How does one grow old as the younger woman? One doesn’t. I always looked fresher than he. If I gained a few pounds, he gained more. If my skin wasn’t as taut as it once was, his was looser. And I always had more energy. When he fell asleep during a movie, I poked him awake. When he nodded off during a dinner party, I kicked him under the table. As his senses diminished, mine grew keener. From ten yards off, I could spot a crack in the sidewalk before he stumbled. From another room, I could hear the punch lines to jokes he missed on TV and shout them back to him. Arnold still retained his impressive, curious mind, but he lost things daily—keys, words, height, mass, the ability to hear conversations. And most alarming, the loss of the sixth sense, proprioception, the ability to know the position of one’s body parts. Arnold wasn’t always sure where his hands and feet were without having to look for them. It took him a wooden moment to reach for things, to make those measurements one unconsciously calculates each time one dips under a low beam or eats popcorn in the dark. I was becoming his copilot. My senses worked double time shepherding his body and mine through space, but not to point out the cracked sidewalk, not to repeat the punch line he couldn’t hear, would mean abandoning him in the wooly, dim, mute isolation of old age.