Chapter 17
It is a fundamentally insane notion . . .
that one is able to influence the course of
events by a turn of the helm, by will-power
alone, whereas in fact all is determined by the
most complex interdependencies.
that one is able to influence the course of
events by a turn of the helm, by will-power
alone, whereas in fact all is determined by the
most complex interdependencies.
W. G. Sebald, Vertigo
During that last year we came to grips with my transition from Barra. We found a piece of land, six acres, with a field and a strip of woods separating the field from the river.This would give me room for a vegetable garden, flower beds, raspberries, highbush blueberries, asparagus, and a few rhubarb plants, though I didn’t need the quantities we had at Barra. The land came with eight wild apple trees and was on a dirt road a half-mile walk from the post office.
I told Guy that I intended to enter the twenty-first century, which coincided with this turn in my life, at the level I’d left it in the early seventies. That is, I’d use electricity for specific items like lights and a record player. But I had no need for a dishwasher or a microwave. Computers were an unknown world I didn’t feel tempted to explore, despite the encouragement of friends.“I have to ease into this,” I told them. My situation seemed similar to that of a nun who’s about to step out of the cloister, or a convict whose thirty-year jail term is coming to an end—each is on the threshold of rejoining a world she knows has changed.
I said yes to a refrigerator, but to retain the useful and familiar I planned a root cellar. I acquired a washing machine and a dryer to use in winter. In summer I’d hang the clothes in the sun. I conceded to a telephone but didn’t want an answering machine and opted for an unlisted telephone number. I couldn’t imagine living without wood heat, though I backed this up with a heating system that would keep pipes from freezing if I went away in winter. I debated about cooking with wood but decided it would bring more heartache than joy. Our woodstove meals belonged too much to Barra. I vowed I would recycle, compost, or burn all my waste, just as we had done at Barra. In fact, because I would be living “on the outside,” where tossing was so easy, being careful about waste felt even more important.
We got lucky with our builder, John Nininger. We knew John from the White Mountains and had originally gone to talk to him about steering us to a log home builder we could afford. John told us that he wanted to build this house himself. He asked us to sketch a floor plan, and he set the delivery date of the log shell for October 1999.
Delays pushed this to November. In December the house still sat, partially assembled, in John’s yard. Guy told me he wanted to see my house set on its permanent foundation before he left—in the winter of 2000. He didn’t want to pinpoint a date, but I knew he would leave before mid-February. After that time the weather was less reliably cold. I didn’t need anything more specific than that. I fell into a pit of the unknown every time I thought of what it would be like—the hour, the moment, of his leave-taking. It felt as unfathomable as Milton’s “illimitable ocean,” as “without bound /Without dimension, where length, breadth, and height, /And time and place are lost.”
I knew that Guy would leave. I felt this with the kind of inevitability one feels about night following day. But so that I could go on with daily life—baking bread, working up wood, seeing friends—I placed his final good-bye in a separate part of my mind. Since I was not challenging him, since I had elected just to watch my beloved husband walk out the door to his own death, I had put myself in the position of spectator, gazing from the bleachers as the fateful game played itself to the end. Yet I was not a spectator to my own life, and that had something to do with why in early December, on a once-a-year trip to Lawrenceville and New York, I told my friend Annie Barry what was going to happen, over a bowl of soup in a Chinese restaurant near Lincoln Center.
Annie was an old friend from my New York days. She had watched me fall in love with both rock climbing and Guy. She was in my wedding. When she married David, Guy supplied the music. She had made three special trips out to Lawrenceville for the memorial services of my parents and my brother. She had first visited Barra when it was not much more than an idea and a clearing surrounded by woods stretching up the steep hillsides.
Annie and I arrived at the restaurant around 6:30 p.m. It was a large, impersonal place where diners could grab a plate of noodles and be off again. Yet it was also a place where one could linger. We sat on the second floor at a small table for two near the stairway. Several times during that bowl of soup I had started to say something but faltered. I hadn’t come to see Annie for this specific purpose, but it had crossed my mind I might say something if the moment felt right. After a while there were only a few diners left. It was late. This would be my last chance. But I kept thinking of Guy. Even though he hadn’t asked me not to say anything, I knew I was stepping across a line by telling Annie this huge thing that was entirely between Guy and me. I knew also that she was the only person in the world I could talk to.
“Guy is going to take his own life,” I heard myself saying. I watched Annie’s face across the table. I saw some shock, but Annie knew about Guy’s demons, so I saw also a deep concern. I began to talk, filling in the background of Guy’s suicide attempt on July 3, 1998. Right at this moment I was telling Annie something I wanted her to know, and I felt the risk slide into relief and went on talking. I was telling her what was going to happen, I said, because I wanted to give her some advance warning. If she knew, it would make it easier for me to tell her when it did happen. I assured Annie that this was what Guy wanted, and that I would be all right.
Annie kept staring at me as I jabbered on. I heard her say, “Now I understand why Guy called your new house ‘Laura’s house.’” And later she broke in to say, “You’ve reached a level of acceptance that I haven’t reached yet.”
I began talking faster, harder, intent on explaining why it made sense for Guy to commit suicide. I expected Annie to start nodding as she began to understand. But she just kept staring at me in a way that told me she was unconvinced. Since I had never questioned Guy’s choice and had never questioned my own role in standing by while he carried out his plan, I thought I wasn’t explaining it well enough.
Finally she asked if she might write me about this. I hesitated. Why would she want to write me? I was brought up short by what Guy might think. I was afraid he would be angry, and I was suddenly plunged into my old childhood fear—the deeply buried but overwhelmingly familiar fear I experienced nightly at the family dinner table. I knew Guy wouldn’t want me to be telling any of this to Annie. Above all, I had to protect him from Annie’s interference, which would, I told myself, cause him pain.As for Guy’s anger at me, in reality Guy was never outright angry with me, but he was often angry at himself, and it was this anger—the unrecognized fear of it—that connected me right back to the terror of the family dinner table. That was where the camera focused and held, and I was stuck, without any idea that I was stuck, in the freeze-frame of the stop-action. All I knew was that I had to avoid this—the immobilizing terror —at any cost. So I asked Annie not to write. I explained to her that Guy and I shared all our mail, reading letters from friends at dinner. I didn’t want to be in the position of withholding Annie’s letter from Guy, finding a moment to read it to myself, then tucking it away to answer later without Guy’s knowing about it.
When we left the restaurant I thought Annie understood everything. Even accepted it. Of course she would write me, but it wouldn’t be about this.
A few days after I returned to Vermont I picked up a thick letter from Annie at the post office. I had a strong feeling that I should read this to myself as soon as I returned home. She also sent a book by Terrence Real called I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression. It was about how our society shapes the male persona, and she wanted me to read it and to show it to Guy. I knew that Guy was going to be very put off by this book, which I could see had words like mental illness, dysfunctional—an overused, jargony word Guy scoffed at—workaholic, rage, self-destructive behavior, which Guy was all too aware he exhibited. He was not going to like any of this. I was in a bad situation of my own making, and I knew I had to tell Guy what I had done.
When he came in from splitting wood I showed him Annie’s letter. “I told Annie what you are going to do. She wrote me about it,” I said.
“What did she say?” His voice was tight, and his eyes were fixed on my face.
“She thinks I should encourage you to seek help. Get the information I need to help you. She sent this book.” I pointed to the book lying on the table. He threw it a glance, and I watched his jaw grow rigid, like stone. I felt awful for causing him this problem and anger at myself for my weakness in confiding in Annie. Now that I was back at Barra with Guy, what I had done was backfiring.
“Here’s her letter,” I said, holding it out to him. “I wish I hadn’t told her, Guy.” The last thing Guy wanted was interference from Annie, but even as I said this I was not sorry that Annie knew.
“I’ll read it later.” He strode over to the table, seized the book, and flung it up into the loft, out of sight.
“Right now I’m going to work on my baseball article,” he said and headed over toward his desk, his usual routine in the half-hour before supper.
I was relieved that Guy wasn’t outright angry with me, but the way he drew in all his feelings was even worse. I was painfully aware of the problems I was causing him, and I saw also that he was keeping himself, only by a supreme effort of will, from flying apart. I began building a fire in the cookstove. If anyone had opened the door at that moment, all would have appeared calm—under control and in order—in our cabin.
After supper, after our reading aloud, after doing the dishes together, and after Guy made the run to empty the vegetable scraps in the winter compost and read the 7:00 p.m. temperatures, he sat down at the table and pulled Annie’s letter off his shelf. I was dreading this moment and couldn’t help watching him as he read it. He moved through the six pages quickly, with an impatience that told me he was reading this only because I had asked him to.
He tossed the letter across the table.“I couldn’t have expected you not to tell someone, Laura, but you picked the wrong person.” I wasn’t so sure, but I wished Annie had not written.
“Do you want to talk to someone, a doctor?” I said.
“No,” he said, then added, “If Annie writes any more letters, I don’t want to see them.”
Annie herself had grown up in an alcoholic family, and what she wrote me came out of her own understanding of the dynamic. At the time, I thought her letter, written on December 19, showed little or no understanding of what was going on between Guy and me.“I can’t think of one good thing secrecy did for me or my family,”Annie wrote.And I thought: There are no secrets between Guy and me. I know exactly what he plans to do. “Why are you keeping secrets now?”Annie went on. “Who is it helping? Was it Guy’s idea? Did he ask you to keep his secret? Why did you say yes? Or was it your idea? Why? Who does it serve?” Guy had not asked me to keep secrets. I had told Annie this. Didn’t she understand? “You said our friendship had reached a new level. Well maybe. Surely our complicity has reached a new level.”
Complicity? I had never been called complicit. Being honest was extremely important to me. How was I being complicit? Annie saw it wrong. She didn’t understand.Annie urged:“If you feel over your head in helping Guy live (as opposed to helping him die), get help for yourself, not him.” Come to New York, she wrote. “Don’t have the money? I’ll lend it to you. Don’t dare leave Guy? Well, what’s the alternative? If you’re right, and all is lost already, will it make it that much worse to get some help for yourself?” Couldn’t she see? Guy didn’t want help, and I was fine. I didn’t need help. She said that I could stay with her and that she knew a good therapist who had experience with suicidal people. “Whatever came out of a conversation with Chris, you’d get support and help for yourself.As a good child of alcoholic parents (as one myself, of course I never even questioned your doing this) you pitched in without complaint, without telling anyone, and worked hard to keep Guy alive and as happy as he could manage to be, for decades.All by yourself. Rejecting all help. You and I were brought up to act like this—all these years later, why are we still acting this way? I think somewhere inside you know you need some support in this, and that’s why you told me.” Again, wrong, I thought. I didn’t need to tell her anything. I had only told her to make it easier on myself later, after Guy had committed suicide, and I would have to write her about it. Besides, my parents’ alcoholism hadn’t caused problems for me; I was left with a few bad memories perhaps, but nothing that I hadn’t long ago gotten over. She just didn’t understand, and by telling her I’d provoked this big reaction that was putting pressure on Guy in our last days together, which I so much wanted to be as smooth for him as possible.
After Christmas, after our New Year’s singing of “Auld Lang Syne,” I knew we were into the countdown. I was taken over by the inevitability of what was a foregone conclusion.As the revolution of each twenty-four hours blew another day off the calendar, I was palpably aware of the end point looming. What had felt so distant the previous March during sugaring was now nearly upon me, bearing down as unstoppably as a tidal wave.
On the weekend of January 14 and 15, 2000, Guy accompanied a jazz singer at a local talent show. When they had begun rehearsing Guy told Danuta Jacob that he made his debut as a jazz pianist on New Year’s Eve 1949. He was seventeen. He had hoped to play someplace this New Year’s —fifty years later.
On Friday the fourteenth, Guy changed into his rented tux at the library, where we spent three afternoons a week as volunteers. He emerged pulling at his jacket, grinning, and needing help with his tie. We drove over to the town hall. It was a below-zero night, and the stars were sharp pricks of cold light. Most of the audience that evening had heard Guy’s music from when he gave concerts at the church, or for the Trail Foliage Ride dinners in October, or at the chicken pie suppers in August. Tonight there were twenty acts. The finale featured Danuta and Guy. Three weeks later, after Guy was gone, Danuta told me she had seen this as their debut.
All our life together I loved hearing Guy play. Much of what he could not speak came out in his music. When Guy and Danuta came on I found myself blinking away tears when everyone else was tapping feet and clapping. It was dim enough so that no one could see me, but this was just too hard. I didn’t want to put myself through that again, so I told Guy that unless he really wanted me to be there, I would stay home for the second night.
He burst in around midnight telling me how “on” he’d felt.“I’m so glad I got the chance to accompany a really good jazz singer,” he exclaimed as he stood by my chair and stripped off his tux.
“Danuta’s going to take it hard, Guy.” Their duo had lasted only six months.
The next weekend, January 21-23, we spent with our friends Tom Simon and Carolyn Hanson in Burlington. The weather was frigid, with a ferocious wind, the most arctic weekend of the winter. Guy wanted to see one last women’s ice hockey game with Tom and Carolyn, a sport we had shared with them for the last few years.
Guy and Tom had been working on a book on baseball, profiles of all the major leaguers born in Vermont, thirty-five in all. Green Mountain Boys of Summer was due out in the spring of 2000. Guy was working on the index and had brought along his typewriter, packing it out from Barra. The proofs had just arrived, and he was going to have to scramble to complete it in time.
The next morning we found Guy downstairs, his work spread out on the dining table. Carolyn’s cat reclined on top of his typewriter, her tail dipping in and out among the keys. What Tom saw was Guy doing his best to meet the publisher’s deadline. What I saw was Guy determined to finish this index for Tom within the confines of his own personal deadline.
Guy left at 9:00 a.m. for Hanover, New Hampshire. He planned to spend a day doing baseball research at the Dartmouth College Library, then attend the women’s ice hockey games on Saturday and Sunday. He had been following this team for the past three years. We would meet again back in Burlington at the Flynn Theater for Macbeth on Sunday evening. We stood in Tom and Carolyn’s hallway, and Guy hugged them good-bye. They had other plans for Sunday evening. They would not see Guy again.
I felt like a spectator who has read this sad play before going to the performance. I watched Guy walk toward the car and saw what the others could not see, a man doomed in his self-imposed aloneness. He had been marked in this way for a long time. But because he was so near the end now, and I knew how it was going to end, I could see more clearly how he had wrapped himself in an invisible cloak of isolation, pulling it tighter year by year. I stood inside the house, peering out the bay window, and watched him drive off into the solid January cold. What were his thoughts? I could not imagine. He didn’t wave.
Carolyn and I spent that Saturday in Montreal. “I thought it would be fun to go someplace warm,” Carolyn said as we strolled through the greenhouses at the Botanical Garden. They overflowed with lush tropical vegetation, and we chatted about how similar it was to what we had seen in Australia’s rain forest just one year ago. On the car ride, in the greenhouses, in the café where we had coffee and cake layered with whipped cream, I had in my mind what was going to happen. It took up enormous room. I was bursting with it and expected Carolyn to ask me what was wrong. On one level I wanted her to ask, but on another I was terrified that she would. If she had, I would have told her because I knew I couldn’t lie. I couldn’t look her in the eye and say, “Why, nothing!”
But I was not going to “prepare” Carolyn. I had learned from my experience with Annie that this was a bad idea. This time I wasn’t going to weaken, so I put it on a back shelf of my mind. There was, after all, no point in letting it interfere with this wonderful day in the tropical gardens of frigid Montreal.
That Sunday evening back in Burlington I had dinner with our friends John Dunn and Linda Collins before the play.Again, what Guy was going to do kept pushing, but I held on to it even though I knew I was deliberately not telling them something they would want to know. They had been at Barra for New Year’s. We had known John since he was seventeen. Now he was a doctor and married to Linda, who was also a doctor. They had named their young daughter after me with the hope of forging a grandparent connection, especially with Guy in mind. I could have confided in them as friends and professionals. Guy had talked with them about his demons. They knew he wasn’t interested in seeking medical help, either counseling or medication. But I said nothing. I was not going to repeat the awful situation I’d gotten myself into with Guy when I told Annie.
We walked the few blocks to the Flynn Theater, and as we approached the group of theatergoers I scanned for Guy. He was there! Instantly I was shot through with a lightness, an unbounded joy. I knew that he had had a good trip just by the way he was talking with our friends Reidun and Andrew Nuquist and Priscilla Page. Everyone was laughing, their faces close together. Guy looked so like himself. The isolation was gone. On the surface everything appeared normal.Yet I had that dizzying feeling of a foot in two worlds, because I knew what no one else could see. If anything, I was the one who felt isolated, holding a secret that was going to shock all these dear friends when it came out. I didn’t like supporting this weight that got heavier with each friend I knew Guy was seeing for the last time. But I knew I was going to go on holding it. I was going to go on keeping the secret.
On Tuesday, January 25, it snowed.
John Nininger dropped us a postcard changing house-framing day to Thursday, January 27.
It snowed all day on the twenty-sixth.
Meanwhile, that morning, Guy had come down with a full-blown case of the flu.
Thursday the twenty-seventh was cold and clear, with a 7:00 a.m. reading of minus four. Guy and I snowshoed out to the car and drove the mile down to the house site. The truck with the huge logs was there, as was the crane. John and his crew were already a few courses up. The sky was that intense dark winter blue above the rim of hills to the south that would form the view from my kitchen windows. The fresh snow, moved by the plow, was mounded above our heads.
Guy felt lousy. He stayed only a half-hour; when he left he told me he hoped he’d be able to make it home.
As I stood in the snow and watched him walk back to the car and drive off, I felt myself testing the feeling that this was how it would be for me. I wouldn’t be “Laura and Guy” anymore. Just Laura. The kind of connection Guy and I possessed I knew I would never have again. If we spent an hour apart on separate errands in Hanover, my heart surged in joy to see his compact shape as he stood waiting for me at the bookstore. It was as though, as I reached for his rough and callused hand, we were meeting for the first time. It was as though we were the only two people in the world.
Perhaps it was right that Guy should leave me here to watch my house be set in place. He probably felt relief that he didn’t have to stay and play a role. He had told me he felt more and more like Canio in the opera I Pagliacci, the traveling player who is forced to act the clown onstage while his heart is breaking. Canio hates himself for this and in the end tears off his mask before the audience, singing: “No, Pagliaccio non son” (I am a player no more). Guy never tore off the mask, but on this house-raising day his flu gave him a good excuse to bow out.
I stayed. I watched each log slot in, knowing that after the log shell was in place, Guy was free to leave. That made up the background of my thoughts as our friend Ned Therrien snapped pictures from his tripod set on the slope above the house. A few friends from the village arrived to watch, as did Maureen, John’s wife, and their two daughters, who made a sliding hill out of the snow piles.
As the sun dipped and the air turned even colder, John had all of us help set in place the four huge log pillars that divided the front living space from the back, where my bedroom, writing area, and bathroom would go. These pillars were Guy’s idea. Yet this was “Laura’s house.” He had made no room for himself. No room for his piano.
That evening I wrote in my journal: “Guy was out finishing up wood when I returned. He wants to leave me well supplied. We talked about our life together at Barra—the climbing, the books—reading and writing. It makes me teary just to write this. But I am not fighting what he has to do. I just want what he wants. It is good to say goodbye to Barra together. We’re down to just days now. G went to bed early, and I hope he sleeps well.”
The next morning I woke up with the flu.
We spent the next week taking care of each other. Guy, who was a few days further along the path to health, fixed me bouillon and cups of tea. During the mornings we worked on our various writing projects. Then, as we ran out of steam, we pulled out the camping pads and took naps on the floor in front of the Ashley, soaking up the wood heat, trying to remember if we had ever both been this sick at the same time.
Sick as I was, this week was a gift. Each day was crystal-cut, and each day felt numbered. I could only think about the day itself. The hour. Not how few or how many were left. I still could not imagine the last day.
That evening Guy played all the songs he knew I loved—“Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” “The Tennessee Waltz,” “The Maple Leaf Rag,” to which he gave the soulful dignity and deliberate pacing of a New Orleans funeral procession. From where I stood at the cookstove I couldn’t see him, but I knew exactly how he sat on the piano bench, leaning over the keys, elbows held away from his body, hands grabbing bunches of notes at either end of the keyboard. His mouth turned down in his customary absorbed expression. He was giving these songs everything he had, and the thought of what I was about to lose overwhelmed me.All the years of pleasure I had taken in Guy’s music—the deepest and best part of him—were about to go silent. When he finished he came over to where I was cooking, and we stood there in the lamplight, looking at each other. He saw that my eyes were wet. “Please don’t play again, Guy,” I said. “It’s just too painful.”
On Saturday, January 29, our friends Jon Martinson, Rebecca Oreskes, and Brad Ray mushed in on snowshoes with their dogs Echo and Tuckerman. The plan was to head down to Hanover to watch Dartmouth’s women skaters play Princeton.
We stood in the bright morning sun in front of the woodshed and watched the dogs poke around in the snow. The others joked about Guy’s flu, saying they’d make him drive separately and at the rink sit way at the end of the row.
I opted out on the grounds of illness, and I felt an unnamed relief as everyone headed down the path without me. Though I did not see this at the time, the flu gave me an excuse not to put myself in the situation I’d been in with Tom and Carolyn and the others during that weekend in Burlington.
The next day, Sunday, I wrote in my journal: “G’s nose and eyes run. He feels wretched. He slept all am. I did some correspondence and napped. We worked on wood for an hour or more in the pm. It was warm—so pleasant out. I came in and napped again. Then worked on Eleanor’s novel while G finished up his Index project for Tom—and ‘laid down his pen,’ like Gibbon in the garden cottage at Lausanne.”
On February 1, I wrote: “We try to have the days be like normal, but nothing is normal now. Tonight Guy played the piano when I was getting dinner, and I feel torn apart inside. As if my heart is being pulled out. I think I can’t stand it, won’t be able to stand it living without Guy. But Guy has not wavered in his decision. He’s been writing our dear friends notes for me to give to them. He wants to go, is eager to go.”
Those notes included one to his surviving son, Jim. We had not talked about Jim in a long time. In that restaurant near Lincoln Center Annie had asked me how Jim was going to take his father’s suicide. I mumbled something about how we hadn’t been in touch. I found conversations about Jim and Guy hard. Right then, I couldn’t imagine that Jim would be that much affected. In the last few years friends had asked me if Guy and Jim were estranged. “No,” I had always replied. “Just out of touch.”
“He’ll probably find my death a relief,” Guy said in a tone that did not invite dialogue. If that was how Guy felt, I told myself, then that was how it was. I had reached the point of listening only. I wasn’t processing in a critical way, and I was hardly reacting. The train was speeding along much too fast. I wasn’t about to interrupt the engineer. Jim was Guy’s son, and I had never interfered with decisions Guy made about his sons. Pushing Guy into a painful conversation about Jim was out of the question.
On Wednesday afternoon, when Guy came in from working on wood and I was starting supper, he said, “I was thinking of leaving tomorrow morning, but I can’t leave while you are still so sick.”
Tomorrow morning? That’s too soon. I felt a wave of relief that it wasn’t going to be tomorrow morning. Gratitude to my flu. Now I knew he would leave as soon as I was better.
On the fourth I wrote:
Worked on getting the marketing package ready to mail to The Mountaineers Books. On the outside things look like everyday. We both go into the PO this afternoon. Say a casual goodbye to Nancy’s “Have a good weekend.” As we walk across the road to the library, we look at each other: this is too painful. We do a little work for Janene who walks out the door with us without a thought that she won’t see Guy on Monday. We drive to our village house. John and his crew are finishing up. We make a little ceremony of giving each of them a copy of our books, standing in the long shadows near the porch.
And finally, on the fifth:
This is the last day together. So many familiar routines have been happening for the last time. G just brought in the Ashley wood. I watch him kneel and fill the wood boxes, slotting each piece into the right bin according to size. Everything makes me cry. We walked over to the sugarshed this afternoon with scrap wood for kindling he and I will never burn and noticed that our maple Kinkapot had broken off around 20 feet up. We talk about this change in the forest, just as we always have. This am I finished reading Eleanor’s novel and drafted a critique. G completed a baseball project and I’ll make five copies for him for his five notebooks he wants me to give to his baseball friends. Sawed a little wood. Had supper. G asked me if I wanted the reading. A question he would never ask except this is the last one. We continued on with Gibbon, G closing the book in the middle of the long chapter on the invasion of Italy by Alaric. It was a short reading since it was a bath night and G helped me wash my hair.
Before we go to bed Guy says, “Maybe I am depressed.” He’s standing sideways, throwing back his head and looking me in the eye. I hear defiance but also confession. It’s a statement. Not a question. I have the feeling he’s telling me something, some last-minute thing he wants me to know.
I gaze at him. You’re not depressed flashes across my mind, though I say nothing. His words catch me by surprise. He has never mentioned depression. Neither have I. Certainly, he has never applied that word to himself before. If he is asking for my help, I am unaware of this. I am on my own train now and cannot slow it down.
The next morning he is gone.