I still say "we." I worry that people will find it tiresome, but often it slips out before I can make the correction. I don't know if I should try consciously to break this habit, or whether it will work itself out over time. I don't want to pretend that "we" never existed; I don't want what I had with Philip to be put on a shelf, out of sight. I hate it when people say, "I can't help it," but sometimes, I just can't. Something to work on or at least think about.I actually think I'm pretty lucky. My marriage, short as it was (12 years is pretty short, compared with many people's marriages) gave me much more than I ever expected. We had a wonderful time together. We had problems, to be sure, but even those taught me a lot about myself and what I'm capable of. Not everyone gets the kind of relationship we had. We had some serious obstacles to overcome before we got married, so I think we were always conscious of how valuable our time together was. We were, as Kurt Vonnegut said in "Mother Night," a nation of two.
