A year and a week after we got engaged in Vietnam, which is also nine months after we got married at City Hall in San Francisco, we drive south on El Camino to the Los Altos CryoBank after an appointment with Dave’s neuro-oncology team at Stanford Hospital. We’ve just learned that if we want to leave open the option of having biological children, Dave needs to bank sperm before he starts radiation and chemotherapy next week.

About seven months after Dave dies, I meet up with a friend to see a matinee of a play about Mad King Philip in downtown San Francisco. She’s recently broken up with her partner, who she has a toddler with, so I’m already looking to her as a model for how to be a single mom. We walk back to our cars together after a tropical themed happy hour at Liliho Yacht Club, picking our way around homeless people and past fancy hotels.

If it were just up to Dave, he probably would have opted to sail around the world, or at least through a good part of the Caribbean. But I’m not a strong enough sailor really, and his health and strength are too precarious for us to be that far away from civilization, alone, on a boat. So we decide instead to spend two and a half months driving cross-country and back in a camper van with Hannah and Monster, the kitten we just adopted, to visit various friends and family along the way.

I leave home in Pacifica around 8am on a Saturday morning with my thermos of Earl Grey tea with honey and half and half. I drive up Highway 1 through sun and fog, along the ocean and over the Golden Gate Bridge, listening to Stevie Nicks lament lost loves. I finally emerge into Marin County, where I stop to get food for the day at Good Earth in Mill Valley — beet salad, a baked tofu sandwich, and sparkling water for lunch; tamari roasted almonds, dark chocolate, and tiny clementines for snacks.