And now she was colder by the hour, more dead with every breath I took. I thought: That is the fear: I have lost something important and I cannot find it, and I need it. It is fear like if someone lost his glasses and went to the glasses store and hey told him that the world had run out of glasses and he would just have to do without.

We are all going, I thought, and it applies to turtles and turtlenecks, Alaska the girl and Alaska the place, because nothing can last, not even the earth itself. The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we’d learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn’t fall apart, you’d stop suffering when they did.