I was sitting at my desk in Manhattan booking a media tour. For about an hour I had been leaving message after message on reporters’ voicemails, delivering a pitch that I hoped would compel them to meet with my client. I took a breath and reset my persuasive enthusiasm for the next call. Just as I was about to pick up the receiver, the phone rang.

I was a little surprised. Reporters rarely call PR people back.

But it wasn’t a reporter. It was my fiancé's brother.

“Marc’s been in an accident.”

Adrenaline sharpened my vision and my hearing. My body grew numb as my brain zeroed in, stilled by fear. Marc, my fiancé, was a helicopter pilot in the Coast Guard.
“Do you want to come to the hospital?” he asked. And then, as if to dissuade me, he said, “It’s on the Jersey shore, about two hours from the city.”

“Yes. Yes. I’ll come to the hospital,” I said, staring at the grimy black plastic base of my desk phone, the beige upholstery on my cube wall, a broken thumbtack.

“We’ll see you as soon as you can get here.”

Then he hung up. Too late, I realized I had no idea what had happened to the man who’d asked me to marry him two weeks before. But one thing was clear - Marc wasn’t capable of calling me himself to say he’d be fine and that there was no need to worry.

When I put the receiver down, I forced my curiosity away. Speculating wasn’t productive until I had more information, and what I might speculate about was far too dark to face.

Instead, I put together a quick tactical plan. First, I needed to tell my boss that I had to leave for the day. Second, I wasn’t sure how long I’d be gone, so I’d need to go home and pack a few things. Third, I needed to get myself to coastal New Jersey.

My boss called a car service. I knew that taking that long drive to New Jersey alone would be untenable, so I called my dear, wonderful, resilient friend Lee.

“Marc’s been in an accident. Will you ride with me to the hospital?” She said yes immediately even though she did not have the kind of job one could just walk out on.

A plush black Lincoln Town Car, normally reserved for clients, retrieved me at the office. We stopped briefly at my apartment. My mind was hyper-focused as I triage-packed: a toothbrush, a little bit of makeup, a few clothes. I didn’t know if I’d only be gone for the afternoon or for a few days.

My favorite photo of Marc, which I’d taken at the Bronx Botanical Garden, stopped me for a second. He was sitting in front of a wall of autumn-colored plants, looking at me with eyes full of the durable and miraculous love that had changed my life.

My breath caught in my throat. He was the gift I never thought I would receive. What had happened to him? I forced the speculation away again. I was thirty. I was supposed to be planning a wedding for December 1993, but instead I could feel myself warding off an insistent spectre of dread.

When I got back to the car, the driver and I barely spoke. Could he sense the fragility of my composure? For whatever reason, he kept a respectful silence, and I kept trying not to think. I told him where to find Lee in midtown. As she got in the car and I conveyed what I knew I saw the driver take a couple of concerned, furtive glances into the rear view mirror.

We headed out of the city toward the end of the life I had just begun.

Four days later, 364 days after we met, Marc died. And so did I.