My father and I both stared at it.

“That’s the one she thought she’d lost,” said my father.

“That’s it,” I said.

We looked at it again, as though it were a meteor fresh from the outer reaches of the galaxy.

“Freddy,” I called, and Freddy came running in from his room. “Look,” I said.

Freddy looked down at the bed. “What do you know,” he said. “It’s that pin. So it didn’t go to the dry cleaner after all.” He leaned over and picked it up. “Remember how Grandma used to wear this all the time?” he said. “When I think of Grandma, I think of her in this pin.”

My father began to cry again. “If we could only let her know that we’d found it,” he said.

Freddy crossed the room to put it away, and he opened my mother’s jewelry box. Placed neatly on the tray that held her everyday earrings, the top tray in the box, were three envelopes. One was addressed to me, one to Freddy, and one to my father. It was Sunday night. The condolence calls were over, and we were about to begin the struggle of life without my mother. We found her letters all together; it was as though she had planned this detail, too.

To me and to Freddy she said what she had said before she died. She told us that she loved us and that we had to get on with our lives. To my father, she wrote simply this: “My dearest Leonard: What a sweet life we had together. How happy you made me. You made me feel beautiful, you made me feel cherished, you made me feel safe and protected. Above all you gave me the bliss of knowing always that I loved and was loved. You are in my heart always.”

I read my note over, and then I set off downtown. Helen met me at the door.

• • •

The process of holding on to someone who is dying and the process of holding on to someone who has died are as alien to each other as love and indifference. I had argued with my mother in the weeks before her death, but for those first months after she died she was in my mind an angel, and I had no purchase on the reality of our relationship. I played memories over and over until I eventually made them tedious even to myself. Every day I talked on the phone with my father and argued. Then I called Freddy to tell him how impossible my father was. Sometimes his line was busy, when my father was calling him to complain about me. Freddy was implacable and even-tempered; some days I thought this must mean he had loved my mother the least of us all, but some days I thought it meant he had loved her the most.