I crouched down, the late afternoon Friday sun hot on my neck. The box was not stone, as I had originally thought, but a heavy-duty black ridged cardboard. Hmm, I thought, perhaps someone’s family heirlooms?

On a grave not too far from where we stood, someone had left several pieces of costume jewelry atop one of the headstones. I lifted the heavy box out of its shallow hole. On one end, someone had typed a white label.

A man’s name. A place of residence. And the note: “Human remains. Cremated August 1, 2011.”

My hands began to shake. “Oh. Oh my. I’ve found human cremains,” I said out loud to the dogs.

- – - – - – - – - – -

When I was a kid, my cousins and I would hold our breaths in the car. We lived in the Midwest, so it wasn’t some attempt to block out the miasma of a freshly manured field or the local pig farm that drove such behavior. We were used to those smells. But, just as we knew that stepping on a crack would surely break your mother’s back, even if we didn’t understand the mechanism by which that would happen, we understood that if you were in a car that was driving by a cemetery, you had to hold your breath.

Maybe that’s when my fascination with graveyards began. Living where I do now, and drawn to the history that can be gleaned from the gravestones here in central New York, I have walked cemeteries that were designed by Frederick Olmstead — the architect of Central and Prospect Parks — and tiny pioneer graveyards that have all but disappeared underneath the dead leaves and myrtle that cover the forest floors. In a Catholic cemetery next to one of the glens lies entombed the remains of a victim of the HMS Titanic. In many of the graveyards I have found stories of families’ heartbreaks: multiple children buried, too many young women who died in childbirth, too many sons lost in 200 years of war.

At the graveyard that is closest to my house, the border between the living and the dead is frozen. In the winter, the long, sloping hill that bounds the east serves as a training ground for young snow sledders. After school, before the sun sets by 4:30, or Saturdays and Sundays, troops of young children and their parents jump on their toboggans starting at the outer graves and slide down toward the snow bowl at the bottom. I have always thought, in a fanciful way, that the people underground are divided between those who enjoy watching the show, and others, who want to yell at the kids to “get off my lawn.”

A few weeks before I found the cremains, I had taken the two dogs up to the field adjacent to the graveyard so that they could run off-leash in the grass and into the woods. At the borders of fields, cemetery and woods, about halfway between two rows of graves and among the roots of a giant red oak, they found a freshly dug woodchuck tunnel. Excited by evidence that the woodchuck was nearby, the girls began to dig. They took turns, and at times, I watched as a head disappeared down the growing hole. I held my breath, imagining the unearthly scream of a dog with a woodchuck attached to its nose. I pulled them away.

Three weeks later, Hurricane Irene blew through, and trees throughout the area were uprooted. As if pulled by Irene’s drag, Hurricane Lee came through with even heavier rains. When I took the dogs back up to the cemetery in search of dry ground for us to walk, we returned to the field. The dogs ran over to inspect the woodchuck hole. The hole had been washed out. It was now a pan-shaped depression, maybe a foot deep. Sitting in the center of it was a marbled black box.

Having discovered that it was ashes, instinct told me to drop the box like a hot kettle, but I overruled that in order to place the box back in its original position. But now what? I felt I could not leave it there: Animals would scatter what was in the box, and that bothered me. Surely someone would know what I should do.

It was after 5, a Friday evening. I used my cellphone to call a friend who sits on the town board. No answer.

I tried another board member. Again, no answer, and I realized, as I was listening to myself explaining my conundrum to the voice mail, that I was leaving crazy messages about being in the local cemetery and did they know what I should do with the box of cremains I had found?

But why? I didn’t know this person.

I had noticed that the name on the box matched the stone closest to the hole. A birth year — 1922 — the hyphen ending in a blank space. I saw in my mind the old man’s widow, garden trowel in hand digging a hole. She had wanted him to be close to his family, but something had prevented her from having her husband properly interred. How sad, I thought. And it was her poor luck that a woodchuck had tunneled right through the ersatz plot.

I thought of my own 95-year-old grandmother. If someone in the future were to find her ashes somewhere they shouldn’t be, wouldn’t I want someone to intervene on her behalf?

The town library was still open. I asked the clerk who she thought I should call. “Wait, you found a body?” she asked.

“No. Cremains. You know. Ashes. In a box.”

“Well, can you take them home with you?”

“Um. No. I don’t think so. Besides, I think it’s illegal, isn’t it? But I can’t just leave them here.” I thanked her for her time.

I slapped at a lazy deer fly, looked toward the valley to see if I could see anyone out walking. No one.

But afterward the words echoed: I could take them home. I imagined reaching back into the scooped-out earth, picking up the box, and placing it on the passenger seat. I’m a klutz. Chances are, ashes would blow all over the inside of my car. Besides, the idea of bringing home a stranger’s cremains creeped me out. Aren’t half of all horror stories about disturbing the remains of the dead? He needed to be properly attended to. And I knew that the fact that I had just referred to the ashes as “he” meant that some time in the past 15 minutes, I had committed myself to seeing this through.

Next idea. I called the county sheriff’s office. “So, you’re saying that you didn’t find a body, you found ashes, and you’re in a cemetery.” The male voice on the other end of the line sighed. “Ma’am. It’s a really busy night down here, and all the cars are out, but if you leave me your number, I’ll have my sergeant give you a call. Maybe in an hour or so.”

I walked around the perimeter of the cemetery until I found a black iron sign. It listed two phone numbers. Again, I left a long, detailed message about what I had discovered on voice mails.

By this time, my partner, Rob, had arrived home from work and had driven up to join me.

“You really thought this was buried treasure?”

“I know. Pretty dumb, huh? Should we just leave it?”

Rob put his arms around me. “No. Too many scavengers around here. We’ve probably got an hour or so before sunset. Let’s keep working on this.”

When I was 8, my parents moved my brother and me to a small house whose backyard abutted a graveyard. After school, my new friends told me stories about the characters who hung out at the cemetery: the old man who came and sat by his dead wife’s grave every night; the lantern that hung by a hook on a pole over one of the graves, and how that light mysteriously turned itself on each night at dusk; the horse-and-buggy that drove through the cemetery at night, and that one of the boys sworn he had seen. “A ghost carriage,” he said. “It’s real. I’m not lying.”

I thought of those stories as I looked at the sun sinking lower in the rose-colored sky. As a kid, I had been frightened of the dead, but now, I only saw the good in the person — perhaps he had loved his wife so much he had sat vigil with her every night. Goose bumps flew up my skin.

My phone rang. It was the cemetery owner. “And what is the name on the box?” he asked.

I told him.

“I don’t have any record of such a person,” he said. “Someone must have left them there, because we bury cremains much deeper than just a foot.” He continued, “Wow. This is just like the other local cemeteries.” He was referring to the bizarre story I had seen a few weeks ago. Several cemetery owners had reported finding ashes — and bodies — buried without the knowledge of the graveyard owners. Improper burial of a body is not only illegal, it’s also considered theft. People were stealing space in a graveyard — the owners’ only source of revenue. The people who were interviewed said that improper burial was another symptom of a hard economy.

Times are lean here: Our local food pantry is feeding 15 percent of our people; the natural gas companies are trying to persuade folks to lease their land for fracking; turns out, people were also secreting their dead into shallow graves.

“Listen,” he said. “I can’t get there until tomorrow morning. I doubt anyone is going to steal the cremains tonight. It’ll be dark soon. Can you mark the hole in some way?”

“Do you want me to throw dirt on it and bury it for tonight?”

“No. I won’t be able to find it. What about a tree branch or something?”

“OK,” I said. And we hung up.

I explained to Rob what I had been told. “I don’t know, Lorraine. I’m concerned that scavengers will get to it.” He looked around. “Look, what about piling stones on top of it?”

For the next 20 minutes, we gathered the fist-and brick-size stones from the clearing by the woods, carrying them back to the hole and stacking them. Even after we had placed a half-dozen on top of the box, we continued.

I realized we were building a cairn, an ancient form of marker.

He’s here, I was thinking.

Evening sounds enveloped us as we worked: crickets, cicadas, chickadees, the keen of a hawk. In the distance, a herd of deer grazed; a murder of crows squawked in the trees; turkey vultures circled. The natural order dictated that, as the sun set, the graveyard would be ceded to the wild and the dead.

By building a cairn, I was participating in the chain of life. I had owed the old man this. It was the right thing to do. It was the human thing to do.

My old childhood ritual had been silly. This ritual — the burying of the dead — was as natural as drawing breath.

But things changed.

No one is to blame for where that piece of me went for the five or six years when sex felt like an obligation, instead of what it had been in my 20s: fun, an expression of pleasure and love, and did I mention fun?

Certainly, I played a part. Just before giving birth to our second child, I had blown a disc in my neck. Chronic pain, pregnancy and prescription painkillers are not a recipe for erotic bliss. Instead, I found the closeness I’d always craved holding my children, nursing, carrying an infant. My husband’s job sent him out of town once or twice a month for days at a time, and I was in a high-pressure graduate program when I wasn’t caring for our children.

By 30, I had turned into an invisible woman. I grocery shopped in sweatpants and hoodies. I glided through public space not making eye contact with men, sure that, as an older woman in a college town, I was past my prime. Why would another man find me attractive when, most days, I wasn’t even sure my husband lusted after me? Toward the end, my husband didn’t even pretend anymore.

One day, I had gone to Victoria’s Secret with my 4-year old daughter. I had lost 40 pounds, and I needed new bras. While there, I tried on a teddy for the hell of it. Later, over dinner, I told my husband I’d been tempted to buy it.

My youngest spoke up: “Mommy, you are littler but you still have a fat tummy.”

My face froze.

“You can’t blame the kid for telling the truth,” he said.

Something in me broke off, like an iceberg from a glacier. I didn’t want this man to touch me anymore.

The separation was just a couple of months after this.

But something else happened at the same time. My chronic pain problem had been sorted out with major medical intervention, and, while I was at home recovering, I rediscovered my real love: writing.

I had cast aside writing years before that to pursue a graduate degree in history. It was the responsible thing to do. Saying “I am a writer” would have taken a level of confidence I did not possess as a young woman. It was easier to drape myself in the armor of being an Ivy League grad student in a respected field. But during my recovery, I found myself sitting at the computer, rapt with attention. What started as a short story was turning into a novel, and in the few months that I was home, I wrote well over a hundred pages. The characters revealed themselves to me little by little, and as they did so, they brought to the surface truths about my own life that I had perhaps known but never acknowledged. That is, as much as I had once loved my husband — as much as he was still a good man, a great father — I wanted out.

Just after my 38th birthday, I left him. 38 marked my resurrection.

Although I couldn’t know that initially. I was too busy trying to make sure my kids were going to be OK. When I considered “me,” I figured I was done. That no man would ever find me attractive again. As a single woman at 38, I was in virgin territory. My parents were (and are) still together. My husband and I were one of the first of our cohort to divorce. The only examples that I had for how a divorced woman in her late thirties was supposed to behave were the stereotypes of the bitter first wives who never, ever had another relationship and who disparaged their former husbands in front of the kids. I refused to be either one of those things. But I began to grieve the idea that, like so many women in this culture, I was washed out.

But instead of a dead end, I found writing revitalized a part of me that had been sublimated for years. I would get up in the morning thinking about the story. I would wake up at night and scribble a sentence on a notebook I kept next to the bed. I knew this feeling, even though I had lost it for a while: This is what passion felt like.

And then, alighted with that passion, something amazing happened. Everywhere I went, people stared. It’s possible I had never noticed before, but it felt like it was happening for the first time in over a decade. But this part definitely was new: Now, when a man looked at me, I stared right back.

To my astonishment and delight, the first man I became involved with was 24 — 14 years younger than me. For more than a year, on the weekends when my children were with their father, I spent a lot of time in bed with this young man. We shared a love of words, a similar need to touch and be touched, and an intense connection. I still remember moments on the subway, the two of us leaning against one another as the city flashed by behind us, and in the windows was reflected back a couple in love. It felt, sometimes, as if we radiated it.

I did not need him to tell me I was sexy. Something inside me knew that. I still did not look in a mirror and think I was pretty, but instead, what I saw was a woman with a spark about her. Had that spark always been there? Had I had been too caught up in the mundaneness of married life? Had I really been yet another one of those women who had given away her identity when she said “I do?” And I don’t mean “I do” to marriage — but rather “I do” to adult responsibility, jobs, children, mortgage, graduate school, paying bills. Where was the me in all of that?

When I was a kid, I had always needed to touch things — it was as if my way of understanding the world was through my skin. Somehow, as an adult I had to ask myself — that core instinct of mine, that desire for a tactile, sensual relationship with the world, how could I have let that go? Even as I sought to build a whole new world with my writing, I realized how narrow my own world had been.

My last date with the young man was on my 40th birthday. We were not going to end up together, and it was time for him to start dating women who were potential marriage partners. I knew I had to let go of him, but I wanted to hold on to this newfound sense of myself as I moved on dating men my own age.

There’s a decade’s worth of stories between now and then, but I can still say that my libido has become a permanent, prominent part of who I am now, just a few weeks shy of celebrating my 48th birthday. I’ve read with interest many stories about women my age having sex: the current (and rapidly waning) hype about cougars, and more recently, stories and discussions about Meg Wolitzer’s “The Uncoupling,” when a group of older women all lose interest in sex, or the debate over “women’s sexual dysfunction” and the fight over female viagra. But I feel frustrated at how our culture still tells women in their 30s and 40s that they no longer matter sexually.

For some women, that may be fine. But the great gift of getting older is being confident enough to embrace passion — however it’s defined. I know women who haven’t had sex in years, but who have come into their own as artists, as entrepreneurs, and yes, even as mothers. Choosing not to have sex is not the same as letting your sex drive die. One is a joyful, empowered decision, and the other — well, for me, it was a tragedy. No one should let themselves be bullied and neglected into cronehood. There is always hope for a new life, always.

For the past three years, I have loved and been loved by the man I assume to be my life partner. As I approach 50, my desire for him has not waned. We encourage each other to pursue our  endeavors, knowing that what lights the creativity in our own lives helps fuel our passion for each other.

Codswallop.

As a (female) professor who knows many other (female) professors, I wouldn’t dream of generalizing about all of academia like Professor X does. But I can tell you from my own experience that Professor X has it wrong. Of course women can be as tough, even tougher, than male professors. But it’s not “nurturing” in the classroom that has led to grade inflation. It’s that nurturing — or, if you prefer the word, “coaching” — can lead to better teaching.

When I moved from an Ivy League institution, where I had been teaching freshman composition classes as part of my graduate work, to a small state university, where I was teaching composition and creative writing, I experienced culture shock. No longer was I dealing with students who would come into my office demanding to know why I had given them an A- on their freshman compositions. Ivy League students would assert that they had never gotten a grade so low, and now I was dooming them to not getting into medical or law school.

I never budged.

Instead, when I arrived at my teaching job, I found students who came to college without a clear sense of why they were there. Many of them came from towns where they were one of the few from their high schools who had gone off to college. Instead of spring breaks spent in Jamaica, or summers spent touring Europe, many of my new students had never traveled outside their immediate environs (thus explaining why the students refer to the rolling hills that surround our campus as “mountains”). They didn’t read outside of class. They seemed to have no intellectual curiosity. I felt as if I had been sent to the academic equivalent of Siberia. In my first semester only, I hesitated to enter final grades into the computer system because students had failed; many had struggled for the low C’s I now had to record. I finally sent the grades off, and then I waited for the onslaught of angry students. None came. Somehow, for them, a “C” was enough. And even the F students didn’t contact me to ask why they had failed.

For a while then, motivating myself to stand before class each day required enormous doses of caffeine and sugar. I felt as if I were teaching entire classes full of Aethelreds — the Unready, and, worse, Unwilling.

Quickly enough, I grew up.

I learned that my job was not to assume that students already knew what I was going to teach them. My job was, in fact, to take them from not knowing to knowing. And how could I best do that?

I teach a creative writing course that attracts potential writers. But, because my course also serves as a general education requirement, most times over half my students come to me from physical education, the early childhood education department, criminology, math and various sciences. They are not writers.

On the first day, I tell them that we will be reading three to four books, a number of published essays, and that they will write both a five-to-seven-page paper and a 15-to-20-page paper during the semester. Some of them freeze in their seats. “I’ve never written more than five pages,” someone usually says.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “That’s what I’m here to teach you.”

My process for teaching writing is quite simple. I treat them all as if they were magazine writers, and I am their editor. They turn in their papers: I copy-edit, offer editorial comments and assign grades. Many students, at first, wind up with grades far lower than they expected. I point out that no one writes perfectly. Editors exist at the professional level. The student is then given a choice. He or she may revise the paper (that is, re-vision what the writer is trying to say), on the chance that a higher grade may be given (but there’s no guarantee), or accept the original grade.

Most of my students choose to rewrite. For many of them, it is the first time they have ever had to revise a paper. If, in an English class, students get only one shot at getting a paper right, we are not teaching them how to get better. We are simply grading them on what they already know about writing. When I offer editing to my students, I am not trying to turn them into carbon copies of me: I am trying to help them find their voices and to be able to express their thoughts with clarity.

Many eventually double the amount of writing that was initially expected: the 27 potential pages of writing become 50 or more. Their grades rise because they have grown from not knowing into knowing. Their grades rise because, when they have completed my course, they are A and B writers.

I still give out C-minuses. Some students improve, but rather than the failing level at which they start, they eke out a C. But rarely do I fail students in my writing classes these days. They receive the grades they earned — not ones I give.

During my course, they have learned to revise their own writing. And me? I no longer look at my students as the unready and the unwilling. Early along the way, I revised my sense of what it is to teach.

We really cannot generalize about a “female” or “male” way of teaching, and the assumption that the increasing number of women academics has led to grade inflation is ridiculous. For example, I would not generalize that all (female) professors sometimes prosecute their students for plagiarism. Yet I know one who does. I wouldn’t say that all (female) instructors demand a memento from the funeral that prevented a student’s attendance. One I know wouldn’t hesitate.

The generalization that I am willing to make, after 11 years before students and among colleagues, is that grade inflation is indeed the result of changing one’s relationship to one’s students. I don’t stand in front of my classroom as the all-knowing prof. I offer to them a system, built upon the idea that once upon a time, I didn’t know how to do these things, either. It’s therefore my job to show them, rather than tell them, how it’s done. It’s turning, through good teaching, D’s into C’s and B’s, C’s into B’s and A’s, and students into writers. Sometimes, you start with an F.

“I think we should call a doctor,” I said.

“No, no,” he said. “I just need to get back to bed. Give me a minute.” Then he closed his eyes.

“Yves,” I said. No response.

I sat beside him, stroking his back, letting him know that he was not alone, while we waited for the ambulance. I had only met Yves in person that day. But it felt like we had known each other for a lifetime.

I’m not sure what made me get in touch with Yves when I saw him on Salon personals. How can we untangle the mysterious calculus that is attraction? I liked how he playfully listed the languages he spoke as “French, English, and Body Language.” I liked the description of the woman he was seeking: “sensualist a must. a self-confident goddess too. a mermaid is also welcomed.”

I’m sure other women looked at his profile and thought “nope.” But I read it and saw a kindred spirit. He lived in Montreal, and I could tell from the way he wrote that he was Quebecois. I liked the idea of the two of us communicating in two languages. “This online dating thing is well … difficult,” he e-mailed me early on. “And I’m a bit ‘clutsty’ at it.”

It was the “clutsty” that clenched my heart.

E-mails turned into phone calls that went way past my bedtime. Each time we talked, we seemed to find another point of connection. His desire to live in a big house out in the countryside, “somewhere the leaves would crunch under my feet when I walk with my love” (I owned such a house). Our intense devotion to our daughters, our aspirations that they grow up strong and independent and fierce. Rrrrriot grrrls, he called them.

The approaching weekend was Veteran’s Day, and after much haggling about where to meet, sleeping arrangements, who would pay for what, we agreed on a plan. I would drive to Montreal to meet someone who already felt like a part of me.

I’ve never gotten over my apprehension about meeting in person: It doesn’t matter how much communication you have with someone via e-mail or phone. Physical chemistry will not be denied.

And what did I see? A man who looked much younger than his 43 years. A dark man — his hair charcoal, his eyes almost black but welcoming and open. He was smiling, and the only thing I wasn’t expecting was that his teeth were crooked — in every photo he had sent me, his mouth had been closed, but after the initial reaction of “I haven’t seen this before,” I almost immediately forgot it.

I had dressed carefully: black hip-hugger pants and thick-heeled boots that gave me a little height, a scarlet camisole and a cardigan. It was unseasonably warm for November. As we were climbing the stairs to his apartment, Yves was behind me, and he made some comment about enjoying the view as I mounted the stairs. I didn’t take offense. I was already feeling a buzz from him, too.

We sat on the couch and began to talk. I turned my body toward his, one of my knees pulled up on the couch. We talked about what to do with the afternoon. He had not had time to go shopping for food, so we decided to take a trip to the market to pick up groceries. I excused myself to go to the bathroom, and when I came out, he was standing in the middle of the living room. I walked toward him, and he pulled me near and kissed me.

We kissed as if we were drowning. I threw my cardigan on the floor, unzipped my boots, kicked them off. Everywhere his hands touched, his mouth followed.

“Do you think we’re going too fast?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “But I don’t want to stop.” He picked me up and carried me to his bed.

I know the difference between lust and love. I’ve had more than my share of sex dates in my life, dates in which I know the only thing I’m after is mutual pleasure. I knew what was happening between Yves and me in that bed was something far different. And he knew it, too. Yves had been alone for two years, had not gone on a single date since his divorce.

“I think I’ve won the lottery,” he said.

“How did this happen?” we kept asking.

I was breathless with happiness. As the sun went down, and my stomach started to rumble, we set out for the market. We had only walked a couple of blocks when Yves made a slight change in direction.

“That’s my daughter,” Yves said.

We stopped in front of a stroller and the woman pushing it. The little girl clambered out. “Papa,” she said, and Yves crouched down so that they could hug each other. Speaking Quebecois, she displayed her banana popsicle triumphantly.

Yves spoke to his ex-wife, and then introduced me. We said “hello” to one another, and then Yves gave his daughter a big squeeze and told her that he’d see her soon.

Yves beamed as we walked away. “Running into my daughter has made my day even more perfect,” he said. “She is everything to me.” He and his ex-wife had been having some issues; he had not seen his daughter for two weeks. 

Earlier in the afternoon he had mentioned feeling a little off. He also said, maybe about 4 o’clock, that he had a mild headache. So it didn’t seem strange to me when he asked to skip the market and head home.

We were kissing by the time we got in the front door. But I insisted that he take some Tylenol, and go lie on the bed. He did as he was told, took off his shoes, and lay down on his stomach. I wanted to make him feel better. I began to knead his shoulders and his upper back. I stroked his scalp, too, and he relaxed under my hands.

“Lorraine,” he said, “I’m really sorry, but I think I want to take a nap for a while. Would that be OK with you?”

I dug around in my bag for the book of Yehuda Amichai poetry I had brought with me. He came back to bed, and he tucked his head next to mine, closed his eyes as I began to read to him. I stroked his hair, kissed the top of his head, held him as he drifted off to sleep, his legs wrapped around mine. I read for a while before dozing off beside him. That’s when Yves woke me up. That’s when I called the ambulance. 

Yves was quiet, although he had begun to seize. His legs were shaking. Even though I knew he wasn’t cold, I bundled him up in the duvet, told him that help was on the way. By then, I knew this was not a headache or a migraine; I somehow intuited it was an aneurysm. His breath was raspy and gargled, and I slowed down my breathing, hoping to set a rhythm he could imitate, as though he were a child and I was trying to teach him a hand-clap game.

Death was coming. I could sense it in the room. But I also felt something comforting, too. Something that told me that I could do this, that I could help Yves ease from this life to whatever was to follow. I had always thought I’d be a panicked mess in a moment like this, but all I felt was stillness. It was like watching a home movie of someone I recognized as me but didn’t know.

I’m not sure how long it was before the medics finally arrived. Time is fluid in extraordinary circumstances. How long is a minute when someone’s life is draining away? How long is an hour when you’re making love? How long was the week that Yves and I knew each other?

The ambulance crew loaded Yves onto a gurney, pointed a flashlight in his eyes. I heard one of them say to the other that his pupils were fixed. I knew what that meant: Serious brain injury.

Inside the E.R. the tobacco-stained light frightened me. I was numbed out and hyper-vigilant at once, waiting for some word, any word about what was wrong with Yves. Two young interns came out and explained that Yves had been put on a respirator, that I couldn’t see him. I felt Yves’ apartment keys in my pocket and went home.

Alone in Yves’ apartment, alone in his bed, I stripped down to my camisole and panties. I clutched his pillow to my face, smelling him there. The call came at 2:32 a.m.

“Is this Lorraine?”

“Yes.”

“I’m afraid I have some bad news. The MRI revealed a massive brain bleed.” He was slipping away. “Do you know how we may contact his family?”

Once again, I became still. How could I tell her that I didn’t know Yves’ family, didn’t have a clue how to reach them? And then I remembered his cellphone sitting on the kitchen table. I fumbled through the address book until I found what I recognized as the name for his ex-wife. I gave it to the nurse and asked her to pass on my phone number to the family.

I lay in the bed, the light on the floor glaring up at me. The book of poetry I had read to Yves before he dropped off to sleep was beside it. I made a cocoon of the sheet from the bed, buried my head underneath it. I still felt nothing.

Shortly before 7 a.m., the phone rang again. It was Yves’ ex-wife. She was at the hospital with Yves’ mom, dad and best friend. She wanted me to come.

“I’m so sorry I couldn’t have done more,” I said over and over again, when I came to join them at the hospital. Yves’ mouth was covered by a plug, and unlike the panting that I had heard coming from him before, his breaths now were normal, peaceful. His skin tone was beautiful: He was a luminous pink.

Someone gave me a hug. Told me I had done everything that could have been done. And then someone explained to me that the doctors said there was nothing to be done for Yves. That even if he were to wake up from his coma, he would be “comme un haricot.” And I remembered noticing that where we say “vegetable,” they say “bean.”

The room emptied, and I was granted some alone time with Yves. I wanted to kiss him. But the medical-green plastic tube in his mouth blocked access. He had tubes in his arms, too, and I was afraid to touch him for fear of knocking something loose. So I leaned over the bed and I kissed his hand. It was warm. It didn’t feel like cold, about-to-die flesh. It felt vibrant.

How does anyone prepare themselves for a moment such as this? What is the right thing to say to someone when it’s the last thing that he’ll hear from your lips?

I suppose gratitude was an odd emotion to have at that moment, but Yves had shown me something I had never before understood. Death terrifies me. And yet, as Yves lay dying, I felt privileged to be with him. I was going to miss him, the possibility of us. But I also knew that all that fear had been taken from me. He had needed me to be with him that night as much as I had needed to bear witness.

I whispered to him, “Thank you.” I told him that his daughters would thrive and be loved. I told him not to be afraid. I told him, “Goodbye.”

I left the room and did not return. I wanted Yves to be with his family when the respirator was turned off. I had given Yves everything that I could, and now, it was time for me to learn to live with everything he had left to me.

Lorraine Berry blogs on Open Salon as fingerlakeswanderer. She has recently completed a book-length memoir manuscript. 

It’s not an empty exercise. Last semester, two of my students were close to their breaking points. Both of them came to talk to me, and I know that it helped them. So, even though I’m not a trained psychologist, I try to trust that my empathy and honesty with future students will at least give them temporary succor.

My students have tales that make my stomach hurt. One suffered from things done to him a long time ago; the other from things that were happening spring semester over which he had no control. I can’t give out more information; I need to protect their privacy. But I have continued to carry their pain around inside of me.

One of them was seeing both a counselor and a psychiatrist, so I knew that I was not the only source of help. But the other, well, with the other I had to do something I don’t like: I had to go to the associate dean and tell him I had a student in trouble, and then I essentially forced the student to go see him. The A.D. made an appointment for the student at mental health services as a condition for the “special dispensations” status given in classes to students who are struggling.

But, increasingly, students in trouble are seeking me out. They write to me in the midst of panic attacks. They write to me in the midst of depressions. They write to me and ask me what to do.

Me. Not their parents.

I don’t lie to my students. Many of them know that I have struggled with addiction, that I have chronic pain, that I have witnessed death up close. I tell them that writing has saved my life. I tell them that holding on to the things that hurt you just corrodes you. That, sometimes, writing it down is like lancing a boil.

Sometimes, it isn’t.

In response to the jumpers, Cornell did something unprecedented: It installed 8-foot chain-link fences, topped with barbed wire, in front of the bridge railings. The thought is that many of the bridge suicides are opportunistic, that this mode of killing oneself is too easily accessible. The system is imperfect, and quite frankly, it’s ugly. But it’s one final attempt to stop the students from launching themselves onto the rocks below from the bridge above.

But more important, I think, is the bridge that professors are for their students. Many of the kids who come to school are unprepared to be there. They leave sheltered homes, where virtually everything has been done for them (many of our students have never even held a part-time job), and they are suddenly ensconced in a system in which past performance doesn’t count.

Some are not able to survive in this atmosphere. Other students, because life does not take a break that coincides with school vacations, are coping with enormous problems in their home lives that make it difficult for them to concentrate on their work.

Sometimes, their struggles may seem mundane. As an adult, I’ve survived breakups with men I thought were forever partners, but for 18- and 19-year-olds, a breakup can be enough to hurtle them into depression they have no clue how to cope with.

I begin teaching today. I will make the same speeches I do each first day of class, and, over the course of the semester, I will get to know my students more intimately as they write their stories. I hope, again, that any one of them who is in trouble will come to me, and that I’m strong enough to help them negotiate the gorges of early adult life.

Lorraine Berry writes the Open Salon blog Fingerlakeswanderer and lives in Ithaca, N. Y.