Introduction I raced into the backyard just after midnight. Barefoot, in pajamas, I raised an empty brown pill bottle into the frigid Kansas darkness, swept it through the air, snapped the white disc of a lid on top, and then rushed back into the silent house, through the hall into my room, wrote on a slip of paper, and taped it to the bottle. Air-- the label said-- from 1970. The bottle still rattles around in a drawer in my father''s house, I think. I wouldn''t throw it away if I ran across it. I wouldn''t open it either. I don''t know why. After all, it''s only air.

*** Here''s what I remember from the first days of a February years later. Sunday morning, we arrived at Mass at Our Lady of Sorrows parish so late that the only seats left were in the balcony. The first scripture reading was already happening by the time the fi ve of us squeezed into the pew: me; my husband, Mike; our two little boys, Joseph and Michael; and Katie, my teenaged daughter from my first marriage. The elderly pastor--elfin in appearance, but resonant and dramatic in tone, always ending his sentences with a forceful, downward emphasis as if his words were screws he was forcing into a particularly tough board--began to preach from the sanc­tuary below us. In the Gospel that morning, Jesus had exorcised demons, but this would not be Monsignor''s subject. That would be death, of course. Mike and I glanced at each other, amused. For in the fi ve months we had attended Mass in the parish in our new city of Birmingham, Alabama, we''d noticed this about the pastor: he liked to talk about death.

No matter what the Gospel or the feast, it seemed, he''d find his way to it: we are all going to die and there is no more important task than preparing for the certainty. No surprise, really. The man had spent his adult life ministering to the dying and the grieving, and he was in his late seventies him­self. Death might be on his mind. *** So that morning, nodding only briefly to Jesus and the demons, Monsignor moved on to a book he''d been given about life- after-death experiences, and here we were again at death''s door, where he would talk to us about death and--always his most repeated point--being prepared for it. So yes, I remember glancing at Mike and him glancing back and I remember sharing knowing, slight smiles at death''s intro­duction. And we settled back to listen, to pray, to think about work tomorrow, about the next book or article deadline, all of us up there in the balcony, an enormous bas-relief of that Lady of Sorrows cradling her dead son on the sanctuary wall behind the altar straight ahead of us, in plain view. I remember Mike kneeling beside me after Communion.

I remember because his posture was just a little different than nor­mal. He usually looked ahead, or down at a misbehaving son, or just rested his chin on his folded hands. That morning, I remem­ber, he knelt there, his face buried in his hands. I remember that we went to Whole Foods after Mass and the boys picked out muffins and Katie got a croissant and Mike wan­dered off to look for something and he came back with a bag of loose tea because that was his latest thing. He said this was part of his renewed project of getting back into shape, a project inter­rupted by our move and the substantial pressures of his new job as director of evangelization (and the Pro-Life Office . and the Family Life Office . and the Campus Ministry Office . and the Child Protection Office .

he seemed to add a job every month we''d lived there) for the diocese. Mike was a man of rou­tines, and this transition had messed with his running and lifting schedule in a big way. He wasn''t in the worst shape he''d ever been but neither was he in the best, so in this new year, he''d get back on track. For some reason, the tea would evidently be a part of that. I remember him walking down the aisle, cradling boxes of tea and a box of filters in his arms. The tea was green, because cutting down on caffeine would be part of the renewed health regime too. And I remember him wrapping his arms around me at the Botanical Gardens a few hours later. It was February, and although a few weeks later it would snow, that day it was mild enough for a walk in and through the vari­ous, quite diverse areas of that beautiful public space: the Japa­nese garden, hills rich with ferns, the greenhouse desert--all of us except Katie, who stayed back at the apartment, swamped with homework.

I remember how when we had arrived and I was getting ready to close up and lock the car, I held my camera in my hand and debated whether I should bring it along or not. I looked around at the still mostly dead, not quite budding vegetation. I considered the boys and Mike waiting for me near the fountain at the entrance. No, I decided. There will be another time--later, when there''s more in bloom and more color. We''ll all come back then and there will be more pictures. Yes, I remember how Mike grabbed me and hugged me in the middle of the Alabama Woodlands, boys tramping through the dry brown leaves thick across the ground around us. I remember how happy we were--ecstatic, even-- to be back in the South, to never have to endure another northern Indiana winter, those months of backbreaking snow that just seemed to go on and on.

Not here. Very soon, the dogwoods would be budding, the pink and violet azaleas would be blossoming, and we would return to walk in the gardens again, to see the colors, to relax in the certainty of new life gently but surely overwhelming the old. It would all happen, we were certain: another walk, another spring. Years of them, stretching ahead. I remember the next evening, which was February 2, the Feast of the Presentation, a celebration of the day Joseph and Mary took the baby Jesus to the Temple forty days after his birth as a symbolic offering of their child to God. I decided we would do a special prayer before dinner, so I printed out a very condensed version of Night Prayer: the last of the daily prayers in the Lit­urgy of the Hours. Now, that Night Prayer, or Compline, always includes a prayer called the Nunc Dimittis, words taken directly from the Gospel of Luke. An elderly man named Simeon met the Holy Family at the Temple that day and thanked God in words very appropriate for those minutes before we release ourselves to sleep: Now, Master, you may let your servant go in peace, according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you prepared in sight of all the peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and glory for your people Israel.

Those of us who could read, recited it aloud; those of us who couldn''t, fidgeted. Mike knew it by heart because he prayed these prayers every day himself, and had almost his whole adult life, as a seminarian, as a Catholic priest, and after leaving active priestly ministry in 1993, as a layman working in education and Catholic publishing. He never stopped praying those prayers. I remember that deep voice. I can hear it now. Lord, now you may let your servant go in peace . I remember him sitting on the couch after dinner, laughing at a sitcom. I remember him raising himself grudgingly from that couch to head trudging, so tired, into our room, where his computer waited for him, and where he needed to fi nish up his column for the diocesan newspaper, due tomorrow.

He had been so tired so early in the evenings for the past couple of months, so tired so early at night, it sometimes seemed as if he wouldn''t make it down that short hall from the living room to the bedroom. But, he had been saying, getting into shape would take care of it. He would get his energy back. Still thinking about that column , he posted on Facebook in the early evening. Eventually, he got it done, that column. He wrote things in it like, "None of us knows what the future holds," and, quoting his friend Fr. Benedict Groeschel, "We have no plans except to be led by God." That''s what the man wrote.

I remember. If I could put it all in a bottle, snap the lid on tight, and keep it forever, I would. But this-- this is the best I can do. *** The next afternoon--it was a Tuesday--I slumped against the cool tiled wall of a hospital emergency room, looking at him for the first time since he and Joseph had left the apartment earlier that morning. He was covered with a light blue sheet up to his bare shoul­ders; he looked as if he were dozing on the table on the other side of the room. But he was dead. He had been dead all day, and I didn''t even know it. *** They had left the apartment that morning, he and seven-year- old Joseph, just as they always did, around 7:30.

He''d dropped Joseph off at school, then driven directly to the YMCA down the road. He''d just started going there; they didn''t know him at the front desk yet, couldn''t tell you who he was. He went to the locker room, changed his clothes, stepped on a treadmill, and started to run. After about ten minutes, he raised the speed. I know this be­cause the woman running next to him noticed, impressed because he was holding that quicker pace. Then he dropped to the floor, hard. She was a dentist and had CPR training, so she knew what to do and what to look for. "His eyes were open," she told.