Did I write down any dreams about Lorraine?

The state conference, the old hotel with the orange carpet. Lorraine was behind the swap table, about forty, in the corduroy blazer. I was the age I am. She did not seem to find that odd.

She handed me a jar across the table. It was empty and clean. I said so. She said, "Well, you have to feed her," in the voice for a patron who has not read the sign. Then the fire alarm went, the 1994 one, and everybody began to file out, and she stayed behind the table straightening the paperbacks.

Annette telephoned at ten past six. Lorraine died at half past four this morning, in the front room, with Hal and Annette and Vivian there. She was sixty-nine.

I had been awake since four. I do not attach anything to that; I am often awake at four.

R. came down and found me at the kitchen table and did not say anything. He put his hand on the back of my neck and left it there. Then he fed the starter, hers, because it is Saturday and I had not moved.

Thirty-seven years. We met at a district meeting in September 1986, in a room with no windows, when she leaned over during a presentation on the new overdue policy and whispered a remark about the presenter.

My physical was today, and I went, because it was on the calendar. Dr. Raghavan asked how I was, and I told her about Saturday, and she put down the pen. She gave me the name of a grief group that meets on Wednesday evenings and said, "When you want it. If you want it." Everything else about me is as it was.

The funeral is Saturday at eleven, at Bethany Methodist. I have written four pages and cut three.