Because a wind had been blowing while the grave was being filled, he could taste the dirt coating the inside of his mouth well after they had left the cemetery and returned to New York.

For the next nine years his health remained stable. Twice he'd been blindsided by a crisis, but unlike the boy in the bed next to his, he'd been spared the disaster. Then in 1998, when his blood pressure began to mount and would not respond to changes in medication, the doctors determined that he had an obstruction of his renal artery, which fortunately had resulted so far in only a minor loss of kidney function, and he entered the hospital for a renal artery angioplasty. Yet again his luck held, and the problem was resolved with the insertion of a stent that was transported on a catheter maneuvered up through a puncture in the femoral artery and through the aorta to the occlusion.

He was sixty-five, newly retired, and by now divorced for the third time. He went on Medicare, began to collect Social Security, and sat down with his lawyer to write a will. Writing a will – that was the best part of aging and probably even of dying, the writing and, as time passed, the updating and revising and carefully reconsidered rewriting of one's will. A few years later he followed through on the promise he'd made to himself immediately after the 9/11 attacks and moved from Manhattan to the Starfish Beach retirement village at the Jersey Shore, only a couple of miles from the seaside town where his family had vacationed for a portion of every summer. The Starfish Beach condominiums were attractive shingled one-story houses with big windows and sliding glass doors that led to rear outdoor decks; eight units were attached to form a semicircular compound enclosing a shrubbery garden and a small pond. The facilities for the five hundred elderly residents who lived in these compounds, spread over a hundred acres, included tennis courts, a large common garden with a potting shed, a workout center, a postal station, a social center with meeting rooms, a ceramics studio, a woodworking shop, a small library, a computer room with three terminals and a common printer, and a big room for lectures and performances and for the slide shows that were offered by couples who had just returned from their travels abroad. There was a heated Olympic-sized outdoor swimming pool in the heart of the village as well as a smaller indoor pool, and there was a decent restaurant in the modest mall at the end of the main village street, along with a bookstore, a liquor store, a gift shop, a bank, a brokerage office, a realtor, a lawyer's office, and a gas station. A supermarket was only a short drive away, and if you were ambulatory, as most residents were, you could easily walk the half mile to the boardwalk and down to the wide ocean beach, where a lifeguard was on duty all summer long.

As soon as he moved into the village, he turned the sunny living room of his three-room condo into an artist's studio, and now, after taking his daily hour-long four-mile walk on the boardwalk, he spent most of the remainder of each day fulfilling a long-standing ambition by happily painting away, a routine that yielded all the excitement he'd expected. He missed nothing about New York except Nancy, the child whose presence had never ceased to delight him, and who, as a divorced mother of two four-year-olds, was no longer protected in the way that he'd hoped. In the aftermath of their daughter's divorce, he and Phoebe – equally weighed down by anxiety – had stepped in and, separately, spent more time with Nancy than they had since she'd gone off to the Midwest to college. There she'd met the poetic husband-to-be, a graduate student openly disdainful of commercial culture and particularly of her father's line of work, who, once he discovered himself no longer simply half of a quiet, thoughtful couple who liked to listen to chamber music and read books in their spare time but a father of twins, found the tumult of a young family's domestic existence unbearable – especially for someone needing order and silence to complete a first novel – and charged Nancy with fostering this great disaster with her ongoing lament over his impeding her maternal instinct. After work and on weekends he absented himself more and more from the clutter created in their undersized apartment by the needs of the two clamoring tiny creatures he had crazily spawned, and when he finally upped and left his publishing job – and parenthood – he had to go clear back to Minnesota to regain his sanity and resume his thinking and evade as much responsibility as he possibly could.

If her father could have had his way, Nancy and the twins would have moved to the shore too. She could have commuted to work on the Jersey line, leaving the kids with nannies and babysitters costing half as much as help in New York, and he would have been nearby to look after them as well, to take them to and from preschool, to oversee them at the beach, and so on. Father and daughter could have met to have dinner once a week and to take a walk together on weekends. They'd all be living beside the beautiful sea and away from the threat of Al Qaeda. The day after the destruction of the Twin Towers he'd said to Nancy, "I've got a deep-rooted fondness for survival. I'm getting out of here." And just ten weeks later, in late November, he left. The thought of his daughter and her children falling victim to a terrorist attack tormented him during his first months at the shore, though once there he no longer had anxiety for himself and was rid of that sense of pointless risk taking that had dogged him every day since the catastrophe had subverted everyone's sense of security and introduced an ineradicable precariousness into their daily lives. He was merely doing everything he reasonably could to stay alive. As always – and like most everyone else – he didn't want the end to come a minute earlier than it had to.

The year after the insertion of the renal stent, he had surgery for another major obstruction, this one in his left carotid artery, one of the two main arteries that stretch from the aorta to the base of the skull and supply blood to the brain and that if left obstructed could cause a disabling stroke or even sudden death. The incision was made in the neck, then the artery feeding the brain was clamped shut to stop the blood flowing through it. Then it was slit open and the plaque that was causing the blockage scraped out and removed. It would have been a help not to have to face this delicate an operation alone, but Nancy was swamped by her job and the demands of caring for the children without a mate, and as yet he'd met no one at Starfish Beach whom he could ask for assistance. Nor did he want to disrupt his brother's hectic schedule to tell him about the surgery and cause him to be concerned, especially as he would be out of the hospital the following morning, providing there were no complications. This wasn't the peritonitis crisis or the quintuple bypass surgery – from a medical point of view it was nothing extraordinary, or so he was led to believe by the agreeable surgeon, who assured him that a carotid endarterectomy was a common vascular surgical procedure and he would be back at his easel within a day or two.

So he drove off alone in the early morning to the hospital and waited in a glassed-in anteroom on the surgical floor along with another ten or twelve men in hospital gowns scheduled for the first round of operations that day. The room would probably be full like this until as late as four in the afternoon. Most of the patients would come out the other end, and, too, over the course of the weeks, a few might not; nonetheless, they passed the time reading the morning papers, and when the name of one of them was called and he got up to leave for the operating room, he gave his sections of the paper to whoever requested them. You would have thought from the calm in the room that they were going off to get their hair cut, rather than, say, to get the artery leading to the brain sliced open.