Suddenly, I started to cry. I could say that it was very complicated, that it was about everything, and of course it was about everything, too. But in fact, I started to cry in simple mourning for my mother, who was there in the room with me. I started while she sat across the room, and then I walked over and sat down beside her and buried my head and wept on her shoulder. For a long time she stroked my hair. “Harry,” she said. “You will be all right, Harry.” I shook with tears, as I had cried when I was very little. It was a kind of crying I had almost forgotten. “Harry, you’ve been working yourself up into hysterics,” said my mother. “I know that you’ll miss me, Harry, but you can go on and you will go on, because you don’t have any other choice. I understand why you’re sad, Harry, but not why you’re so overwrought. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” I held on to my mother’s fragile body, the shadow of a body that she had then. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she said again. “You have such a good life, Harry. You’ve got to get on with it and live it.” Still I cried. “This has gone on long enough,” my mother said quietly, almost to herself. “You’ve all got to get on with your lives.” Then she pushed me gently away. She put a hand under my chin. “Come on, Harry,” she said. “Pull yourself together. Let’s make ourselves some lunch.” And she stood up, and led me along the hallway to the kitchen. Janet was doing the cabinets. “Janet, is there some of that salmon left?” my mother asked, and we made toast.

• • •

The verb “to die” is one of the few that is only readily usable in the past and future tenses. We accept, “He died last year,” and we can easily accept, “We will all die someday.” But the present tense, “I die, you die, he dies”—that should be canceled right out of the language. And to have to use the verb in that tense not for a single moment but for weeks and months and then years: that is altogether intolerable. We tend to think, furthermore, that “to die” is a verb of the instant, like “to dive.” It is a thing that takes almost no measurable time. One second you are on the board, looking at the water, and the next second you have left the board behind you and taken the plunge. So with many deaths: one second you are alive, and the next second you are dead. Science defines death in this way, and your death certificate indicates a particular moment as the moment of death. But sometimes the verb “to die” is more like the verb “to age,” and is a thing that happens by terrible and slow and imperceptible degrees. My mother was not given a chance to age in that manner, and was, by way of inadequate compensation, given an experience of death as gradual as a life span.