Marriage is memory, marriage is time. "She didn't know the songs," I recall being told that a friend of a friend said after an attempt to repeat the experience. Marriage is not only time: it is also, paradoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John's eyes. I did not age....

       --Joan Didion (1934-)  in The Year of Magical Thinking, about the year after the death of her husband