text: When I was young, we used to spend at least a few hours almost every day at the beach. My father worked long hours, but my family had the privilege of having one parent make enough money that the other could stay home. So whenever the weather was halfway decent, and even sometimes when it wasn't, my mother would pack up our minivan with towels and sunscreen and an umbrella and a beach ball and some buckets and a cooler full of drinks and snacks and in that cramped and overcrowded space she would buckle my sister and me into our seats, and we would drive the five miles to the Pacific Way Park beach. Now this beach was gravelly and not well maintained and the water was usually cold and there were hardly ever other families there because there were other beaches not too much farther down the road that excelled in all the ways our beach lacked. You might say that these other beaches were objectively better, and maybe you'd be right. But to me, our beach was the best beach in the world. Maybe the best place, period. Subjective experience can, and often enough does trump objective fact. Our beach was better not because anything tangible was better about it, but because the time we spent there shaped it in our minds into something it had never really been. Even now, when I look back on that beach, I remember the bright, warm glow of the sun, the feeling of pristine white sand between my toes, the blue waves lapping lackadaisically against the shore. And none of these things ever really happened, not all at once, anyway. But I also remember my little sister running and screaming with joy, my mother's face staring lovingly down at me, my father laughing hysterically as we frantically tried to chase down a towel being stolen by the wind on one of the rare occasions he was able to meet us there after work. And all of these memories are real. These events happened, and now I am the sole keeper of them. I am their historian, their guardian. My parents are gone. My sister was taken by childhood leukemia a tragically short number of years after her smooth, unburdened face lit up our beach in the clearest, happiest memory I have of her. So no one knows now about our beach but me. I guess that makes it my beach. That doesn't feel right. I put all of this down as a sort of preamble to give context to the thing I'm really dwelling on and that's the fact that within days or weeks I will no longer have a husband. And the way I feel about my beach is the way I'm already starting to feel about him. He's not even gone yet and already my memories of him are turning into the warmer, brighter versions of reality, sprinkled here and there with things he really said, and moments we really shared. It's not that I'll forget about his imperfections any more than I've forgotten that my beach was actually cold and gray, but those things just sort of stop meaning anything in light of the fact that soon I won't have his imperfections or his perfections anymore. I won't have any part of him. Last night he said something to me that I'll attempt to put down for posterity. I won't quote him directly because the way he stumbled over his words and kept circling around the point he was trying to make would be a great disservice to the deep and unsettling meaning he conveyed to me. He said that tiredness can be such a different experience depending on its context. He said that sometimes, like when you're a child and your parents carry you in their arms to bed as you slowly drift off, or when you're just lazing around on a quiet Sunday with nothing to do and nowhere to be, tiredness can be this peaceful, warm thing; a blanket you wrap around yourself and let yourself melt into. But that same tiredness, the exact same physiological thing, can be a stressful, terrifying thing to endure if it comes upon you while you're at work or otherwise occupied, already overwhelmed with all the things you must do and the endless thoughts racing in your mind. Then it's this cold, harsh thing whose edges cut at you. It actively keeps you from finding peace. All of this I agreed with. I even laughed a bit at how philosophical he was being. "So deep," I think I said, almost brushing him off. But he chuckled too, so it was okay. But then the smile faded from his too thin, hairless visage and he hit me with his revelation: There is another circumstance that changes what tiredness means and how it feels, and that's dying. He told me that he feels tired now at all times, and sleep doesn't begin to touch it. He has nowhere to be, nothing to do. Sleep is a blanket, sure, but it's wearing thin. And he can't find lasting peace in rest though he rests all day. He is tired now of living. He confessed he's scared to die. He confessed he doesn't want to go, but he's too exhausted to stay. This kind of tiredness, he told me, he hopes neither me nor our son ever have to feel. I hope so too. I'm struck by something he told me shortly after our wedding when I asked him why it had taken him so long to propose when we both already knew I would say yes. He told me about his best friend John and his ex-wife Laureline. He told me how deeply and passionately in love they had once seemed and how it hadn't saved their marriage from ending. He said that he was terrified that if their love could come to an end, then anyone's could, even ours. He didn't want things to end that way. Well, they're not ending that way, but they are ending. When we said "'til death do us part," neither of us had imagined that it really would. He spent years afraid of what might happen if we got married and the thought of it ending like this had never even crossed his mind. I'm sitting here and writing all this down partly so I remember this feeling someday when I look back on these words and partly because I promised our son that I would soon return to his room with an answer to his question, and I really don't want to return to his room and answer that question. "Mommy, will daddy go to heaven when he dies?" he had asked me, so innocently, so devastatingly. We didn't raise him in a religious home. We never mentioned heaven or hell to him, but how can you keep a kid from encountering those concepts? I wonder how much happier I'd be if I had that unshakeable faith I sometimes witness in others; if I knew with certainty that his father would go to heaven, and so would he and so would I. But I don't know that. I don't know anything. "Karen," I hear my husband's feeble voice half calling and half whispering from the bed. I look over at him and he smiles. "It's okay," he says, as if he knows what I'm thinking about. I smile back and I get up and walk to our son's room. He's playing with his toys on the floor next to his bed and for all you could tell from the outside, he's perfectly content. Even though he asked such a direct question about death, I can tell that he doesn't really comprehend the reality of it. God, does anyone, really? He looks up at me with his eyes bright and I can't help but feel a tiny resentment toward him. Not for anything he's said or done but because he looks so much like his father and every time I look in his eyes from now on, I will be destroyed by the emptiness in my life that his father has filled. But at the same time, I feel much more strongly this feeling of gratitude to him for carrying a little piece of my husband in him. More than a little piece, really. Probably all the best bits. And I am grateful too that as long as he and I are both around, neither of us will be the sole guardian or the lonely keeper of the memories of his father. It's a burden and a blessing we'll share. As he looks at me with those bright eyes and that wide smile, I feel briefly hopeful that maybe he's already forgotten his earlier question. "Well," he says, "where will daddy go when he dies? And I respond in the only truthful way I can. "Well honey, I don't really know.