Before she died, they went stargazing.

She was always exclaiming, Oh look! There’s Orion’s Belt. The Big Dipper!
He would put his hands up to the sky and be able to see
every constellation lying next to her, could draw lines
where there had previously been unconnected dots.
He used to think that if he could just steal away
into her mind for one day, he would be able to understand the universe.
To see how life entered her head,
like sunlight filtering through a window,
he might be able to make sense of it all, to see all the constellations.
Whenever he was with her, he was overcome by the fierce desire
to grow small enough to fit behind her eyes.
He wanted to see everything the way she saw it,
to perceive every movement the way she interpreted it.
She was a book in his hands he wanted to know better than the back of his hand.
But he neglected to study the lines in her palms.
The end of the story came by surprise. Everything suddenly undone,
like a bag of marbles crashing to the ground. Scattered.
For days he wandered in and out of rooms, treading heavy
lines into the carpet, whispering the names of stars.
He learned them all. Winter and summer. Made them into a mnemonic device
he repeated to himself during the day, and at night, took a lonely lawn chair
out into the back and stared at the sky till it was nothing but a big blurry brightness
made of so many shapes and lines.
Eventually, he knew the stars so well he forgot how to spell her name.