During the week of that second surgery, I watched my mother die. For two days after the surgery she remained in what looked like a trance. She did not open her eyes or move her face; when the nurses woke her up for blood tests or to make her bed, she seemed not to know who they were, and she moved in their arms like a dead body. She did not see us. The IV drip continued to flow into her arm, and from time to time she would shudder, but she did not move or turn or speak. Her face remained set in that expression of rage. When I was a child, I could make my mother completely happy, but I could also make her desperately angry, and I had seen her face when she was in a fury that touched on violence. Never, though, had I seen an expression like the one on her face those days, her lips pressed so tightly into their frown that the blood went out of them. To my father, my mother might be beautiful, but to me, my mother, who had always been so beautiful, was appalling.

At first, we didn’t understand what was happening. It was not until the end of the second day that my father asked one of the nurses why my mother was recovering so slowly from her anesthesia. The nurse—a kind, clean, efficient woman who had been helping my mother since she first got sick—shook her head and said, “The anesthesia is long gone. She’s depressed. It’s a natural response to this kind of news; she’s been so disciplined all year, and she should have been well. She’ll come out, but it’ll take time.”

I suppose that these were really just instructions to wait some more, but how much more could we go on waiting while this inert figure lay in the bed looking like a badly drawn copy of my mother? My mother had been depressed many times that winter, and we knew what her depression was like: she was morose and sentimental and touchy and afraid. This frozen anger was like nothing any of us had ever met. My mother had a thousand different moods, and this was not one of them.

That night, my father and Freddy and I went out to dinner, as we had done at the end of every hospital day. Freddy and I were manic, making absurd jokes, laughing hysterically, until my father’s reserve of calm ran out and his strained sense of humor disappeared, and he pounded on the table with his fist. Everyone else in the restaurant stopped what he was doing and turned and stared. “Would you two stop carrying on!” my father thundered. Neither Freddy nor I could respond. We ended that meal in the same white heat of silence in which we had spent the day.