I was dating two nurses at once. They were both older than me by a good margin. All they had in common with each other was nursehood and microbiology. But really there was very little difference between us. All autopoietic beings, after all, chemically maintain their identities despite constant environmental perturbation. Joan and Marci taught me that trees and people have common eukaryotic roots—we share mitochondria, Golgi bodies, and sperm tails—and that the ultimate ancestor is a DNA-containing microbial cell. The genome trapped within the plasma membrane of eukaryotes is an entity capable of indeterminate growth. It is immortal. Which is not to say it is flawless. Indeed, to err is more than human, it is biological.

Joan was wiry and charmingly goofy. She lived in a trailer park. Her hair was long and red, frayed like antique textile, sexy because it looked old. She almost never wore underwear, only tattered bras or briefs when she did, and she played bass guitar in a band of failed minstrels. She once plucked out a song for me in her nightie, bobbing her hairy head and biting her lip as she strummed. She was forty.

Marci was the ex-wife of a university law professor, and lived on a hill in a Victorian with a dozen rooms and a semicircular driveway. She was pretty and petite, cropped hair dyed a sleek black, but for all the time I knew her she had a blemish on her cheek, a wart that said all she herself would not about what it was like to have your husband leave you for a student. Marci kept busy in community cleanup groups, had three darling sons, and was proud of her kitchen. She was forty-two.

Joan was a home health aid. She darted through town in a clunker, a bag of syringes on the seat next her, and gave injections to people who needed them but couldn’t do it themselves. She made more as an LPN, she said, than she had as a secretary. The injections, which were generally painful, were gratifying to her because she didn’t like most of her patients.

Marci was a full RN, but only volunteered at the local hospice, caring for terminally ill children who arrived one month and invariably died by the next. At first, she said, you cry for them. You cry for every damn one. But before long, there’s one you don’t cry for, either because he’s not there that long, or because you know he’s better off dead. That clears the way. Pretty soon you’re not crying for any of them.

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