I should tell you, for the sake of honesty, that I believed from the start that my mother would die of her cancer, though I held off that belief so vigorously that some of the time it seemed to recede, almost to vanish. I think that she, too, believed, most of the time, that she would die. How did we get back to New York from France? How, indeed? How did we get from my mother’s straightforward life to the world as it is now? The processes that the mind cannot conceive before their time often prove to be as simple and as gradual as the summer twilight that unfolded outside my mother’s hospital room every day of that first hospital week.

I knew as a child that my father would live forever: he is made of the stuff of tree trunks and of great lakes, of the things that last. And my father was never in a rush. I don’t mean that he wasn’t occasionally eager to get to the office, or hasty getting dressed to go out for dinner; I can say without hesitation that, from time to time, he looked forward to the weekend or to a holiday. But at some more fundamental level, he always had his leisure, world enough to do whatever he was doing; he made me feel that time itself was an ordinary thing, as eternally replaceable as the food we ate and took for granted. My mother, however, for all her strength of will, was as fragile as a new leaf, as indeterminate as a flame; it always seemed to me that she could no more linger in the world than a soap bubble can stay on the air. Many the hour she would devote to her long baths, many the quiet day, many the leisured walk on a spring afternoon; she scheduled her time well enough so that she was never late for an appointment, never hurrying (as I am always hurrying) to meet someone or to get somewhere. She did not (as I do) oversleep and then dress in haste, did not underestimate the number of hours needed for transportation, did not make more plans than she could manage. But she lived life with the particular, careful, slow hunger with which you might approach the last dessert on earth. She held on to every moment as though it were the final one; she did not race through any given day, but, unlike my father, she rushed to have all the experiences of her life before it was too late.

“You’ve got to keep up with life,” she said to me more than once. “It runs away from you.”

“Well, I guess so,” I said, “but sometimes you’ve got to stop and enjoy whatever you’ve done.”