• • •

On Tuesday night, we all had dinner together, in the kitchen. My mother had made chicken. She was not feeling at all well, and was off to see the stomach specialist again the following day. I had plans to meet friends that night, and had said that I could stay only until nine o’clock. My father wanted me to have no plans, but I had done enough rearranging of my schedule and I put my foot down.

Freddy pulled the wishbone out of the chicken. “How about it, Mom?” he asked, offering her one side.

“If wishes were horses,” she said, and they each pulled, and she won. “Look at that,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter,” said my father. “I’m sure you both wished for the same thing.”

“I don’t think so,” said my mother cryptically. And she put her half of the wishbone at the front of one of the shelves above the kitchen table.

At nine o’clock sharp I stood up to leave the apartment. I kissed everyone good night. “Always running off to something,” said my father.

“Leonard, let him do what he likes,” said my mother.

“I suppose you’re leaving all the dishes for Dad and me,” said Freddy.

I pointed out that I had done more than my share of the dishes over the weekend in the country, while Freddy had been on the phone endlessly with that friend of his who’d moved to Chicago.

“I’ll do the dishes,” said my father in a tone of mock heroism. “Just stop arguing.”

“Go on, Harry,” said my mother. “You’re keeping your friends waiting.” And so, though I suddenly wanted to stay, I went.

• • •

The next morning, Wednesday morning, my mother went to see her last doctor, for a test the details of which seem too miserable to tell, a test whose lack of dignity, in a day when my mother had, above all else, an unsullied sense of her own dignity, seems to make it irrelevant. The truth of that day lies not in what she endured at the hands of that gastroenterologist, but in the quiet, unyielding, and generous determination with which she was to carry off her death itself. Because that day, Wednesday, after seeing the doctor, in the late afternoon, my mother killed herself.

In real life, people do not have deathbed scenes. Deathbed scenes are a matter for grand opera, and you will perhaps recall that my mother hated grand opera. I can remember her joking about women who stumble across the stage singing for an hour while the knives turn in their hearts; it was one of her synecdoches for the absurdity of the form. But my mother had a deathbed scene as grand and rich, as well-conceived and as stunning as La Traviata’s. Like some Butterfly loosed on Manhattan, she plunged her many knives into her own ravaged frame, and having done that she sang like the sea itself, as though the lifetime she had saved and felt and known had suddenly all come to repeat itself, until we felt, finally, that love was in the room with us, an object no more substantial than her last breaths, but so strong that it would stay with us for all our lives.