“What’s that?” James asked.

I wanted to tell James how personal this was. It made me crazy to watch for 16 years as this monster responsible for killing what might be as many as 250,000 of my countrymen eluded authorities. “It’s the modern-day Nuremberg trial,” I said, wishing I could explain better.

I grew up in Bosnia, and fled to America in 1993, at the age of 13, after my family was exiled. A 31-year-old survivor of the war, I am one of the 5,000 Bosnians living in Astoria, Queens. Not long ago, I went back to visit my hometown for the first time since we fled. Vacation for other guys my age means partying, or hanging out with old friends. I spent two weeks visiting graveyards.

On the runway at JFK, I sat between my brother Eldin and my 72-year-old father, Senahid, nervous to return to the land after so many years.

“Which day are we going to the cemetery?” my father wanted to know.

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When I arrived at this new private school in seventh grade, after my mom got a job teaching, I hoped Fred and I might be friends. We were both faculty brats, and the school catered to elite students from wealthy families.

But our similarities ended there. Fred was tall for an eighth grader, and he was clear-skinned and golden, with hair so light it seemed more than blond. I was short, stocky and pale. He wore clothing emblazoned with Hilfiger and Klein. I was perpetually clothed in hand-me-downs. People whispered that he smoked pot and felt up girls after school. I had changed schools so often I’d forgotten how to make friends.

Something about my incompetence made Fred furious. In the locker room after lacrosse, he would snap at my ankles with his stick until they turned bright red. One day during practice, he dropped any pretense of chasing after the grounded ball and simply rammed into me with all his force. My helmet disappeared; my sweaty gloves flopped on the ground.

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I have spent the last 30 years taking care of women in pregnancy, birth and beyond. I use my hands to help bring life into this world. Over the past few years, however, I found myself using those very same hands in the performance of a Taharah, a Jewish ritual that prepares a dead woman for burial. Birth, life, joy, beginnings vs. death, decay, finality. Such a contrast! What could be more different? And yet, somewhere in my consciousness, there was a commonality. Caring for a woman in her life, preparing a woman for birth had a parallel in preparing a woman for burial. The act of helping a woman and her baby through their many transitions seemed analogous to helping the soul transition from this plane of existence to the next.

“Taharah” means “to purify.” Particular prayers are said and simple hand-sewn white linen garments dress the body. All this is identical for everyone, no matter how old, how young, how rich, how poor. During a Taharah, all are treated the same.

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“We should direct all highway traffic into the school parking lot!” somebody suggested.

“Let’s cover everything in Vaseline!” someone else said.

I played along, but I was having a tough time. Eight months before, my boyfriend Ben had been killed in a car accident. He’d been different from the other guys: almost preternaturally kind and, like me, overly intellectual. On the way to our junior prom, we’d sat in the limo discussing “The Great Gatsby.”

I knew Ben would have loved the senior prank a friend and I proposed -- a series of odd, unexpected happenings throughout the day, like hiding alarm clocks in the ceiling panels, and switching teachers’ desks. But I’d barely started my presentation when Caleb Grossman (not his real name) cut me off.

“Jenny’s idea is stupid,” he announced to the class, some of whom began to snicker.

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Until age 26. I was in a faltering relationship with a man who loved hiking and camping, and who sincerely believed that I would love these activities too, if he could be my guide.

V was the first Indian-American I’d ever met who actually liked to camp. I’d always associated camping with white people, along with sunbathing and being grounded, but here was V at REI — testing compasses, lusting after tents — with a thrilled, drifting look in his eye. I kept thinking about a term that a friend and hiking enthusiast had once taught me — “poop trowel” — two words that returned to me now with great foreboding.

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We were really starting to feel the crunch. I think two years prior to me being laid off we had to cut our hours back and so everybody worked and got paid for 90 percent instead of 100 percent of the time. So everybody had one day unpaid every two weeks. And so that was the first big sign that things were getting bad. And then it just continued to spiral until we couldn't keep as many people on. And I was the low man on the totem pole. I was the assistant planner, which is the lowest step, and also I was the most recent one hired so I had the least seniority. I knew about almost six months before I was actually going to be laid off, they'd already told me that it was me.

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You were a writer. Were you losing your enthusiasm for it? Or you weren't happy with what you were producing?

No, the stuff was pretty good. For some reason it wasn't feeding me like it once had, I guess. Writing into the void on a daily basis was a hard thing and I did it for a couple years, where you don't know where your story's going. It's a fight. And I think I got to where I liked the fight. There was less of that.

Did you have a plan B?

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I suspect most couples don’t know the exact date of their first encounter. But then most couples probably don’t have a police report.

It took me a few days to decide to contact Nick. I’d been wrestling with that urge for five years now. My inbox was a shame trail of gushy letters typed after midnight, impulsive notes dashed off in the afternoon. All of them had cutesy subject lines, like the titles of Raymond Carver stories, but they should have been labeled the same thing: “Do you love me again? Have you changed your mind yet?”

But one evening in March, I sent Nick an email. My hands were trembling as I typed. It was subject lined “things you may or may not remember,” and this is what it said:

“My friend Charlotte is getting married in New Orleans on May 13, and I will be going. May 13 also happens to be the day I met you, six years ago on Royal Street with a lump on my head the size of a lime. (Life is WEIRD, right?) I'd like to see you. Is that possible?”

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I notice in your conversation with the veteran from Vietnam [from the Studs Terkel book, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith"] he tells you right at the beginning that your interview gave him stuff he would think about for a long time. And it got me wondering about what that interview was like. How does Studs Terkel sit down with someone and get them spilling their inner selves about life and death? What's the secret?

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My mother was 37 years old, twice divorced and childless when she met my father. She had been living in Manhattan for 17 years, having grown up in Connecticut and gone to the Rhode Island School of Design to study painting. She had dozens of friends, went to parties and attended art openings. She smoked pot in the Village and spent Tuesday nights in smoky jazz clubs, sipping martinis and recrossing her legs.

My parents had been set up on a blind date by mutual friends, but the night they were supposed to go out, my mother stood my father up. She’d gone to Long Island that day with a friend to pick strawberries, and by the time she came home, the last thing she felt like doing was going on a blind date with some older businessman from Atlanta.

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Over the next five years, I got that seat. I spent Hanukkahs, Passovers, even Purims in Judy’s plant- and music-filled home in Amherst, Mass., my picture hanging on her fridge alongside her children and grandchildren. To her, I was a done deal. I was family. To David, not so much.

After thousands of dollars spent on couples therapy, David still couldn’t make up his mind about me. He kept saying he “wanted to want to marry me.”

“What did I do wrong?” Judy asked me one day, in a stolen, private moment, not understanding why David was unable to commit to me.

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Staying on in a summer community is like being in a department store after closing, or the zoo after dark. I wanted the place to empty out. I wanted to turn at the flashing light without waiting for the endless line of cars piling in from Boston. And yet the weekend after Labor Day, when I showed up at the flea market ready to bag the bargains that await the locals, I discovered there was no flea market after Labor Day. In high summer I bitterly complained about the busy, noisy beach where it was impossible to read undisturbed. But when I took a late September swim, it was eerie to find myself alone there. I felt like a ghost, condemned to wander the places where I was happiest.

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And so, hunkered down inside my house, I had imagined the following scenario: The actress, fleeing down the alley from these men and unable to enter her own home, would accept my offer of temporary shelter. I’d quickly usher her into my living room where I’d offer her a non-alcoholic beverage. My cats, who normally hate strangers, would allow her to pet them and she would feel inspired to reveal some shard of a more authentic self that existed beneath her celebrity train wreck veneer. She would confide her secret fears, gripes and vulnerabilities and I would nod with empathy.

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A year earlier, I had tumbled into a mid-life crisis. I had one child who was nearly three, and my husband and I were planning for a second. This had always been our intention, and I approached this second foray without much anxiety. But when my younger sister called to tell me she and her boyfriend were going to London, something inside my head was knocked loose. “Damn,” I thought. “I’m going to be a MOMMY.”

Yes, I know what you’re thinking: You’ve been a mommy for three years. Get over it.

But it wasn’t the prospect of becoming a parent that freaked me out. I loved my little boy and wanted to add another goofball to the family. What threw me into a tizzy was the prospect of being a mommy and all the cultural baggage that came along with it. With one child, you could be that interesting woman with the cute kid who still retained a modicum of cool. But the second child would define you. This is faulty logic, I know, but I believed it nonetheless: A mommy is invisible. A mommy has bad jeans and a minivan. Twenty-five-year-old boys would never check me out. I would never take off to London on a whim.

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This was all my fault.

Great timing for my high school reunion. That one question to sum up my first 10 years of adulthood: “So, what have you been up to?”

“Oh, just living with Mom,” I said, throwing an ironic thumbs up. I shrugged. “You know, with this economy…” Not even a full sentence, it worked as an excuse without technically being a lie. They all nodded with sympathy as if something had happened to me, and not because of me.

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Our conversation was boring and needlessly loud. The man had a braying laugh and mentioned his boat repeatedly, calling it “she” each time. I snuck a look at my phone: 8:17 on Saturday. I could be home in my pajamas, watching “Breaking Bad” on Netflix. I imagined standing, turning without a word and walking out.

Instead, I gave my husband a desperate look and he broke in with a question about wind and sails. The man turned, and I relaxed for a second. Next to me, I felt his wife brighten. She’d heard I was a writer and she wanted to talk about books. Specifically “Twilight.” It was her “passion” — the entire series. I nodded and drank steadily as she deconstructed each plot.

After we said goodbye and got into the car, John sighed. “Well, that was a waste of 200 bucks,” he said. Then he reached over and squeezed my hand.

We’d been searching for another couple — people to hang out with and take vacations and trade stories about our three nearly grown children — for more than a year. Ever since our breakup with Sara and Greg.

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Now, I like to loathe people. It just feels so good. I particularly like to loathe the sorts of people described above, and when I see them on TV or read their blogs I sigh contentedly and say, ahhh, it is now morally permissible for me to loathe this person. So imagine how irksome it was to have to deal with persons like that on a constant basis and discover that those persons, in person, generally weren’t loathsome persons after all. In fact, to my great consternation and disappointment, I often liked them.

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Attempts to fix my cycle didn’t work. Over time, my bleeding worsened. That’s when my fertility specialist recommended in vitro fertilization. IVF, he said, would allow him to “toy around” with my hormones. As he explained how many types of drugs he planned to inject in my body, I nodded politely while screaming no way inside my head. I was skeptical of high-tech baby-making measures. All that medication didn’t appeal, for one thing. Neither did the odds: I’d seen friends go through multiple failed rounds of IVF (chances are about one in three). From what I could tell, the stress of IVF wreaked havoc on relationships. Couples pillaged their savings and retirement accounts (the procedure is $15,000 a pop). I figured if traditional medicine wasn’t for me, perhaps I could cure my infertility a more traditional way, by changing what I ate and how I lived.

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“No,” he said, then checked my chart again for my age. “No, not at all.”

At 36, I had been preoccupied by my age, and this didn’t help. I’d been looking at every woman’s neck to see when the accordion stretch of the chin would kick in. Could I stave it off a few more years? Had I blown it by not being skinny, so that I couldn’t later gain five pounds to smooth out my wrinkles?

But it wasn’t just about my appearance. With each passing year, I counted all the things I could no longer do: be an athlete, be a model, be a ballerina. It didn’t matter that I never aspired to these things. The things I had aspired to do, like write a novel and be a young mother, were also undone. (I am a mother, but not a young one.) The world and its opportunities were closing like a window. I felt like I was choking.

And even as I thought of this, I knew the basic existential dilemma: Thinking about age wouldn’t make me young. And worse, I would never be younger than I was now. I was fairly accomplished for my age: I’d traveled and known many interesting people. I’d been in love with the wrong guy. I’d been in love with the right guy. Everything seemed right on schedule. But I was weighed down by the truth of time, that it’s coming for all of us.

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What’s wrong with me?

Like many music connoisseurs whose tastes were forged in the ‘90s, I’ve long admired Built to Spill, the rare rock band that’s spent its entire career basking in the adulation of critics and fans. The New York Times once compared singer/guitarist/founder Doug Martsch to Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. The band’s devotion is deserved. Even as its members settle comfortably into middle age, Built to Spill remains emblematic of a certain post-adolescent longing. Their sound is catchy, twisty and inventive, and their lyrics burst with wit and humanity. There’s every reason to like them if you like complex arrangements and blistering solos. (And if you don’t, who needs you?)

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