Glowworms

Why do I think that death would be manageable if I knew in advance when it was coming? Death is not manageable, and the answer to the question of when is never going to be anything more than a good guess.

In 2024, I was scheduled to go on book tour in Australia and New Zealand. Flights had been purchased for me and my husband, Karl, and tickets to various literary-festival events at which I was to appear had been sold. But, as our May 9th departure inched closer, three things became increasingly clear: first, Karl’s hundred-and-two-year-old mother, Jo VanDevender, was not going to make it to a hundred and three; second, my friend Jim Fox, who, at eighty-four, had been diagnosed as having pancreatic cancer that had metastasized to his lungs, wasn’t going to beat the odds much longer; third, our little dog, Sparky, who looked at us with mounting panic through his bouts of hard panting, had developed an enlarged heart.

Karl and I had many long talks about whether to cancel the trip. Karl is a doctor, and he is able to be both kind and unsentimental where death is concerned, even the deaths of his mother and his dog. He said it was possible that all three would still be here when we returned, and it was also possible that they would die while we were gone and we wouldn’t be able to get back in time, and, by the way, back in time for what? To be helpful?

Jo had spent the past seventy-five years of her life on Poplar Springs Drive in Meridian, Mississippi. She and her husband, Frank, long deceased, had had three children: Karl and his sister, Nancy, were both in their seventies, and Michael was in his sixties. Michael lived next door to Jo, and Nancy lived four houses down on the other side of the street. Karl had a plane, and we regularly flew from Nashville on weekends to see Jo. The last time we went, Karl’s daughter, Josephine, flew with us. Nancy’s daughter Langdon had come from Los Angeles. We were all thinking the same thing—that Jo was somewhere near the end—though when someone is a hundred and two it’s hard to tell the difference between the end of life and the slowing down even further of life. Jo had a genius for rallying. Most of her friends from her generation, the legendary Whiskey Widows of Northwood Country Club, had already died, but Jo’s friendships extended deep into other generations, so there were still plenty of visitors. I had known my mother-in-law longer than I had known my husband. We had been friends for thirty years, a fact that pleased us both. I had dedicated a novel to her: “To my friend Jo VanDevender.” She loved that. “Not ‘To my mother-in-law,’ ” she said. “ ‘To my friend.’ ”

On that last Sunday visit, Michael and I stayed at the house with Jo while Karl took everyone else to lunch. I got a good two hours with her, holding her hand as she dozed in a hospital bed. She hated that hospital bed, even though it made her more comfortable and her care easier on everyone. She wanted her own bed back. She wanted never to die. She woke and slept and woke, and every time she opened her eyes she seemed surprised to see me there.

“I like your shirt,” she said.

I thanked her.

“I’ve been sick,” she said.

“You have,” I said.

“Am I going to feel better?”

“You will.”

“I like your shirt,” she said. “When am I going to be better?”

“Soon, I think. Do you want to try some applesauce?”

She did not, but she took a little water. I asked her if she had been a good swimmer, and for a minute the memory lifted her out of the fog. “I was,” she said. She told me that she had swum in Bay St. Louis when she was a girl. She looked at me. “I like your shirt.”

By the time everyone came back from lunch, the weather had started to deteriorate. Karl said that we needed to leave quickly in order to be able to fly out. It was March 24th, Palm Sunday. Later, I would think that, if that was our last goodbye, then it had been a good one. We all kissed her and told her that we loved her.

My friend Jim and I had said our last goodbye in the hallway of his New York apartment a month earlier. I’d come to stay while his husband, Martin, was away on business. To have an entire week with Jim Fox was as close to a lottery win as anything I could imagine, if lottery wins paid out in love and long conversations about books and films and dogs. The first morning I was there, Jim got into his wheelchair, and I pushed him the three blocks from his apartment to his chemo session. He held his cane, which he liked to use as a gondolier’s pole to help me along. He sang.

Jim’s friend Dale met us in the waiting room, wearing a beautiful brown corduroy dress. In other circumstances, I would have asked her where she got it. Jim had so many friends who wanted to take him to chemo that a schedule had been devised. But, after the initial tests, we were told that there would be no chemo that day, because Jim’s platelet count was low. Then he fell in the bathroom. The three of us were sent next door to the hospital and down to the basement for scans. I was especially grateful for Dale’s company when they took Jim away. The scans aroused suspicions, and the decision was made to admit Jim through the emergency room. In the E.R., we were put into a tiny holding bay with a dancer named John, who was in renal failure. John knew all about how to come into the system through the E.R. He wore a fluffy red onesie and had giant bags of Doritos and SkinnyPop, which he freely shared.

Dale did not want to leave, but she had already committed to babysit for her grandchildren in Brooklyn, and this was probably for the best, since there wasn’t room in the bay for two occupied beds, two visitors, and the wheelchair. After she left, I sat in the wheelchair, holding the cane. Because it was a teaching hospital, medical students arrived in an endless procession, along with medical residents and various techs and techs-in-training and nurses and nursing students, all of whom needed to ask Jim some questions: What was his name, his date of birth, how was he feeling, what was his pain on a scale of one to ten, did he know the year, did he know who the President was?

“The President now?” he asked cheerfully. “Joseph R. Biden. But let’s do them all. Let’s do them backward.” And so he did—Biden, Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon . . . all the way to the Founding Fathers. Once he had started, he would not be stopped.

The repetitious questions did not throw him off his course. All comers were human beings trying to do their jobs. He met each one with joy.

In the last week I would ever spend with one of the best friends I’ve ever had, I was given the gift of being supremely useful. I brought him vanilla ice cream and black coffee. I emptied the urinal, found the remote and the hearing aids, changed the sheets, tended to the sacral ulcer, greeted other helpful visiting friends. When, three days later, Jim was discharged into my care without a single thing relating to his health having been resolved or discovered, I got him dressed and wrapped in a blanket, then pushed him the three blocks home in his wheelchair, because I couldn’t imagine how I would get him into and out of a taxi. We spent our final day together making lists, organizing bottles of pills, and cleaning out the linen closet. I located, purchased, and installed a riser on the toilet seat. I soaked his feet and cut his toenails. He gave me the small china dog that his father had won for him at a fair in Ellwood City, Pennsylvania, when he was a child. “I’ve had that dog with me everywhere I’ve lived,” he said.

I held the little brown hound in the palm of my hand. Maybe I wanted it, but I didn’t want it now. “Could you give it to me later?” I asked. “How about my birthday?”

“This isn’t your birthday present. It’s your going-away present,” he said. “My going-away present to you.”

I wanted to believe that I would see him again before he died, but I knew that probably wasn’t going to happen, and this made the solitary ride down in the elevator a sad and singular journey. You get what you get, I told myself. I had got so much. I had not got enough.

The dog was harder.

Jim would have understood this. When his dog, Grace, died the year before, at the age of sixteen and a half, the sadness was overwhelming. I had dinner with Jim and Martin in their apartment at some point in those short months between Grace’s death and Jim’s diagnosis. Jim set the stage over dessert. “Now, we have a very important question to ask you,” he said with great formality. Both Jim and Martin looked at me nervously, and I knew the question before they asked it.

I told them yes. Yes, they should get another dog, and if they died or became incapacitated this unknown dog could come and live with me.

They were so happy you would have thought I’d pulled a puppy from underneath my napkin. That night, we all believed that there would be one more dog in this lifetime.

Oh, how I wish that Jim could have had one last dog to sleep beside him when he was sick.

Sparky would have been an excellent candidate for the job as he wasn’t well himself, but what dog wants to see New York City for the first time so near the end of his life? What dog really wants to get on a plane?

Sparky would have done it for me, though. He was the kind of dog who woke up every morning wondering what he could do for his country and never what his country could do for him. Ask any of the readers who met him at Parnassus Books, the store I own in Nashville, where he worked. Ask any of the staff. His sweet and gentle nature made him a legend among the shop dogs. Karl had picked him out at our local humane shelter twelve years earlier, walked straight to the bin where he was and lifted him up, the Dalai Lama of dogs.

The medley of pills I pushed down Sparky’s throat twice a day didn’t do much to save him. When his belly distended like a hard balloon, Dr. Wall drew three hundred and ten ccs of fluid out of his abdomen and brought us back a dog so elated and hungry and seemingly well that it counted as a miracle. “Don’t keep doing this,” she said to Karl and me. “You can drain them and drain them, but the fluid comes right back. It isn’t kind.”

I’ll always be grateful to her for telling us this up front. Otherwise, I would have had her put a needle in Sparky twice a day so that I could have what I wanted: I wanted him to live.

My friend Pam, who keeps a picture of Sparky on her wall, told us that we should go to Australia. She said that, if Sparky got worse, she and Dr. Wall would make the right decision. I knew that they would, but I didn’t want to go.

The home health aide called Michael in the middle of the night, sometime between April 4th and 5th, and Michael got up and went next door. When Jo died, he was with her.

The funeral, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Meridian, was befitting a woman who had been an involved and beloved citizen with advanced social skills. People poured in for the visitation and stayed for the service. They lined up their cars and drove to the grave site, far too many to fit beneath the small awning that covered the chairs for immediate family. The skies opened into sheeting rain as the minister gave his greeting; this was followed by thunder and an explosion of lightning. “Go! Go!” the minister shouted to the assembled, and we ran, soaked, back to our cars. Karl turned on the headlights and got the windshield wipers going at a mad slap. We drove straight to Northwood Country Club, where lunch was served. Karl said how much his mother would have liked that, nature forcing us off to the party without a minute to linger over her final resting place.

Back in the day, Jim Fox and I had been known to stay on the phone for more than an hour, but once the coughing started to wear him out he set a strict fifteen-minute limit on all calls. “This is genius,” I said. “Now we can talk anytime.”

And, for a while, we did. We talked almost every day. But then the fifteen minutes got hard. There were e-mails, and then the e-mails stopped. Martin called me on April 30th to tell me that Jim was sleeping, that Jim was dying now. “I put the birthday card you sent right by his bed, where he can see it,” Martin said.

Two days later, on May 2nd, his eighty-fifth birthday, Jim died.

Jim was the person I most wanted to call later that same day, to tell him that I had taken Sparky to see Dr. Wall again, and that Dr. Wall had drawn half a litre of fluid out of his abdomen, despite what she had said before. “Jim,” I wanted to tell him, “she gave him another chance, a couple more days.”

But it was just a day. The next morning, May 3rd, Karl and I took Sparky back to her office. All the fluid that had been drawn off the day before had returned, all that and more. Dr. Wall took him to another room and put a port in his leg so that the medicine wouldn’t sting him. Karl and I sat close enough to make a single surface of our laps, and we held him while she gave the injection into the port. For years, Sparky had been so afraid of going to the vet, and this was what he had been afraid of. His legs folded beneath him, and his sweet head fell into my open hand.

All three of them were gone now, and five days later we were gone as well.

I started keeping a journal in the year 2000. An old boyfriend of mine had had a weekly appointment calendar from the Museum of Modern Art, and he wrote down as much of his day as would fit in a space six and a half inches long and an inch high. Years after I last saw him, I decided to co-opt his habit—a resolution to mark the new century. It’s the small space that makes it possible for me. Every day, I condense my life into what will fit in that strip of calendar.

The months preceding our departure to Australia and New Zealand were a train wreck, but I kept up the entries because I was twenty-four years into the pledge. Looking back over those pages now is nearly unbearable. They are a map of everything, of Jo and Jim and Sparky.

We flew to Los Angeles on May 8th, then to Melbourne on the ninth. I told myself that things would be better on the other side of the world, and I was right. At home, I would have lain on the floor of my office and cried. I know this about myself. Distraction has much to recommend it. In Australia and New Zealand, I had work and scenery, other writers and friendly readers. Karl and I were not separated by the workday. We were together all the time, and that was the greatest comfort. What a disaster it would have been to leave when everyone was still alive, only to have them die one by one when we were so ungodly far away. I’d thought I could manage it, but I could not have.

That first day in Australia, we walked in a beautiful park not far from our hotel and tallied the unfamiliar birds as a means of staying awake. My memories of the Melbourne Writers Festival are disconnected in the way of dreams: I remember the snacks in the basement of the theatre where I spoke but not what was said onstage. I remember that, from the table where I sat signing books, I could see that a production of “Wicked” was running at the theatre across the street. I signed for more than two hours. Karl came by and said hello. I was told that the length of the line was a good thing, because it meant that the signing after the evening event would be brief, but the second signing turned out to be every bit as long. Some people came twice.

The next morning, a car picked us up at 4 a.m. to deliver us to our flight to Queenstown. At the airport, the driver wrestled our bags to the curb and was gone. The place was half asleep. We were half asleep.

It turned out that there was no flight to Queenstown, and there wouldn’t be for another two days.

The only agent at the only open ticket counter in the airport studied our printed itinerary.

She told us that our flight had been cancelled a while ago. “You were rebooked on the flight that left yesterday morning,” she said.

I shook my head. “I was working yesterday. Yesterday was why I came to Melbourne.” The tickets had been purchased by a festival, but I didn’t know if it had been the next festival or the previous festival that had failed to inform us.

It didn’t matter, because there was no flight. Tracking down whoever had dropped the ball wouldn’t change that. We had to figure out how to get to Queenstown on some other airline. Most of the desks would be open at six. It wasn’t yet five.

From what we could determine on Karl’s phone, the only way to fly to Queenstown now would be to fly to Sydney and wait for a connecting flight, which would take eleven hours in total and cost us a full day of our vacation. We kept trying different scenarios, different airlines, but continually failed to get the results we were hoping for. As a resident of a vast country, I should have been able to conceive of the vastness of this land I was visiting, but I could not.

The publicists and festival organizers were sleeping. I borrowed Karl’s phone and texted Meg.

Meg Mason was the reason I’d agreed to come to the Southern Hemisphere in the first place. Meg, a novelist, is a New Zealand native who moved to Sydney at sixteen. She and her husband, Andrew, were already in New Zealand, waiting for us. She told me that figuring out our transport would take a few minutes.

When she called back, she had booked us a flight to Christchurch, which would put us on the wrong side of the correct island. “In Christchurch, I’ve hired a plane to bring you to Wanaka.”

“Does it come with a pilot?” I asked, wondering if this was the aviation equivalent of a rental car. I assumed that Karl could fly an unfamiliar plane across an unfamiliar island, but it wasn’t ideal.

“You gave me your credit-card number,” she said. “It comes with everything.”

The condition for success was that our flight to Christchurch had to land by three-thirty so that we could take off in the rental plane by four, because, as Meg explained, the pilot didn’t fly in the dark. There was just the one flight from Melbourne to Christchurch, and it was scheduled to land at three-fifteen.

When we arrived, we had no trouble picking the pilot out in the crowd. He wore a blue pullover with a patch that said “Canterbury Aviation,” and carried a charging pack for his plane, which looked remarkably like a car battery. I didn’t ask why. Insofar as it was possible to hustle, we hustled to get our luggage, clear customs, and find a taxi, in which the three of us were driven to the distant other side of the airport. It amazed me that the journey to the other side of the airport could be such a long and scenic drive. We arrived at the edge of a grassy field and got out with our luggage, the pilot, the charging pack.

The waiting plane was a Cessna 185 Skywagon, a taildragger, circa 1974. It was a four-seater, but one of the back seats had been removed to make room for luggage and a jumble of plane-related detritus: ropes, a mallet, a large toolbox. Karl was thrilled, and I was fine. I was proud of being fine, because I believed that many people in my position wouldn’t have been. Ivor (the pilot was named Ivor) untied the ropes and pulled up the stakes. We would make the four-o’clock deadline, just. We took off without the benefit of tarmac, taxiing across the short nap of grass.

“Accompanying your argument with that simple, childlike tune isn’t making it any easier to understand.”

Cartoon by Carolita Johnson

I am no stranger to small planes. My stepfather flew our family around when I was growing up, and Karl has had many planes in our thirty-one years together. I have had flights that were unpleasant and flights that were uneventful, but I had never before been struck with a sense of wonder on a plane. In that Cessna 185 Skywagon, I was lit up with wonder. Much of this can be attributed to flying down the middle of the South Island of New Zealand and seeing the green and treeless mountains in the light of late day, as if the whole island had just pushed itself up from the blue-green sea. But more staggering than what I was seeing was how I was seeing it. We were flying very, very low. We were flying the way I fly in dreams, brushing over the contours of land. On the mountains, the unattended sheep raised their faces to the sky and blinked.

I talked to Karl about this later. I would have sworn we were a hundred feet above the ground at most. He said that it was more like a thousand feet, but maybe a thousand feet feels like considerably less when you’re used to so much more. Going to Meridian on weekends to visit Jo, we kept an altitude of between six thousand and ten thousand feet, depending on the weather. Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi rolled out like an old quilt beneath us, all pattern and shape and no detail. I hadn’t asked Meg what it cost to be flown from Christchurch to Wanaka, but, whatever we paid, it wasn’t enough.

In Wanaka, we landed in the very grass where Meg and Andrew were waiting. Ivor staked the plane, and we gave him a lift to the hotel where he would spend the night—only commercial flights are allowed over the mountains in the dark—then we went to the house on a lake which the Masons had rented.

Meg and I had built a solid friendship over the years based on a fervent correspondence, but this was only the second time we had seen each other in person, and I had never met Andrew. There was, for all of us, an element of risk: four adults driving a rented Defender to a very secluded house with enough groceries to last several days. I can see the ways in which it could have gone Agatha Christie, but it didn’t. Our only disagreement was over how to cook the porridge.

Meg had made every arrangement for our happiness. We read by the fire and then lay out on the deck to watch the stars. We drove to the head of the Routeburn Track and crossed a bright-blue river on a rope suspension bridge to study the ferns and moss on the other side, then drove to Glenorchy to do a book club for thirty people at a general store called Mrs. Woolly’s. We talked about Jo and Jim and Sparky while hiking. We talked about the books we were reading and the books we wanted to write. I had a few bites of Meg’s Vegemite toast—thin layer of butter, thin layer of Vegemite—then started making my own. My sadness was neither resolved nor ignored, but it softened. This is something the tourism board might consider advertising: “Go to New Zealand and soften your sadness.”

There were a certain number of set activities that we had agreed on well in advance: visits to the glowworm cave on Lake Te Anau and to the kiwi sanctuary, trips to the Milford Sound and to Arrowtown. This was our vacation, and after the vacation was done Meg and I would appear at literary festivals in Auckland and Sydney. By the time we’d packed up and left the house in Wanaka, driven several hours, bought more food, and found the rental house in Te Anau, we were tired and it was dark. When Karl said that he would not be sorry to miss the glowworms, Andrew said that he could do without them as well. It might be nice to settle into the new house, make some popcorn, and leave the worms to themselves.

But I wanted to go. The chances of my making it back to Te Anau on some other night in life were nonexistent. Meg backed me up. “They’re worms that glow,” she said. “And we’ve already paid for them.”

“You don’t need to go,” I said to the husbands. “We’ll be fine.” By which I meant that Meg could drive. I wasn’t going to take the Defender into a landscape devoid of street lights when the steering wheel was on the right-hand side of the car.

Andrew said no. If we were in, then he was in. Somewhere in the world, there may be a more agreeable person than Andrew Mason, but I have not yet found him. Karl, who is very agreeable himself, said that he would come, too. The four of us got back in the car.

It was a Thursday, and our tickets were for 9 p.m. The town of Te Anau had already called it a night, but the large visitors’ center at the edge of the lake was brightly lit and full of T-shirts and branded rain gear and plush stuffed keas. We stood in line to go down a gangplank to the boat that would take us to the cave, and watched the previous tour group debarking, a sheen of elation on their faces. “Was it good?” I asked a random sampling of them.

“Fabulous!” they said. “Oh, you’ll love it.”

On the half-hour trip to the western shore of Lake Te Anau, Meg and I sat together on a bench and looked at the crown of stars arcing over the sky while our husbands sat nearby, mapping out the next day’s drive on their phones.

We were happy, in the way that people who go off on a boat to have an adventure at night are happy.

On arrival, the large group on the boat was divided into smaller packs of twelve. Our pack consisted of Karl and myself, two Masons, and eight Chinese visitors, who were told through the translation app on their phones that they would have to put their phones away. No one was allowed to use a phone in the cave, which seemed a real disadvantage for the people who were now cut off from any further instruction, but they cheerfully complied. Our guide was a slight man who reminded me of Johnny Depp playing Captain Jack Sparrow in “Pirates of the Caribbean,” or maybe of Johnny Depp’s father had he played the same part. I wondered how often our guide took breaks and came up to the earth’s surface to stretch.

The path into the cave descended steeply, and the ceiling lowered so that everyone had to bend and then squat. It was in this cramped configuration that we went down and down and farther down. Like any American, I was thinking about liability, a concept that didn’t seem to trouble New Zealanders. The twisting limestone tunnel was slick and poorly lit, and soon we could hear the roaring of water. In a few more turns, we came upon a large waterfall pouring into a rushing river, aptly named Tunnel Burn, which was lit up to show just how clear the water was, how fast. We crossed a stone bridge and, on the other side, found a punt waiting for us. For the first time, it occurred to me that this was not a good idea, but there was nothing I could do about it.

Forward was the only direction available. The twelve of us got into the unsteady open boat with Captain Jack, and, when we were settled, he began to pull us down the ice-cold river hand over hand, using a chain.

Yes, in the pitch dark we could see tiny glowing worms dotting the ceilings and walls, but they were, in number, several hundred billion fewer than the stars that covered the night sky above Lake Te Anau. I took Karl’s hand and whispered that he should hold on to me, no matter what. We’d been told not to speak in the boat as it was being pulled along, and that was just as well, because everything I had to say was about death.

Not Jo’s death or Jim’s or Sparky’s, though I kept the three of them close. In the punt on the river in the cave, beneath the dim light of glowing worms, it was my own death that consumed me. If any of the strangers in this open boat lost their minds and threw a few of us overboard, threw me overboard, that would be that. The river was cold and fast and headed to the center of the earth. If there were a geological shift, an earthquake, a rock slide, that would be that. The one entrance into this cave was, coincidentally, the one exit, and that small opening could close at any moment. But more alarming than the ways in which this physical space could turn against us was the simple metaphor of a wizened little man pulling a boat down a river in the dark. I had always believed myself to be pretty sanguine at the thought of my own death—I’d had a good long life, done good work, experienced true love, was generally A+ lucky—but now all I wanted was to get the hell out of there. I wanted to be above the ground and not beneath it.

I thought of my father, ten years dead. His presence in the boat was palpable. “You bought a ticket,” he said to me. “You brought Karl and your friends. They were perfectly happy to stay home, but you insisted.”

I felt as if I were on a conveyor belt being carried through suffering and time and loss, and at the end I would be dropped off into darkness. I hoped that Jo and Jim and Sparky had missed this part.

The glowworms continued to glow.

When we looped back to the same dock, Karl helped me out of the boat, or I helped him.

We stooped and climbed up through the tunnel of rock. I’d been crying, but the environment was so pervasively wet that no one noticed. Our guide stopped to point out an accessible glowworm on the stone wall, and everyone leaned in for a closer look. I would have nothing to do with it.

We were fed back through a museum and into a theatre where we were shown a film about glowworms. A young woman gave an animated presentation, explaining to the audience that these particular glowworms weren’t really worms at all but the maggots of the fungus gnat. These maggots vomit and excrete illuminated threads of bile to entice tiny insects to their deaths. When tiny insects are in short supply, they eat one another. In the film, one glowing maggot scores an oversized moth, wraps it up, then bores through its eye before eating its living brain. There was a reason that they didn’t show the film before you went into the cave.

Meg and Andrew skipped the presentation and stayed in the hallway to look at photographs of the cave’s discovery by white settlers, in 1948, some two thousand years after it had been discovered by Maori people. Those settlers managed to make an underground river with murderous maggots on unstable terrain into a tourist attraction in record time.

“I cannot believe you had a breakdown,” Meg said. “You never have breakdowns. I consider you unflappable.” We were back on the big boat, going across the open lake. It was freezing now, and we were well past tired.

“It surprised me, too,” I said.

“Was it the worms?”

“Maggots,” I said. “But, no, it was more the dark underground river leading toward death.”

“Do you think the people who told us it was fabulous, coming off the boat, actually had breakdowns in the cave but didn’t want to ruin the surprise?”

“Possible.”

“Was it Jo and Jim and Sparky you saw?”

I shook my head. “It was me. It was my death.”

Meg put her arm around me. “Well, that’s awful. Maybe don’t put that in your review online.”

The next day, we took the Milford Road to the Milford Sound. As with every other destination in New Zealand, the drive was the reward. We went through deep, mossy forests on narrow roads that offered up spectacular alpine views whenever we turned a corner. When Andrew pulled the car over to take pictures, the sun broke through the clouds in silvered streams, as if to herald the Epiphany.

“This is one of the most beautiful places in my country, and I’m only here because you came from Nashville,” Meg said. We were in the back seat, the husbands in the front. “Are you still thinking about the maggots?” she whispered, pronouncing the word like a New Zealander. Meegits.

I was, but not with the intensity of the day before. That’s the thing about your own death—you can hold the truth of it for only a few minutes, and then it reverts back into abstraction.

To drive to the Milford Sound, one must go through the Homer Tunnel, which runs through the Darran Mountains. When we arrived at the tunnel, Andrew pulled over and turned off the car, and Karl patted his shoulder and said, “Well done,” because Karl gave Andrew a bit of praise every time he stopped as a way of appreciating his willingness to do all the driving. Vehicles could pass through the tunnel only in one direction at a time, and so we got out and stood near the red light, waiting twenty minutes before it turned green. A kea walked around on the side of the road, pecking at gravel. Andrew took a picture of it.

Green light. We piled back into the car, and the magnificent scenery switched off.

Everything switched off. There were no lights in the tunnel, and quickly it was as black as a glowworm cave, but instead of the maggots we had headlights, which were equally ineffective against the overwhelming darkness. The Homer Tunnel starts at three thousand one hundred feet above sea level and drops by more than a football field in just three-quarters of a mile. The car didn’t seem to be moving forward as much as falling straight down, but this didn’t bother me. It reminded me of the Duquesne Incline, in Pittsburgh.

“What’s happening?” Meg whispered.

“Just a really steep tunnel, I guess,” I said.

“No, there’s no such thing as a steep tunnel. Tunnels are meant to go through the mountain. Not under it.” She tipped over so that her head was in my lap. “I don’t think I can do it.”

I put my hand on her head. I understood what she meant, even though I didn’t feel it myself. “We’ll be out soon enough.”

“No, I’m not going to make it.” Her voice was thin. “It’s against nature. Can you talk, please? Can you please tell me a story, or anything? I don’t care. I’m closing my eyes.”

I leaned over her. In the dark, I held her in my arms. “That kea?”

“The one we just saw?”

“I didn’t want to say anything, but she’s famous. She’s the official kea, the one who’s on the postcards and handkerchiefs. She has tremendous licensing deals.”

“That’s a lot of pressure.”

“She can never go anywhere now and just be a bird. That’s why I didn’t say anything.”

“I wonder if we’re going to die,” Meg said.

“We’re going to die, but not in this tunnel.”

“The kea,” Meg said. “What’s her name?”

“Sally,” I said.

When we were finally returned to daylight, Meg sat up and smiled hugely. “That was hideous.”

“I know.”

“I can’t believe we both had existential crises on the same vacation. Friends, encountering their own deaths, Thursday and Friday.”

“What are the chances?” I said.

Just as the glowworms aren’t really worms, the Milford Sound isn’t actually a sound; it’s a fjord. Precipitation is the great constant there, and when we got on the boat it was raining. Meg held fast to Andrew, and together they made their way to the open deck on top of the boat to watch for dolphins. Karl went up front to talk to the captain, and I drank tea from a paper cup in the boat’s glassed interior. From time to time, I’d go up top to see the Masons, but the rain kept driving me back in. I went to see Karl, who introduced me to his new friend. The captain said that he wasn’t allowed to cruise behind the waterfalls anymore because of recent rock slides. The highest waterfall in the Milford Sound was five hundred feet, or half the height at which Ivor had flown us from Christchurch.

Over the loudspeaker, the captain told the passengers that the Alpine Fault ran down the South Island, right beneath the Milford Sound. The “rupture events”—which struck me as a very polite way of saying “earthquakes”—came with great regularity, every three hundred years. A rupture event of magnitude 8 was currently seven years overdue. He suggested we think about that while driving home through the tunnel.

I threw my tea away and went quickly up the grated metal stairs. I saw my friends at a distance, holding on to the railing. Both of them wore their stocking caps pulled down beneath the hoods of their anoraks. The wind and the rain and the churn of the engine, the hats and the hoods, all worked together to keep them from hearing anything. They turned and saw me, their smiling faces wet with rain. They had seen dolphins, they shouted, and I went and stood beside them, looking over the edge until I saw dolphins, too. ♦