I had not noticed until then that our fixed emotions can perish as easily as new ones; nor had I noticed how changes can without warning violate what we love in ourselves. That request forced all the emotions one associates with an actual death: I instantly found myself searching for things to hold on to, trying to locate how I would remember her, snatching at the odd episodes that had stuck from early childhood. And I found, to my surprise and horror, that I had almost no memories at all, and that the ones I had were meaningless—memories of houses and hotels and restaurants, a few freeze-frames of her in conversation, a chance image of her waiting for me to come home from school or materializing for a visit at summer camp—but none of my mother fully herself. I felt the most terrible emptiness, of having made too little effort, of having lost what should have been my mind’s pictures.

I knew, of course, how much of my life (even Bernard, even the piano) had to do with acceptance and rejection of what she represented to me—and I realized that to lose her would be to lose my reasons for most of what I did. When I looked for concrete memories, though, I came up with paper-thin images just of how pleasant our lives had been, of nothing more than the pleasantness; and I knew that our lives were something other than that, something at once more and less than that. “Promise you will always remember me as I have been until today,” she said, as though there were one way she had always been, a simple way, a snapshot thing to remember—and my mind was cluttered with bits of long-vanished clothing and songs we had sung when I was six. Then suddenly I thought that if she died I would also have to die, that I would not know how to stay alive without her. I thought that I could no more readily conjure token memories of her than I could such token images of myself. By the time my father came back from the front desk with the confirmed tickets, it was he, and not my mother, who seemed like a visitor from some distant corner of memory.

• • •

Later on Sunday the world settled back into place. In my parents’ suite we ordered an odd hodgepodge of dinner from room service, a mix of breakfast food and lunch food and dinner food. Sleek and efficient, the waiters brought it all in on a rolling table, pulled out the table’s leaves, arranged the cerise-and-white floral china, and pulled over chairs. Each time one of the glasses touched another, a perfect note would sound, which the waiters would quickly arrest with their long fingers, as though in mystic regard for silence. We sat on the other side of the room while this was going on, pretending not to notice, and talked vaguely about the weather.