What I find remarkable in hindsight is how, over the course of that winter

and spring, I just did my job. I was a lawyer, and lawyers worked. We worked all
the time. We were only as good as the hours we billed. There was no choice, I
told myself. The work was important, I told myself. And so I kept showing up
every morning in downtown Chicago, at the corporate ant mound known as
One First National Plaza. I put my head down and billed my hours.

Back in Maryland, Suzanne was living with her disease. She was coping with
medical appointments and surgeries and at the same time trying to care for her
mother, who was also fighting an aggressive cancer that was, the doctors insisted,
completely unrelated to Suzanne’s. It was bad luck, bad fortune, freakish to the
point of being too scary to contemplate. The rest of Suzanne’s family was not
particularly close-knit, except for two of her favorite female cousins who helped
her out as much as they could. Angela drove down from New Jersey to visit
sometimes, but she was juggling both a toddler and a job. I enlisted Verna, my
law school friend, to go by when she could, as a sort of proxy for me. Verna had
met Suzanne a couple of times while we were at Harvard and by sheer
coincidence was now living in Silver Spring, in a building just across the parking
lot from Suzanne’s.

It was a lot to ask of Verna, who’d recently lost her father and was wrestling
with her own grief. But she was a true friend, a compassionate person. She
phoned my office one day in May to relay the details of a visit.

“I combed her hair,” she said.
That Suzanne needed to have her hair combed should have told me
everything, but I’d walled myself off from the truth. Some part of me still insisted
this wasn’t happening. I held on to the idea that Suzanne’s health would turn
around, even as the evidence against it stacked up.

It was Angela, finally, who called me in June and got right to the point. “If
you’re going to come, Miche,” she said, “you’d better get to it.”

By then, Suzanne had been moved to a hospital. She was too weak to talk,
slipping in and out of consciousness. There was nothing left to feed my denial. I
hung up the phone and bought a plane ticket. I flew east, caught a taxi to the
hospital, took the elevator to the right floor, walked the hallway to her room, and
found her there, lying in bed as Angela and her cousin watched over her,
everyone silent. Suzanne’s mother, it turned out, had died just a few days earlier,
and now Suzanne was in a coma. Angela made room for me to perch on the side