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It made it easier that they both believed in the simplest kind of afterlife – that my father could say to her, even in those last days, joking but without irony, ‘You’re going to get tired of hearing from me. I’ll be asking you for this that and the other thing twenty-four hours a day. JESUS, you’ll be saying, here comes another prayer from Dennis.’ And my mother would reply, her voice hoarse with pain, ‘Jesus might advise you to take in a movie once in a while. Give your poor wife a rest. She’s in heaven, after all.’It was a joke, but they believed it, and they believed, too, I think, that their love, their loyalty to one another, was no longer a matter of chance or happenstance, but a condition of their existence no more voluntary or escapable than the pace of their blood, the influx of perception…There was, in their anticipation of what was to come, a queer self-satisfaction. It was clear now that they would love each other until the last moment of her life – hadn’t that been the goal from the beginning? They would love each other even beyond the days they had lived together; was there any greater triumph?
