[A]
When I was growing up, I was embarrassed to be seen with my father. He was severely crippled and very short, and when we walked together, his hand on my arm for balance, people would stare. I would inwardly struggle at the unwanted attention. If he ever noticed or was bothered, he never let on. It was difficult to coordinate our steps---his halting, mine impatient---and because of that, we didn’t say much as we went along. But as we started out, he always said, “You set the pace, I will try to adjust to you.”
[B]
Alone now, the widow reads considerably. She used to underline favorite passages to share with her husband. Now, in a notebook, she stores quotations like this one from Elizabeth Jolley’s Cabin Fever: “I experience again the deep-felt wish to be part of a married couple, to sit by the fire in winter with the man who is my husband. So intense is this wish that if I write the word husband on a piece of paper, my eyes fill with tears.”