I should say here that, since I did not have so much as a cold all winter, I forgot how unpleasant it is simply to be under the weather. Two years later, when I endured an upset stomach and general malaise and a slight sore throat for a few days—a ­seventy-two-hour virus—I realized that I was experiencing some of the symptoms my mother had known during that long winter, and I tried to imagine what it would have been like to feel that way for an unrelenting nine months. Then I realized how hard it is to sustain any optimism when you are occupied with your own discomfort, and I saw that if my mother thought she was dying, this was in part because she had had too many sensations that were too much like death for far, far too long. In the way that a slight skin irritation sustained over months becomes as bad as a deep flesh wound, so my mother’s chemotherapy symptoms became terrible simply because they never went away. I tried to be a staunch support to her: I called every day when I was abroad, and came back to New York at least once a month. I went with her to have the wig fixed (in the end, she did have wigs that looked so much like her hair you would never have known they were anything else, but it required unholy care to make what was dead appear to be part of her living self). I did everything a perfect son would have done, but I did it in a spirit of largely unarticulated peevishness. I wanted credit all the time; I wanted a marching band to come to Kennedy airport each time I landed, to sing out my praises on the tuba and the big bass drum. June sparkled on the horizon: in June they would do a final test, prove that my mother was fine, and abandon the chemotherapy. In June, we would be entirely free.

• • •

My mother apologized at least a thousand times that winter for the terrible accusation she had made in the first weeks of her illness. She had repeated that all she wanted was for me to be happy, that she accepted my decisions, and that she worried only about my having a lonely old age and living at the margins of society. I insisted that she had to meet Bernard when next she came to London, and she insisted that she wouldn’t. I can remember sitting with her at tea one afternoon, telling her that if she loved me she had to include herself in the whole of my life.

“You cannot love me but close out Bernard and our relationship,” I insisted, “because that is now a part of me.”