Cima and Tomas’s relationship

Cima and Tomas’s relationship is shaped by a future they expected to enter together and the loss that arrived before they felt ready. Their life before the pandemic was made of work, study, small routines, and plans for children; after Tomas died, those memories became inseparable from Cima’s regret that she had not been beside him. Her recollections preserve both the sweetness of their shared life and the pain of its unfinished expectations.

A life organized around what came next

Cima and Tomas were waiting to have children until Tomas became a full-time faculty member. He was a musician working toward an academic career: he completed his dissertation and passed his oral examinations just as the first cases appeared in Newark. They lived in a walk-up in Brooklyn Heights, with a view of the skyline and bridge, while both felt stressed and their lives seemed to be on hold. Looking back, Cima remembers that period not as an unhappy prelude but as a life she had not understood she was already living.

Their days were marked by small, repeatable comforts. Cima recalls buying an egg-and-bacon bagel before work and Tomas calling from the train platform to ask what he should bring home, perhaps Indian food or pasta. The future they imagined—children, stable work, the work of living—seemed to lie ahead like a train they were waiting to board. In retrospect, that expectation itself becomes part of the relationship’s meaning: the hoped-for life was not separate from their life together, though they did not yet recognize it as such.

Their shared weekends offered a different rhythm from the city and its demands. They went to Keene Valley, stayed in a white clapboard cottage with a view of Noonmark from the sleeping porch, and often climbed the small mountain on Saturdays. They rode single-gear bicycles to a cold swimming place with a little waterfall, stripped off, and jumped into the water. Cima remembers these outings as a ritual of intimacy, made precious by the uncertainty and transience she could only fully perceive afterward.

Separation during the pandemic

When the first reports of illness emerged, Cima was working in public health and Tomas was coughing, though he had no fever and the illness had not yet been clearly identified. Her mother was also dying. Cima decided that she could not fly back to New York City and stayed with her parents; she believed she might return in a week or two. Her friend Joel, a doctor running the hospital wing, told her that he would arrange Tomas’s cremation and hold his ashes. Cima was grateful, and she planned to take the ashes to John’s Brook, near Keene Valley, where she and Tomas had spent so many weekends.

Tomas died in the hospital while Cima was away. In her account, he was confused and calling for her. The separation was therefore not a chosen ending to their relationship but a consequence of overlapping emergencies and information that Cima did not yet possess. She later judges her decision harshly, asking why she stayed with her mother and whether she should have understood the danger sooner. She notes that Tomas had not yet been diagnosed and that many people were coughing, while only a few cases had been confirmed; the uncertainty that shaped her choice does not erase her later self-reproach.

Grief, memory, and belated understanding

Cima’s account makes the emotional consequence of that absence explicit: she wishes she had been there for Tomas and believes she should have known more, given her public-health work and the early reports. Her regret concerns not only missing his final hours but also the impossible judgment, made in retrospect, of how to divide care between a dying mother and a husband who was not yet known to be gravely ill. She describes loving Tomas more than anything, including the God of her Episcopal liturgy, and recognizes that only after his death did she understand the full measure of that attachment.

The memory of their marriage is also a memory of deferred beginnings. Cima says they had been waiting for their real lives to start: for Tomas to finish his degree, for her to have a child, and for them to begin what they called the real work of living. After his death, the years of waiting appear instead as a complete and deeply cherished life. The book’s movement between the routine details of their former days and the knowledge of their ending gives those details a double weight: a meal, a phone call, a bike ride, and a familiar mountain remain ordinary in themselves, yet they become the evidence of what the couple had already made together.

What Cima shares with Hig

Cima’s history becomes part of her conversation with Hig, who tells her that he ended Melissa’s life at her request. Hearing this, Cima says she wishes she could have done the same for Tomas. Her words do not describe what happened: she was absent, and the later scene she recounts is a dream. In it, she dreams repeatedly that Tomas is dying and calling for her, and imagines herself taking the decision to end his suffering. She wakes from the dream carrying the pain of having been unable to help him in life and of having left him alone at the end.

That distinction between memory and dream is essential to their relationship as Cima presents it. The imagined act belongs to her grief, not to the events of Tomas’s death; her account exposes how her mind returns to the moment she missed and invents, in sleep, a different form of presence. When she shares this with Hig, her private guilt becomes something witnessed between two people who have each faced a spouse’s suffering and death. The conversation does not undo Cima’s absence or settle her regret, but it gives her grief a listener and reveals how strongly Tomas remains bound to the life she remembers.