We had three grown-up sons we loved, and when we did talk our conversations tended to center around their lives. I knew that Eileen was happy, that she enjoyed her work with handicapped children. As for her private life, I didn't know and I didn't feel I had any right to ask. When I heard from our middle son, Stephen, that Eileen was seriously ill and had to undergo laser surgery to burn a tumor from her windpipe, I flew from Dublin to Phoenix.

My wife, Rebecca, insisted I go. We found nothing awkward in the idea of my flying off to be with Eileen -- although some of our friends were unable to grasp the idea that there could still be friendship after divorce and that a second wife might be sympathetic to the needs of a first. I loved my ex-wife, although not in the same way as I had once. There were no old longings, just a kind of serene bond. Rebecca understood this.

In the implausible heat of Phoenix, I met my sons -- Iain, Stephen and Keiron -- and we went at once to the hospital where Eileen had her operation. The kids were apprehensive, caught in an unmapped zone between optimism and despair.

Eileen was in ICU, doped on morphine. She was only 5 feet tall to begin with, but in her illness she seemed smaller, shrunken. The sight of her so diminished shocked me: I felt unbearable sorrow that a woman normally so vibrant should be sapped of life, reduced. She recognized me, but couldn't speak because her throat hurt too much after surgery. Sometimes she'd scribble illegibly with a felt-tipped pen on a pad, but most of the time she was lost to us inside the dark room of narcotics and dreams.

I met with her surgeon, who told me that Eileen's cancer was inoperable and spreading. She had about six months, maybe. This was the prognosis the boys and I had expected, but it was a chillingly immutable prediction just the same. Eileen was leaving us: It was the truth we didn't want to face.

My sons and I took turns sitting with her. Sometimes when she looked at me, Eileen smiled in a slightly baffled way, as if she thought my presence was part of a dream. Other times, she smiled sadly and held my hand, and I spoke words of comfort, verbal placebos for me and for her.

Often when I watched Eileen in her morphine-induced sleep, I had flashbacks to when we'd first met -- Glasgow, 1962 -- in the basement of a music store. She was the assistant manager and I was a part-time clerk with ambitions to write poetry. I enjoyed her free-spirited style, the way her life seemed like a series of scattered events, dates kept, dates broken, trains missed. She lived outside of time. Often we went for drinks after work, we talked, I shared my sorry amateur poems with her, and she read them with great sympathy -- a quality she never lacked. We found ourselves drifting, without thinking, into love.

Early in our relationship she showed me a small cesarean scar and told me that she'd had a baby daughter, Barbara, whom she'd been forced to give up for adoption. Eileen was 16 when she became pregnant, and the father, whose name she never mentioned, had faded out of her life.

Eileen had been anxious to keep the child, but her parents, Orthodox Jews who perceived Eileen's pregnancy as an affront to the family name, opposed this wish so strongly there was absolutely no question of Eileen raising the baby on her own. Besides, the times were against Eileen: In 1955 single mothers were stigmatized. There was simply no chance of a public or private reprieve. Eileen would give the child away and get on with her life. From the point of view of her adamant parents, this was the only solution, and Eileen -- barely more than a child herself -- yielded reluctantly in the end.

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