I've always called it love at first sight. What I mean is a compelling visceral attraction that overpowers competing instincts, any tendency to caution or reason. When Frank said hello I fell in love with his voice. By the end of that day, I was sure I loved everything he had been, was then, would ever be. He was wildly enthusiastic about my painting - there's nothing like being understood. In the weeks that followed I read from his manuscripts and made drawings based on the poems. He bought me notebooks and different kinds of pens to try out. He said, Paint an old man sitting by a coffin waving at the moon; a fat lady shelling peas and a centaur behind her; a blind Gypsy holding a conch shell. Paint a white horse breaking away from a funeral hearse; a scarecrow wearing a kimono. Paint smoke rings.

I'd never heard anything like it.

Back then I was sure of many things. I believed Frank and I would always be together, and that time would only bring us more of what we wanted, as if the course of our lives had been set to trace an unwavering line upwards toward happiness and achievement. I have never regretted for one moment leaving the Mid-west, although sometimes I miss the farm - our rambling old house with the front porch that wrapped around two sides, the elaborate garden we had, all the land. Sometimes I miss the prairie and its panoramic views of each day's beginning and end. I loved watching that sky. Things are so different here in northern California. Coastal hills, ghosts of old mountain ranges barricade the eastern horizon. I don't see the first giant copper edge of the moon rising out of the earth like I used to, but nothing the Midwest has to offer can compare with the sight of that enormous red crescent sinking into the Pacific in the middle of the night.

Bodega Head is where I go to watch the moon set- November and December are the best months. I've never been scared to take the path on the crest of those high cliffs alone late at night. Perhaps I should be. A buck deer and I met once in the dark; I saw the white smoke coming out of his nostrils before I saw him. Frank had been the one so at home around water. I never thought I'd end up feeling the same way. Now I can't imagine leaving here. Living on the western edge of this continent, so far away from where I began, is reassuring to me now - the whole country behind me; two mountain ranges, two time zones, and nearly twenty years now lie between me and the hot oppressive summer of his death. I've had plenty of time to go over that Saturday, wonder why I didn't see it coming, parse every sentence I uttered - every word - comb through everything I did but wish I hadn't, and everything I wanted to say but didn't. As if my taking out one part could have changed the outcome.

He died before I had time to finish his portrait. In May he said, "Copy this Gauguin and paint me standing in front of it. Call it Spirit of the Dead Watching "A Tahitian girl is clutching her pillow in fear. Her bed a sumptuous pattern of blue, rose, yellow, and bright orange. A spray of phosphorescent flowers decorates the wall behind her. At the foot of the bed is another woman, hooded, dressed in black. She sits, staring impassively ahead. She is manao tupapao, the spirit of the dead watching. I thought it was a great idea. I thought he had the best ideas. Why don't you pose in your kimono, I said.

We buried him barefoot in that kimono. The funeral home said no at first. They insisted he wear a suit and shoes. Claimed it was a state law. Sometime in the weeks after his death I rolled up the canvas and placed it in a corner of my parents' attic where it remains.

"I love you," was the last thing he said to me. He said I love you and I said, "Don't give me that crap."

Saturday evening. June third. He had betrayed me by having an affair and I had found him out. I was hurt and humiliated and angry enough to put him through a wall. I barely tolerated the hug he tried to give me, my arms stiff at my sides. He tried to kiss me and I turned my head so that his lips only grazed my hair. Then he left. Forever. He left me in a room and shut the door behind him as he left, and he took three steps across a hall into another room and shut another door and shot himself

In the span of the longest five or six seconds I have ever lived through, Frank fired three shots into his chest. Three pops, three cries. All I had was sound. I couldn't see him; I could only imagine what he was doing in another part of the house. With the sound of the first shot time stopped, changed course and went backwards through the second and third shots, then reconstructed itself into an endless, directionless loop. Before Saturday, June third, time was a straight line. After Saturday, a loop.

I heard a sharp crack, a hard slap, an angry teacher breaking his ruler against a desk. I heard the crack and just as sharp I heard Frank hollering, "Oh" - surprised. I heard him step on a copperhead, get stung by a yellow jacket, smash his thumb with a hammer. I watched him jump into Spider Creek, heard him hit the cold water and yelp from the shock. Pop Oh! Pop Oh! Pop Oh!

After the third cry I knew he was dead. Imagine the wall is telling you a bedtime story. Go to sleep now, it might say. That is how the news was delivered. A quiet voice from somewhere inside me said flatly, It's all over; he's killed himself. I didn't want to move. But the same silent voice was ordering me out. Get out, get out, it kept repeating. Call the police.

I didn't want to look. He's blown his brains out, the voice said. Don't go in there. Save the memory.

Death had changed his eyes from hazel to pale porcelain green. I climbed onto the bed where he lay and sat astride his crooked body, amazed at the sight of three small red holes ringing his heart. I put my hands on his chest. While I waited for the police I tried to memorize every detail of his face before I never saw it again. He looked through me, toward a distant place and I tried wishing myself there. This is real, I repeated, working hard to convince myself; this is real this is real.

I spent that night in a Holiday Inn. I was afraid to close my eyes, afraid to dream, afraid to let sleep seal the day and lock it into history. Tomorrow, I thought, he will be irretrievable. Finally, against my will, I slept, and not fitfully as I had expected, but deeply. During that long deep sleep - more like a coma - I didn't dream about Frank. I didn't dream at all. He sent no messages, instructions or last requests, and I felt no trace of our connection.

His funeral was like every funeral - inadequate. Stand up. Sit down. Kneel. Pray. Get used to it. I remember the red missal in my lap. It was a deep lush luminous red. The soles of my black shoes clacked on marble tiles, each step echoing through cavernous silence as I made my way to a pew. But what I remember most clearly is Frank's casket -so small and far away- bathed by a pool of dim light. It glowed in the darkness of the church like Sleeping Beauty's glass coffin. I see thick white candles burning in giant brass candlesticks at his head and feet. I think of a clearing in the forest and all the animals in a circle waiting for Sleeping Beauty to open her eyes.

I don't know if the first year was the worst but it was the most singular. Then death was new -every day unique, the first of its kind to be lived without him- and the point was simply to survive. The first year, I couldn't imagine there would be a second one. I anchored myself to painting and stayed busy. It was hard to concentrate on art because I kept expecting someone to burst through the door of the studio and shoot me. I scoured Frank's poems for ideas and ways to stay close to him.

All that year I looked for windows, mirrors, thin fingers of light, something to slip through, some way to find Frank through faith or will on the other side of pain. I dreamed of secret passageways, walls that were really doors opening into life, and Frank vibrant, splendidly alive on the other side of those walls. My nights were full of second chances.

What I saw before me was a desert of time, a white monotony of absence and regret that I could never cross. I imagined him waiting at the end of that long first year with fresh water and a laurel wreath, waving from the finish line to spur me on. "You made it," he might say, "and I'm your reward." For years I saw him - a gesture, a wave, a blur. His promises were everywhere. Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm; for love is strong as death. I thought it was him. I worked hard at forgetting but he stayed with me, beside me, behind me. I felt him waiting, like the fog waits to come in on summer evenings. Just roll in over the hills while I sleep, I told him. You can disappear with the sunrise. Once I thought I saw him but it was the light hitting my windshield. I thought I saw him but it was a blue jay in a bay tree. I thought I saw him but it was a curtain blowing through a window. I saw a man waiting for the bus and thought it was him. I saw a shadow dancing across a wall and thought it was him. I was expecting him. I had the red carpet out. A black cat jumped down out of a tree and I thought it was him. I heard something like his voice but it belonged to an owl. I thought I saw him but it was smoke from a brush pile. I thought it was him but it was my longing, my regret. Sometimes when the phone rang I imagined he might be calling. I said, I love you too. I said it often in case he might be listening.

I studied the photographs I'd taken, looking for clues, and found the other woman in his face. At the point where she entered our lives I saw lies cross-hatching, shadowing his cheeks, filling in below his eyes with darkness. The smile began fading in and out; it grew less frequent. Finally his jaw became a clenched fist, clamped down tight on honesty, choking it back; his face seemed fossilized. He looked driven, wild, worn out in the last pictures. I decided she had killed him.

During the fifth summer of his death, I opened one of his books and read a poem on the last page and I remembered our life purposefully. To console myself I painted a meadow like the meadow at the farm - prairie hay turning copper in October light, intersecting an eastern sky infiltrated by the beginnings of darkness. I painted my longing as a red silk kimono with its pattern of tiny pink and white gourds, floating above the tall grass. The seventh summer I took off my wedding ring and put it in a pine trunk. The eighth summer I gave all his records to the Santa Rosa Public Library. I couldn't bear to listen to the music of our life. The tenth summer I wore his Saint Francis medal.

I painted his portrait during the thirteenth summer and we became friends again. On the fourteenth anniversary of his suicide I fired a twenty two revolver at a paper target. It felt a little like murder. Did you feel the pain? I asked. How were you able to keep pulling the trigger? Why didn't you drop the gun? Why did you leave? I hit the bull's eye twice.

Three months later, on August first, I celebrated his birthday for the first time in a long time. Instead of a cake I bought a package of twelve inch red tapers. I collected all the candlesticks in the house and arranged them in a circle on the dining room table and put my bouquet in the center - his favorite flowers, bachelor buttons, mixed with yellow coreopsis and white cosmos, tied with a red ribbon. I'd picked them from the flower bed by the front door. The fog was beginning to roll in and soften the long shadows that fell across my deck. I lit the candles at dusk -fifteen in all- and stepped back to take in the sight. He would get a kick out of this, I thought.

June third comes and goes. I grow older and Frank remains forever twenty-nine. Time has taught me, among other things, that death is persistent and enduring beyond my capacity to imagine it. People still ask me Why? I used to have an answer. Now I say, I don't know.

Ginny Stanford