

Chet brings the story to her as she lies propped up in bed wuth tubes growing from her face and he appeals to her to allow him to get the story published for her. At first she is confused by this request: is he worried that they aren’t going to have enough money, so that he hopes that a book will become a financial help to them? Once he gets past this comedy of errors, he finds that Kate is absolutely uninterested in any notion of any kind of legacy – all she wants is for Chet to promise to protect their daughter’s childhood and help her to live a long and happy life – and she nixes the idea of bringing the story to a publisher.

But she does say that she would like to try to read it through one time for their daughter, if she can get through the whole thing. It is about fifteen pages, and Chet is worried about what the effort will do to her, but he cannot deny her the chance for pleasure, and he brings their daughter into the room. The little girl is a bit fidgety at first, but ultimately she is mysteriously well behaved and she listens with laser-like attention to this story that she is now old enough to understand. Kate barely makes it through the story. There is a dry death-rattle in her throat that leaves Chet horrified that she won’t make it, that she will die in that moment because he could not leave well enough alone and he had to bring the story in to her.

But she does not die then. By reading it to their little girl she has published it in the only way that was important to her, and at the end Chet observes through his tears that Kate and their daughter both have radiant smiles on their faces. In spite of all.

Over the next few weeks Diana selected and read some of the earlier columns so that she backfilled the gaps a bit, and I don’t think I missed any of her readings. Eventually I made a point of introducing myself again to Diana, and of outing Chet Spiro to her, and we came to find places in each other’s lives, and, more slowly, Diana in Rachel’s life as well.