I stirred in my bed this morning before there was any color in the sky, reached over as usual to the space next to me and found what I always find. Only it was dead. Cold. Unresponsive. Useless.

It was a little, just a little, like the story I’ll never forget about my Great Aunt Emily. She told me that as the youngest child in her family she had watched her siblings one by one tie the knot and then begin one by one to have troubles – troubles she associated with their unions, troubles that uninspired her to say yes to the man who asked for her hand. Whether she closed the door after that or was never asked again, she didn’t tell me.

For most of her adult life, Aunt Emily lived with her mom. For practical reasons they had slept in the same bed. Once, when I…