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my office. I don’t recall how I got there.” He tried to claim it was only light-headedness, because he hadn’t eaten lunch or because he was dehydrated, but after a few minutes of cross-examination he admitted that he’d been having headaches for days. I begged him to see a specialist, but being a man, and a doctor, he wouldn’t listen. I think it was because he had an idea of what was wrong and he didn’t want to have it confirmed.
    I’ve been with a lot of people as they were dying and can attest: it’s not like it is in the movies. It’s not antiseptic or tidy. It is absolutely the lowest point in any person’s life. They’re either old and their body is starting to irrevocably fail, or they’re young but very sick or have had an accident. In either case, they’re afraid of what’s coming, afraid and confused. I’ve learned through experience that there’s nothing you can do for someone at the end except to try to keep them company so they don’t have to make that passage alone. Noone wants to die alone; I’ve held the hand of many a dying man. That’s the price of immortality. It hasn’t meant that death is a stranger to me; if anything, we are reacquainted frequently at the deathbeds of others.
    As a matter of fact, I’d been through the death of a close loved one so many times that, during those last weeks with Luke, I went into a kind of autopilot. I knew what was expected of me in those situations. The dying wanted unfailing support. Luke wanted me to be stoic in the face of his emotional ups and downs. He wanted me to be practical and logical, to be a rock at a time when his life was falling apart. He wanted me to be in the waiting room while he was undergoing tests. He didn’t want me to freak out when he suddenly couldn’t speak or use his right arm. He never had to ask for any of this; I just knew it was what he needed from me. He was too smart to worry that I would be unhinged by his passing; he knew I’d lost plenty of others before him.
    It seemed that immortality—rather than make me more sensitive to the pain of losing a loved one—had robbed me of the ability to feel real emotion in the face of death. When my lovers and friends died, my feelings were always muted and distant. I’m not sure why this was. It might have been to protect me from being swamped by grief, so I wouldn’t relive the sadness I’d felt for each of the people I’d lost over the course of my life. Or maybe it was because I knew from experience that, soon enough, another person would come along and—if not take Luke’s place, not exactly—at least distract me from missing him. Because I had no choice but to live on and on.
    Immortality had made me less human. Instead of giving me greater perspective on what it meant to be human, which you’dthink would happen when you had such a long life, immortality had put me at a greater distance. No wonder Adair grew to be insensitive to the suffering of others: immortality forces you to become something other than human. I felt it happening to me, even though I didn’t like it. I came to see it was inevitable.
    That night as I lay in bed, I thought back to one afternoon in the hospice. The doctors didn’t expect Luke to last more than a couple of days, and he was unconscious most of the time due to the morphine drip easing his pain. He wore a knitted cap for warmth as almost all his hair had fallen out from chemotherapy. What was left had turned shock white. He’d lost a lot of weight, too. His face was shrunken like an old man’s and his arms seemed too thin for the IV needles and the sensors that fed his vital signs to the monitors.
    I’d taken to curling up in a lounge chair by the window, reading or knitting while he slept. I was grateful for the sedatives and painkillers making his last days more comfortable. After all, I’d sat with loved ones dying of tumors and tuberculosis with nothing stronger than Saint-John’s-wort and fortified wine to see them