This is the dream I had the night before Pierce’s funeral:

We’re at my old house in Pittsburgh (which, having been demolished, is literally a ghost house) having a memorial dinner when, suddenly, Pierce is there, sitting at the head of the dining room table. No one else can see him except me and one little nephew who keeps reaching out trying to touch him.

I’m so glad to see you, I say.

, he says, but you know, once you go in you can never come back out again.

Then he gets up and walks into the living room, and as I watch he gets older and older – fifty, sixty, seventy – becoming the man he would have become, all in the space of a minute, and then sits down in one of the overstuffed chairs, a very old man with a cane and white hair.