On the Wednesday my mother died, the implausible weather finally broke, and it rained and it rained and it rained and it rained. I remember that this seemed like a dark omen when I woke up in the morning, as though the clouds had come to tell me something I would have preferred not to know. But I remember feeling also that the rain seemed protective, all that water flowing down around us, and that my apartment seemed strangely dry and safe in the downpour. I remember sitting inside with all the lights on, thinking that I needed more and better lamps. I played the Schubert over, the piece on my CD, which I was to play for a concert two weeks later. I tried to play it just as it was on the CD, but I found that the piece had changed for me, that it had become softer and less clear. I put down the lid of the piano, and decided that I would rearrange all my closets, bring to the apartment the fullness of order, the order that had degenerated into chaos during the weeks before the party. Seldom have I been so meticulous and so thorough: I chose each hanger for each pair of trousers, put the suits at the left side, the winter things far to the right, arranged my neckties in a chromatic progression.

Did I have a sense of foreboding on that damp morning? Is there anyone in the world who, recalling the events, has not had a sense of foreboding on the day of his mother’s death? I had had a sense of foreboding every day for a month, and on that day I had a strange sense of peace, a sense that the time had come to put everything in place. Was I hoping for my mother’s death? The thought made me ill. And yet it cannot be denied that what we have anticipated with dread for too long comes to seduce us. I wanted to put pain behind me, and though my mother’s death, in fact, would only change the shape of my pain, it would be at least an end to her pain, an end to the pain outside my knowledge or ability to affect. I wanted my mother to live forever, but if she could not live forever, I wondered whether it wasn’t time for her to go.

That is not to say that I was prepared or even comprehending when she called at three o’clock. “Hello, Harry,” she said. “How are you?”

I said that I was OK, and that I had been rehanging the closets. “And how are you?” I asked.

“It wasn’t good news this afternoon from that doctor,” she said, and paused for a moment. “I think this is it.”

I felt a strange surge of terror, and excitement, and also panic, and also a sudden blankness. “Do you mean—” I started. I tried to think of words.