We started breaking up on a Thursday in late September. I had made plans to go to New York in October, and I had invited Bernard to stay with us for the two middle weeks of that month. “I wish,” I said to him, “that you could come and stay with all of us the way we used to be.” Then we had gone on to talk about what the month would be like, and we had made plans for the time we would spend together in New York. Bernard and I loved making plans, and we were good at that. I had learned by then that my mother’s condition was degenerating further, that her second chemotherapy was not so effective as had been hoped. “Oh, Bernard,” I said. “What to do?”

And Bernard, in his supportive way, said, “You must just go back to New York and try to keep everything stable, and try to be the same with your mother as you’ve always been.”

I stopped him this time. “No,” I said. “It’s not time for things to be the same anymore; it’s time for things to be different. I need to go back to New York and ask my mother all the things I’ve never asked her, tell her the secrets she’s never known. We have to understand everything before it’s too late, to find all the answers—so that, when she’s gone, I will have no regrets, no uncertainty about who she is and what she feels; and so that when she dies she will know as an absolute certainty how much I love her.”

When Bernard looked at me pityingly, I wanted to strike him. Bernard was a master of sympathy, but he was unacquainted with empathy. The idea that my being sad might have made him sad was as odd to him as the idea that my being fat would make him fat. And so the idea that my mother’s sadness had become my sadness was for him impossible to understand.

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