If you were younger and in another era, your stone would be a cut stump, no branches outflung to beg the air and the clouds for more life, for a longer reach. Snuffed of life anywhere within the wood, anything porous or magnetic or hopeful. Perhaps the stone you have should depict a book with the last pages torn out, or rewritten for you, or labeled by a totalitarian censor, or trailing off like the words I last heard you spoke on the phone. You didn’t know the name of your hospital, even, other than it began with an M. “Methodeez? That’s what I heard the workers say.”

“You mean Maimonides,” I asked your soft voice carefully, “Or Methodist?” Maimonides was the epicenter of it all where my love died alone. Methodist was closer to you, down the street from where you and I last met up in Park Slope. But you had no answer.

Long before we took seats in each other’s lives, my first trip to New York was in the theater district. Broadway had managed to craft a musical out of Charles Dickens’ last unfinished novel. Like yours, it was a mystery. The Broadway show’s ending, I guess, was up to interpretation. Like each weekly women writer’s workshop of ours. You never finished your mystery that I know of. You slacked off and then began to share chapters of a whole new story.

At the Zoom shiva, your boyfriend mentioned finding your novel spread out in your apartment. I have learned nothing of any subsequent publication; neither your boyfriend nor your brothers contacted me when the unveiling of your stone took place. I’ll never know how the mystery ended or who killed the victim or stole the painting. Maybe the mystery is the ending. Maybe the unfinishing is the completion. Maybe the uncountered questions are their own answer. Maybe the end of your story is a whole new one that thinks of something else now.

I will ask it: How, in the 21st Century, does someone die in the hospital of a virus they didn’t have when they entered?

They had protocols. They had the usual pandemic measures. Only one loved one could enter the facility at a time and could not re-enter for the day once they exited. My Googling showed that Methodist’s ICU was 80% Covid patients when you were there.

My questions ramify. They cry from the ground. However they extend or whatever they do or do not reach, I shall not let them be cut off. They will stand and grow roots beneath them. Something somehow will not lie forever unknown.