We don't live close the hospital, and there was a road block, and a detour, and I still didn't know except for that place deep down that had never been touched was screaming at me something was irrevocably wrong.

After parking the car, I walked calmly across the parking lot thinking, I should be running. In the movies they're always running.

I wouldn't know for a while. The fact that they took me to the chapel was a clue, one I chose to misinterpret.

And then the doctor finally came in and started asking questions about how Scott had been feeling the last few days, sparking an irrational hope. I finally had to come out and ask, "So he's dead?"

No one had actually said it, and I needed to hear it. Maybe the questions continued. I don't remember. How he'd been feeling seemed irrelevant at that point. "So he's dead?" I probably asked that a dozen times to a dozen different people.

I wish I'd been in a frame of mind to answer those questions. I've answered them hundreds of times since, thought about those answers and wondered if it would have made a difference for Scott if we'd been more attuned.

Scott suffered from frequent heartburn and popped Tums on a regular basis. He also liked spicy food, so when he had an extra painful bout of indigestion on July second after eating two spiced-up meals in one day, we didn't think anything about it. When he went back to bed on the third--something he never did--and slept another four hours, we attributed his fatigue to a busy weekend. When the heat forced him to quit during the second set of our tennis match on the fourth, I thought nothing of it. It was hot as hell, and we were both red-faced and breathing heavily. He seemed fine when he left for the gym before work on the sixth.

Obviously, he wasn't.

I don't know if those seemingly unrelated incidences were signs of what was coming or not. My gut says they were. I wish we'd been paying closer attention.

Hindsight is a bitch, and I hate her.