I guess we can neither foresee nor avoid the winds of malice that buffet human efforts. All the premonitions that came to me, dreams foretelling of one person’s departure, another’s illness, in images so exact there was no room for doubt, yet nothing connected to his death. Why such silence from my dreams? Is it because I could have prevented that death and wasn’t meant to?

The year before his death, I experienced unusual aches and pains, fatigue I blamed on too much work, not enough exercise and time’s wear and tear, so I spent hours out on the snowbound lake or along park trails, on skis or snowshoes, in runners or on a bicycle. The doctor ordered X-rays, but my back gave no sign of degeneration, no collapsed vertebrae. “That’s rare for a woman your age,” he told me.

What to do? He recommended a new mattress, a trip to the chiropractor’s, told me he wasn’t against alternative medicine, quite the contrary … the pain kept coming back, insidious, tenacious. I couldn’t read the messages my body sent as it remembered the child’s weight in utero, knowing that its creation — cell by cell in the moist, secret membranes of the womb, the best being chosen from his father and me to make a masterpiece — would soon disappear from this earthly plane, and lamenting that loss with every single fibre, in torment and despair.