When I woke up the next morning, my mother was dead. This was incredible to me, and it remained incredible to me, and it is still incredible to me now. During the ordinary daylight hours, I have come to accept that my mother is dead; but in the earliest part of the day I still have the sense of bewildered disbelief that woke me up the morning after her death. She said, on the day she died, that she could not believe that we wouldn’t all be sitting around afterward discussing how we had weathered another family storm, and I feel that way myself. So much of the reality of events always came from her; if she and I could compare notes about her death, I would perhaps accept it, but since she and I have not been able to talk about it, it remains obscure and dreamlike. In the early mornings, it seems no more plausible than that the earth is round. I acquiesce to the general wisdom according to which these things are true, but I do so in contravention of every natural instinct and of the evidence of my heart.

The morning after my mother’s death I woke up to a world changed beyond recognition. Hanging in that world as though suspended in water were my father and my brother. We met in the new blank space of the kitchen and ate a silent breakfast. The silence was not one of anger or even of sadness; it was a strange pervasive silence almost like snow, a silence that coated everything and took away the shapes and forms, like the silence of the newly deaf. Without breaking that silence, we talked about what needed to be done. I agreed to phone my mother’s friends. Freddy agreed to go with my father to identify the body. My father called to make the technical arrangements for the funeral. We agreed to meet at noon to make together whatever decisions we needed to make together.

It is often said that there is nothing so terrible as to be the bearer of bad news, but this is untrue. Every time you convey some sorrow of your own, you are borne up by the dismay you bring to other people, which makes your own sensations fuller and more rounded. It is painful to make others sad, but their sadness also places and contains and validates your sadness. I called all my mother’s friends and many of my own friends that morning. I did not chat with anyone; I gave the news to each of these people and explained that I had many calls to make, and hung up almost at once. This telephoning was a powerful business: I felt that I reached into each of these men and women and brought forth their grief. Of course everyone was shocked, everyone but the very closest members of my mother’s inner circle. “But last week,” they all said, “at the party,” they all said, and I said only that she had died quietly and at home and as she had wanted to die.