I’d been divorced for six months, my ex-husband was planning to marry a former friend of mine, and I’d put my cat to sleep at Christmas. The night before I turned thirty, I affixed a temporary tattoo of a zebra above my left breast, threw a party, and danced until past midnight. The next day, for my birthday, I went snowboarding for the first time and fell so hard on my tailbone that my nose started to bleed. Then my father was diagnosed with lymphoma. And my great-aunt Charlotte was buried.