In March, weeks after James’s death, the author brings a bouquet to her piano teacher, Cristina, whose elderly father has just died. When a man in the parking lot jokingly asks if the flowers are for him, she snaps at him, reflecting that such encounters confirm her low opinion of people who behave “unimaginatively.” Cristina expresses astonishment that the author attended her piano lesson the Wednesday after James died. The author internally concludes that she has no other choice but to continue with her daily activities to keep her mind and body occupied.

In the immediate aftermath of James’s death, the author found she could not play music with emotional moods. Instead, she obsessively practiced the mechanical finger drills from Hanon’s The Virtuoso Pianist, a book of exercises Cristina’s own teacher called “demented.” She develops a method for existing within the “abyss” of her loss, which she calls “marking time” (125). Borrowing the term’s military definition of marching in place without moving forward, she applies it to her routine actions: practicing piano, studying geometry, gardening, and playing a mobile game using Vincent’s old login. She concludes that these activities are essential for the living as a way to structure an otherwise unbearable present. The dead, by contrast, have no need to mark time.

The author traces her use of the word “abyss” to a three-week hospitalization in a New York psychiatric ward following her 2012 suicide attempt. During that time, her friend Tom, a fellow writer, brought her books by Tolstoy and Montaigne, which provided a mental “refuge” from the ward’s chaotic environment. She recalls other patients, including a paranoid woman and a young Bosnian woman whose mother abandoned her during the Kosovo War. A doctor later explained her condition as a “cognitive crisis” where her brain chemistry had gone awry. The author emphasizes that it was her own “thinking, rather than feeling,” that led her to that point (131).

For months prior to her hospitalization, she remembers feeling a cold detachment from her life and family, even during happy moments with her children. She felt as though her thinking self was watching her functioning self from the outside. In the hospital, an elderly patient saw the word “abyss” in the author’s notebook and repeated it, making the author realize that such a state is intensely personal and difficult to communicate. She concludes that books and writing can offer an “approximation of salvation” but not a true escape (133). Tom’s story of seeing the writer Joan Didion in a similar hospital years earlier reinforces this idea, leading the author to assert that each person has their own abyss.

While kayaking, the author’s friend Katherine asks difficult but appreciated questions about her sons’ death, wondering whether the two are connected. After reflecting, the author decides that the answer lies in the value of life, framing their choices as philosophical judgments about existence. To her, Vincent died because he found life unendurable despite its value. Conversely, she believes James, a stoic and philosophical thinker, found life to be endurable but not worthwhile. His suicide was not an act of feeling but of calm, thorough reflection.

The author recounts telling James, weeks before he died, that one must endure the difficult 90% of life for the 10% that brings joy. She feels certain that on his last day, James saw a world without Vincent and concluded it was a place he could choose to leave. After his death, finding an empty sushi box from a favorite shop in his dorm trash, she makes a point to visit the shop herself to reclaim the space. She concludes that she has learned to “suffer better”—to discern which pains are worth lasting and which are “inessential” (148). While she wishes she could have shared this insight with Vincent, she accepts that such wishes are futile. Living by thinking, not feeling, is the only way she can continue in her new reality.