So her oldest and dearest friend phones the girl.  "I'll come over for a couple of hours, sit with him, and you can go do something just for you," she says.

"Something like what?" the girl wants to know, hoping this isn't a pitch for pedicures, long steamy baths, and reeking vanilla candles with Kenny G's gummy music clogging up a pleasant silence.

"Go to Starbucks and read the newspaper," the dear friend suggests. "Grab The New York Times and just go through it cover to cover."

"You know I don't do stuff like that," says the girl. She's thinking how much she'd like to zip out to OfficeDepo and buy a new printer cartridge. But she could do that on her own. Take about half an hour.

"You really need to start asking your friends to help you," the dear friend says sharply. The girl thinks about her friend or any friend attempting a catheter change, doing a wheelchair transfer, or putting on her boy's brace, and shudders. "By the way, I know you went to see the doctor," her friend goes on remorselessly. "Did he give you anything for the anxiety?"

"What anxiety?" the girl asks, wondering. There's been stress, rage, no sleep, and fury but she can't think of any anxiety. Come to think of it, she would love her some anxiety. It would seem like a mild drizzly day in Seattle rather than a hurricane pounding Ragged Island, Maine, her most frequent psychic location. 

Her friend snorts. "Anxiety over this. I know you love your husband, but there's a lot of fear you're experiencing. I've been your friend for twenty years, so just hear what I'm saying. You need medication."

This truly is her oldest and dearest friend. One who has been as close as her skin, closer than any sister, so the girl listens. Tries to wade through the counseling jive, although it's not her thing.

"I got scared when he was about to die," the girl says slowly. "But it felt like rage more than anything else. And then there was, um, despair. Besides, you gotta remember, he's actually the one with the problem. Anything else I feel, I write about it."

"Yes, yes, yes. I know you're an artist, I know that's your story," says her friend, which rankles the girl some. What story? There's no story here. Just days and days and days.  "But trust me, there's real terror operating inside you, and you need to get away." If it's inside me, how can I get away? the girl wonders but just listens, stares at her shoes, doesn't say anything. "I'll be over at one, next Monday," says her dearest friend. The girl thanks her nicely, pretty sure she's been the topic of concern in any number of conversations. That call had a reheated quality, like scalloped potatoes served up the second night.

Then she hangs up, thinking how everyone operates from movies they run in their heads, some of them over and over like a 7 minute porno loop. Maybe her friend thinks that it would be irredeemably horrible if her husband had a monstrous, disabling stroke. And maybe it would be, but maybe it wouldn't be horrible every minute of every day. This isn't some personal chirpy belief, like trusting there were good days even at Dachau--there weren't--but the girl's situation is a long way from that.

As the Buddha says, the lotus grows lushly on the Ganges, a truly filthy river, and it's a good thing to know. There are no pure experiences, Lord Buddha points out. So maybe she can write something about that part. Call it The Brighter Side of Strokes.

The whole deal is sad and tragic and awful only if you think it shouldn't have happened. It's only terrible if you believe that the Universe dished you an extra gloppy serving of meanness, like a bad-tempered cafeteria lady. But that, the girl believes, comes under the heading of Playground Rules, which were big in the grade school world of fairness versus not, but aren't operational in Grownup Land.

And so, time to look at her particular lotus blossoms. And they do bloom thickly some days, like when her boy smiles his smile and says, You're my sweetie, or grabs her thigh when she's serving his dinner and goes, That's so nice, that leg. Or when she rolls his wheelchair gently, skillfully trying hard not to give him any hard jounces. Maybe he notices that and maybe he doesn't, but it's still something that gives her pleasure: giving her boy a smooth ride.

And now that he's not at work, doesn't have his head in some project or other, and now that she's looking after him, the scrim of daily life has been ripped apart. All that fiddly crap is gone, so they don't have to talk about auto insurance or how the furnace is about to go blooey. They can talk about anything, whatever is in their deepest darkest  hearts. There's no time, and no reason to be slick and cool.

He tells her about the night they thought he would die, and a nice Lutheran lady pastor came padding in on her Hush-Puppies, holding a clutch of papers having to do with his last wishes. And the girl  tells him about that same night, not knowing he was signing papers, but somehow knowing he was about to die, how she tore through the house like a touched-down tornado, ripping off the blinds, throwing stuff at the walls and floor, shrieking like Medea, and calling God a motherfucker, then finally giving him to God, like she had any choice at all.

And he tells her how sad and discouraged he gets, and she says, I know. It's okay, and rubs his bony back. And then she looks at him, parts of his beard gone white, how his back is all hunched from weariness and injury, and remembers when his hair was white-blonde, nearly down to his shoulders, how tall he was, an ex-basketball player who wore dead-black aviator shades and was the hippest guy in a five state area. And the girl thinks how fine it is that she knew him then and knows him now, for 31 years all told. 31 years that seem like 30 minutes.

Poignant, she thinks. It's a good bittersweet word.

And because of the stroke, she looks after him in all possible ways, even in those ways she would once have believed impossible. And at those times, the do unto others thing becomes a live and springy phrase, not a chunk of dead horseflesh, and she cares for him precisely as she would care for herself, sometimes thinking that she never understood love at all. But maybe she has an idea of it now.

Her oldest and dearest friend took off for New York today. The girl would like to call her up in a day or so, tell her she doesn't have a story.

But maybe she's got a poem.

It's a very long one: about a lotus blossom floating on the Ganges.

How it blooms.