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.