I thought of us walking together, a little bent, bony, stepping carefully, in our very old age, our gnarled hands clasped. His eyes are still a shocking green. Our hair is white. We walk together like people who have had fifty years to learn each other’s gaits and to learn how to respond to each other’s slight teeterings on the pavement. That future was gone. The image of it scraped at me.

But I’d only ever pictured that image from the perspective of someone watching the old couple, even though in the image I am supposedly the wife.

So I wasn’t mourning an experience of being that wife; I was mourning a romantic image of her, walking with her beloved and adoring husband, who had never existed.