With two little girls and all four of our parents alive and thriving, we were in the happiness bubble—buffered, generationally, by the people we loved most in the world. Nothing made my heart sing like seeing a young couple pushing a stroller alongside vibrant grandparents. My mom would visit and come with me to pick up Ellie from school. My parents stayed with us in Maurertown and, later, Millbrook. We loved double-dating with them.
Jay’s equally fun folks had a house in Rehoboth Beach. His siblings’ kids were around the same age as ours, so it was always cousin central when we visited （there’s a funny photo of me and Jay’s sisters Barbara and Clare and his brother Chris’s wife Kathy all pregnant at the same time）。 They had a piano and a fireplace; we’d bust out the chips and salsa and watch old movies like How Green Was My Valley and Mrs. Miniver.
At the time, it didn’t occur to me that one day, the bubble would burst. That’s what bubbles do.
Part II
30
Jay
I SOMETIMES WONDER what he would look like now. Would he be trim or portly? Would his hairline have stopped receding just short of his crown or retreated to a ring of salt and pepper? Would he have shaved his head and embraced his baldness, à la the Wall Street guys who look like Mr. Clean? Would we still hold hands underneath the duvet and celebrate our birthdays by splitting the difference on January 8th? Would we still be in love or would it have worn thin, like the rust-colored riding pants I kept on a hook in a closet in Millbrook for eight years after he died?
Then I see flashes of his smile and the creases that ran from the edges of his eyes to just below his ears. I remember watching him hang up his winter coat one day and turn to me, grinning, me thinking, If those are wrinkles, I could learn to love wrinkles. It was Valentine’s Day and he had brought Ellie, Carrie, and me—each of us—little bouquets. They were nothing special, probably purchased from a bodega on his way home, but the fact that there were three of them for his three girls moved me so. Our last Valentine’s Day.
THIS WAS NOT supposed to happen to us.
Everything was picture-perfect. A rarefied Upper East Side existence of private schools and mothers sporting sweater sets and Belgian loafers, their banker husbands in horn-rimmed glasses and alligator belts. In our case, two beautiful children, two busy careers, one Park Avenue apartment. If only I’d had a little warning, enough time to say, Remember this feeling. Because it’s all going to get swept up in an instant and land in a heap of splintered beams and shattered glass, like the towns I’d covered, leveled by storms with nice names like Gloria and Andrew.
On the third day of April 1997, I ran up from the studio just after 9:00 a.m. to greet two women from the Gap. They were waiting outside my office, holding a half dozen white shopping bags overflowing with spring clothes. Six years in, I had solidified my approachable, girl-next-door persona by wearing labels my female viewers could afford （Ann Taylor, Dana Buchman, the so-called bridge lines）， avoiding anything that even slightly whispered haute couture. It wasn’t difficult, considering that my five-foot-three, 125-pound physique would inspire few designers to choose me as their muse.
Soon my dressing room was strewn with T-shirts, khakis, cotton skirts, and summer-weight sweaters—I tried things on while we chatted and laughed like preteens at the mall.
I have a clear mental picture of what happened next, like remembering where you were when the Challenger exploded or the first plane crashed into the North Tower. It started with a phone call. Our new nanny, Nuala, a young woman from Armagh in Northern Ireland, was unflappable, with the scrappy look of a female boxer, so her agitated voice quickly got my attention.
“Katie,” she said, the Irish brogue tumbling out with an urgency I had never heard before. “Jay is doubled over in pain. It’s really bad. You need to come home.”
I quickly changed back into my pantsuit, ran downstairs, and jumped into Jack’s car, waiting at the curb. My heart beating double time, I told him to head home as fast as he could. Our morning ritual over the years—him seeing me looking like a sleepy wet rat as I crawled into the car and we drove to 30 Rock—had created an intimacy I was especially thankful for now.
Once at the apartment, I burst into the bathroom. Jay was just getting out of the shower and wrapping himself in a towel. I tried not to gasp. Jesus, he’s thin. How have I not noticed how thin he is?
I called my internist, Dr. Tom Nash, and told the receptionist I needed an appointment immediately. Not for me, but for my husband. Like so many seemingly healthy men his age, Jay didn’t even have his own doctor. Why hadn’t I made sure he was getting annual physicals?