It is like being in the hold of an old steamship. A single, hanging lightbulb swings overhead. The flimsy stairs wobble beneath my feet as I climb into the attic, which smells of must and mold. The stairs unfold from the ceiling like a gentleman extending his hand. I reach for the hanging handle that controls the attic steps. There is not much I want to take with me. I am boxing up the Oregon beachside life I settled into nearly fifty years ago. What do I care where I die? That is the point, really. He is trying to take care of me, to show how much he loves me in this most difficult of times, and so I put up with his controlling ways. My house, named The Peaks by the lumber baron who built it more than a hundred years ago, is for sale, and I am preparing to move because my son thinks I should. I want to imagine there will be peace when I am gone, that I will see all of the people I have loved and lost. The past has a clarity I can no longer see in the present. Perhaps that’s why I find myself looking backward. It is unnerving, this new unreliability in my vision. My eyes fail me often-in the darkness, when headlights flash, when rain falls. My skin has the crinkled appearance of wax paper that someone has tried to flatten and reuse. I have aged in the months since my husband’s death and my diagnosis. As I approach the end of my years, I know that grief, like regret, settles into our DNA and remains forever a part of us. It makes it sound as if I misplaced my loved ones perhaps I left them where they don’t belong and then turned away, too confused to retrace my steps. Lately, though, I find myself thinking about the war and my past, about the people I lost. We understand the value of forgetting, the lure of reinvention. They think talking about a problem will solve it. Today’s young people want to know everything about everyone. If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: In love we find out who we want to be in war we find out who we are.
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