With so many annual tests, checkups, and health scares, I feel fragility and hypervigilance mix with a sense of a cosmic law, of dharma, of reality, of strong feeling. I am sitting on the table waiting for the nurse to come while Mike is outside in the car. I am in awe of how he remains patient with me when he’s in so much medical upheaval; but, in some ways, he’s the one who is mystically grounded, how? I wonder. I am disappointed that I still don’t drive. I did promise Dale I would drive and I still haven’t committed to it. Sixteen years ago today I married Dale and now I no longer celebrate the day. Too much pain and regret these days because every year I hear about or find one more detail about a betrayal and it’s really too much to take. To hold onto him when I no longer have kindness. So I’ve stopped thinking about it all in a certain way. I’m waiting for my pap smear and I’ve been in the room for thirty-five minutes, and I’m worried Mike will need to leave for an infusion soon and I will have to take an Uber, but my phone isn’t working and my texts aren’t going through to Mike or would I be able to get an Uber and I start to get anxious. When the nurse comes in, she seems compassionate and lets me fret about the time and we do the whole thing so quickly that I strangely calm down as we talk about the mammogram and the ultrasound I had to get last week, but my breasts are okay, just dense with benign cysts. She says it’s from coffee or chocolate, two things I love. I’m still getting periods but my joints are starting to hurt more. She leaves me to dress and Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” comes on and I start to weep uncontrollably for both Mike and Whitney, whose death I often think about and I’m still weeping as I turn to leave. The nurse catches me red-eyed, tear-streaked, asking If I’m okay and I worry that now my unraveling is witnessed. Will she note this in my charts, put the dreaded “depressed” on my record? Maybe it’s already been done from when paternalistic Dr. Sharma chastised me about my panic over getting nodules that had yet to be diagnosed—just six months after Mike’s diagnosis and he didn’t realize he had to give us that news?—and life starts to get harder on record, and poor Mike is the one who must face his mortality. I’m just the caregiver. I’m adjacent to death, perhaps starting to metaphorically bleed out the feelings we’ve been wrestling with. We have survived this year. Maybe I’m releasing the fear for both of us. Today Eileen Tabios says on Facebook, “A problem with entering your sixth decade is that death is no longer unimaginable. To continue, you must renew your commitment to an art/poetic practice that most others find irrelevant. That renewed commitment is… hard.” And I respond with recognition, yes, it’s hard when everything feels so tentative. (On that exam table, I recall being frozen in fear before weeping.) I want to hand the worry to someone else forever. Forever. What’s forever? We sit with the yearning that today is not only about suffering but it’s about seeing how the “will always love” is the voice of the dead belting into the most sterile of rooms. Asking you to answer the question of what forever is: Isn’t it a renewed commitment to seeing down that long hallway to where the voice begins to sing, to keen, to cry?