Then we all sat down to write eulogies. Freddy had done a lot the previous evening, while my mother lay dying. I had sketched out drafts of one kind or another on and off during the preceding six months, but they all seemed banal to me. My father headed back to his bedroom to sit in the red chair and write.

“I suppose we should ask someone to read these at the funeral,” he said in passing.

“I’m going to read my own,” said Freddy.

I wavered.

“I couldn’t possibly stand up there and read,” said my father.

“I’m going to read my own,” said Freddy. “If you want me to, I’ll read yours, too.”

“If you’re sure you can do that,” said my father, “then you might as well. But I wouldn’t plan on that. Funerals are terrible. I don’t know how I can even get through the day.”

I wavered. Freddy looked at me. “I’ll do yours if you want, Harry,” he said.

I said that I would have to wait until the morning to decide. “If I can, I’ll read my own,” I said. “If not, I’ll let you do it.”

Then I sat down and wrote my eulogy. It was four pages long, double-spaced, and it was about my whole life with my mother, and it took me fifteen minutes to get it down on paper. It was like typing out something I had memorized a long time before.

• • •

I took sleeping pills again that night, and woke up the next morning with a start. Friday, the day of my mother’s funeral, was my mother’s kind of day, pure springtime, the sun bright and strong and the skies clear with a few tiny puffy clouds scattered down near the horizon as though their sole function were to underscore the extreme blue of the heavens. My father was weeping in the kitchen when I went in to make tea. Freddy was being stoical. I took a long shower and got dressed carefully. I had found the shirt I had had made for my party, that I had forgotten to wear ten days earlier, and I wore it that day. My gold watch had been repaired, and I wore that as well. During breakfast, I reread my eulogy, and I read my father’s, and I read Freddy’s. None of them was as simple or pure as my mother’s last words, but they were just as urgent.