Page 26 of All the Way to the River

I t is not possible for me to share everything that happened next—in the direct aftermath of Rayya’s diagnosis of terminal cancer—because those details involve conversations that I had with my now ex-husband, and I do not wish to tell that part of the story publicly.

They were painful conversations, but brief and kind.

In those conversations, I told the truth at last, about my feelings toward Rayya. And we agreed to end our marriage.

After we hung up the phone, I lay down on my bed, and I wept and wept and wept.

I cried so hard, I fell out of time and space.

I saw things there, in that timeless void.

I saw Rayya dying.

I saw her lying in a hospital bed and taking her last breath, with me sitting beside her, holding her hand.

I saw her disappearing from this world without my ever having told her what she was to me, or how much I loved her.

I saw myself going to her funeral.

I heard people at the funeral saying, “I’m so sorry your friend died”—and nobody knowing what she had been to me.

Nobody ever knowing what she had been to me, nobody ever knowing what I had lost.

I saw myself coming home from the funeral. Driving back to my beautiful house. Taking off my funeral clothes and hanging them in a closet.

I saw my future, in the years after Rayya died.

It was hideous, what I saw.

It was a bleak, postapocalyptic landscape in which I would never again be okay—and nobody would ever know why.

I saw all this, and my soul was appalled by what it beheld.

I knew then that I had to go to Rayya and be with her until her death.

I could not stop her from dying, but I could not allow that future—the grim, lifeless future I had just beheld—to occur.

Everything would have to change now.

Everything would have to be confessed.

I did not know how I was going to do any of this.

I did not see how I could survive it.

But here is what I can clearly see about that moment, looking back on it now: When I finally stopped crying and stood up from that bed, my marriage was already over.