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.