You know that feeling when you've done what’s expected—attended the solemn gathering for a fellow retiree, shared polite condolences—and then you come home and just…sit? I suppose it was the sheer finality of it all that made me… pre-occupied. I spent the whole evening, long after the casserole dish was put away, just checking my pulse. Not out of fear, I don't think, but more a sort of clinical assessment, a quiet inventory. It’s a strange thing, this quiet humming in your wrist, still going, still insistent, when someone else's has simply ceased. Sometimes you just wonder, don't you, about the sheer *persistence* of it.