But my mother looked much as she had looked for months. She was sitting up on the pink love seat at the foot of the bed, her back erect, and she had a magazine in her lap. “Hello, boys,” she said. It was the last time she ever said that. “Hi,” we said. She had on her little bit of non-allergenic makeup (still from the doctor’s appointment? Was it just what she had worn to go out for the day, or had she touched it up before we arrived?) and she was wearing a nightgown with pink roses on it, and with lace around the neck and the arms. It was not one of the amazing silk nightgowns she saved for European trips; it was just a nightgown, in her favorite color, with flowers. It was the kind of thing my mother wore, the kind of thing she always wore, that she slept in from my earliest childhood. She was wearing a long pink bathrobe, and one of her white turbans, very fresh and clean, carefully straight on her head. She looked so much herself that I could hardly bear to see her; nor could I turn my eyes away.

Had she said in the hospital room, one year before, that she was already dead? She had repeated, insistently: can’t you see that the woman you loved is already gone, that I am only a shadow, that she isn’t here anymore? But the day she died, that was altogether untrue. She was never more entirely present than she was on that last day in her bedroom. On the day my mother died, it was as though all the richness of her character that provident nature had saved to be slowly dispensed over the following thirty-two years (had she lived as long as her own mother) was suddenly poured out in the space of three or four hours. It was almost blinding, so dazzling you could hardly look at it, a distillation of her capacity to love. Never have I loved anyone so much, or felt so loved, as I did in those few hours.

Freddy went and sat beside her on the love seat, and I sat down on the floor at her feet. Freddy took one of her hands, and I took the other. My father sat opposite us in his red chair. The three of us who were not my mother were full of anxiety, but my mother behaved as though this were only another ordinary matter in the course of family life. “How exactly does this work?” my mother asked, and my father dutifully looked again through the booklet with the directions for ill people who want to kill themselves. He said that according to the booklet it was the usual practice to have a light meal about forty-five minutes before taking the pills. Freddy kept interrupting. “This is just too weird,” he said. Then he said, “Are you sure you want to do this now?” and my father and I were more or less in tears.