The narrator tells more of his wife's past. The man she was waiting for in Seattle had been her "childhood sweetheart," and after they married, they lived a military life as he was transferred to bases. One year after leaving Seattle, she contacted Robert, and they thereafter began to exchange the tapes on which they would tell each other their deep secrets. They continued to exchange tapes as her life as an Air Force wife got lonelier and lonelier, until she finally tried to kill herself with pills. She ended up throwing them up, but At the center of "Cathedral" is a significant irony: a narrator who ignorantly disdains blindness while being oblivious to his own limitations in sight. Of course, the narrator can see with his eyes but does not realize the limitations he has placed on himself, and how those prevent him from seeing or wanting anything greater in life. The story is ultimately about transcendence; that is, an existence beyond the
