Another reason I knew that the story had come from me was that no version I heard included the details I could not yet face， for example the blood on the living room floor that stayed there until Jose came in the next morning and cleaned it up.
Jose. Who was part of our household. Who was supposed to be flying to Las Vegas later that day， December 31， but never went. Jose was crying that morning as he cleaned up the blood. When I first told him what had happened he had not understood. Clearly I was not the ideal teller of this story， something about my version had been at once too 10）offhand and too 11）elliptical， something in my tone had failed to convey the central fact in the situation （I would encounter the same failure later when I had to tell Quintana）， but by the time Jose saw the blood he understood.
I had picked up the abandoned 12）syringes and 13）ECG 14）electrodes before he came in that morning， but I could not face the blood.
In outline.
It is now， as I begin to write this， the afternoon of October 4， 2004.
Nine months and five days ago， at 15）approximately nine o’clock on the evening of December 30， 2003， my husband， John Gregory Dunne， appeared to （or did） experience， at the table where he and I had just sat down to dinner in the living room of our apartment in New York， a sudden massive 16）coronary event that caused his death. Our only child， Quintana， had been for the previous five nights unconscious in an intensive care unit at Beth Israel Medical Center’s Singer Division， at that time a hospital on East End Avenue （it closed in August 2004） more commonly known as “Beth Israel North” or “the old Doctors’ Hospital，” where what had seemed a case of December flu， sufficiently severe enough to take her to an emergency room on Christmas morning had exploded into pneumonia and 17）septic shock.
This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed， weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death， about illness， about probability and luck， about good fortune and bad， about marriage and children and memory， about grief， about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends， about the shallowness of 18）sanity， about life itself. I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer， even as a child， long before what I wrote began to be published， I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs， a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly 19）impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am， or have become， yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room， equipped with an 20）Avid， a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time， show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now， let you pick the takes， the marginally different expressions， the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable， if only for myself.