And then we sat down to wait. The time of my mother’s illness was in some sense entirely a time of waiting. For two years, there was not a single day when we were not waiting for a test result, waiting for the end of a course of therapy, waiting for good health again, even waiting for my mother to die. The day of her second surgery, we had arrived in the hospital earlier than early, and we waited for them to take her up to the operating room, and then we waited for them to bring her back down, and every one of the many seconds that passed in such waiting was like a little death of its own, so that by the time noon struck we all felt as though we had died a thousand times without being once reborn. And yet the idea of ceasing to wait was also intolerable. I had in my mind a cartoon image of characters trying to stop short of some precipice and finding themselves unable, skidding along on their heels while the dirt churns up around them: we lived in eager dread that our waiting would end. On the day of my mother’s second surgery, we tried at first to keep up conversation, then lapsed into the books we had brought for distraction. I drummed meaningless chord progressions on my silent keyboard. In the end, we gave up and let ourselves stare fixedly into our three kinds of middle distance, unable to connect by any stretch of our collective imagination. My father and Freddy and I were lost in a neighborhood of pause, and it seemed to me that we remained stranded there forever.