Today I cycled through Central Park, past the confetti of spring flowers, brown twigs and mud, to the place where Laura and I had  our last perfect day before she was diagnosed with mucosal melanoma.  We lay out all day under the trees on our picnic blanket, reading our books, snuggled in each other’s lap, day dreaming about our future together.  We always made each other promise that we would live another 40 or 50 years, so we could have the most time together. Our grand scheme was that around age 110 for Laura, 102 for me, we would die in bed together in each other’s arms.

We were blissfully happy that day in May even though we’d been talking about my going back to England for 6 months to look after my mum post bypass surgery and  to launch my new web project with the help of UK friends. Laura and I hated to be apart, but we figured it would be a small blip in the whole rest of our lives. That night we watched ‘The Impossible’, about how the Asian tsunami shredded people’s lives in the blink of an eye. Little did we know our own tsunami was just 2 days away.