Past the asters, the zinnias, the nasturtiums…

…still married

How to end my memoir.

My memoir about marriage and mortality.

Just stop?

I keep thinking of Virginia Woolf

And how I started with that image of her pulling the dead flowerheads in her garden,

And her thinking about her husband in the house, and how much he loved her.

I still like that beginning because it shows you that a good marriage,

Never mind all those so-appealing wedding pictures they run every Sunday

In the New York Times Vows section, everyone laughing in their gowns and tuxes,

Is about something more.

After nineteen years of marriage,

Virginia often sick, Leonard worrying about her,

The sex not much,

She wrote about the two of them driving around France in the rain in 1931:

“That we retrieved so much from it that was lovely, ravishing, amusing & had so many good hours, spinning along wet roads, under a complete gray cloud, speaks well for the state of our souls. After being married nineteen years, how moving to find this warmth, curiosity, attachment in being alone with L.”

To being alone with L, her husband Leonard Woolf.

Alone in the rain in a car in France.

Lovely, ravishing, amusing.

It is perhaps at such moments, moments when you realize, alone in the car together,

That no other person can be that other person,

And that some day you will not be in that car together,

That you know what marriage is.

Virginia Woolf, deeply troubled, walked one day through their garden and into the River Ouse.

I think I will leave her in the garden. In a book the ending can be whenever you want it to be.