“I think you’d better come uptown,” she continued. “I’m going to call Freddy now.” Then we hung up. I spun around. I was in a bathrobe and wearing glasses, my hair all standing on end; I had not bothered to get dressed before attacking the closets. Should I just throw on something fast and rush uptown, or should I have a shower first and try to calm down? I couldn’t bear to waste any of my mother’s remaining minutes on earth, but I also wanted to spend the last evening I would spend with her feeling, in small external ways, my best; she hated it when I didn’t shave. I wanted her to remember me as she most liked to see me. I rushed into the bathroom to wash my hands, and the phone rang. I couldn’t decide whether to pick it up, and I almost left it, and then I grabbed it, and it was my mother. “I thought it might be easiest if I sent Robert down to get you,” she said. “I’ll send him down now, and you can collect Freddy from the lab on your way uptown, and you boys can come up here together.”

So I had time to shower and shave after all. My hands were shaking so badly that I could barely hold on to the soap, and the razor was tricky. My contact lenses were almost impossible. Haste makes waste, I thought, trying not to jab myself too many times. I stood in the shower and tried to lose myself in the rush of the water, tried to find repose in the splashing of the water, rubbed shampoo into my hair. I felt physically sick.

I was rubbing conditioner into my scalp when I suddenly felt again the urgency of time, and so I rinsed my hair quickly. I wondered whether Robert was downstairs yet, and worried that I might be wasting minutes I could have been spending with my mother. I rushed to get clothes to wear. And then there was a moment of puzzlement: what to wear to head uptown for my mother’s death? As I looked at my clothes, each item seemed to me marked either as something I had bought in accord with and tribute to my mother’s taste, or as something I had bought in resistance to my mother’s taste. I might have organized my closets that morning by putting the clothes she liked on one side and the clothes she disliked on the other; the items she liked well enough but would never have chosen for me could have been ranged in the middle.

I put on khaki trousers and a blue oxford-cloth shirt, nothing ostentatious, not items we had talked about at any length, year-old and comfortable, but clean and freshly pressed and neat. I stared in confusion at my sweaters, and then suddenly saw the green sweater she had knitted for me. I’d never worn it much, because it itches slightly, and because I’d had a fear of wearing it out: I started saving that sweater when it was made, even before my mother got sick. It seemed like the right thing to wear that day. It occurred to me then that I would probably be the one to choose the clothes in which my mother would be buried.