"I look out the window again, down at where the glaciers have dimpled the landscape and left behind dozens of blue pockets of water, and I think of how one's life is supposed to flash by while one is dying. Is that happening to Alan? Or maybe it falls to me, the conscious one, to have the flashbacks. Scenes from our life together go zipping through my mind: the years in graduate school, the travels, the parties, the birth of our daughter. Is this all ending now, in some Canadian government helicopter?" (Chapter 1, page 17)

"Alan has extensive damage in the frontal lobes of his brain. The official diagnosis is DAI - diffuse axonal injury - with subdural hematomas all over his frontal lobes. What does this mean? His brain is very messed up." (Chapter 2, page 31)

"I don't realize how accustomed I've grown to hospital life. When my mother...