My Husband Divorced Me At 78, Taking Our $4.5 Million House: “You’ll Never See The Grandkids Again.” He Laughed, I Left. A Month Later, An Unknown Number Called Me: “Ma’am, There’s Been An Urgent Situation Involving Your Husband…”

I had visited once years before and remembered the quality of the light, the way it came off the Gulf of Mexico in the evenings, less sharp than New England light, more generous. I rented a one-bedroom apartment in a building near the waterfront while I figured out what I wanted to own. I walked every morning along the bay. I found a library branch where I became a regular. I found a church with a small choir that needed an alto, and I joined it, though I had not sung regularly since my forties.

I found Donna, the support-group facilitator, had a colleague in Sarasota who ran a similar group. I became, in time, a member of that circle too and then eventually a volunteer, sitting with women who were in the early terrible stages of what I had been through, listening the way Bev had listened to me.

I made a friend named Louisa, 74, a retired pediatrician originally from Georgia, with a laugh that came from deep and arrived unexpectedly like weather. We walked together three mornings a week and went to the farmers market on Saturdays and argued about books with the cheerful viciousness of people who take literature seriously.

It was ordinary.

It was sustaining.

It was enough.