Kelly Corrigan

The second thing the brave don't do?

Leave.

or hide inside work or hobbies or some other socially acceptable busyness.

In my worst moments, when sitting on my hands is just unbearable, I have dreamed of going to get an MFA in Paris.

Because if I can't help, why do I have to watch?

It would be nice to leave and start again.

Hardly anyone who's been in a long marriage hasn't at least wondered how it is that the object of their desire has become so burpy and farty.

So bingo-armed and turkey-necked.

Sometimes I see myself naked, stretch marks from pregnancies, scars from cancer surgeries, other things that I don't feel you need to be visualizing right about now.

And I think it's a miracle that man stays with me.

But, you know, he's not untouched by time either.

And that's just the physical.

I mean, who here hasn't wanted to be with someone who hasn't seen us eating on the toilet or bitching at the Comcast guy?

leaving behind our own humiliating history, maybe with the nice person we met at art school in Paris.

It's an option.

People take it.

The brave hang around.

They are available and ready to bear witness.

The final act of bravery was made clear for me during a conversation with my friend Liz while she was dying at 46.

She said she had this weird, long, totally convincing dream where all the parents who, as she put it, had to leave early