“That day they gave me some different doctor and moved me to another room. And do you know your mother came to see me every single day the whole two weeks I was in there? She didn’t stay too long, but she was there every single day, regular as clockwork, eleven o’clock in the morning. ‘You’re looking a bit better today, Janet,’ she’d say. Always with some flowers or a piece of fresh fruit, and once with one of those chocolate-chip cakes you all eat in the summer. And now she’s in the hospital and your father told me not to go see her. But if she’s there and so sick and all, it makes me feel terrible, not going.”

“She’s under a lot of stress right now, but I’m sure she’d be very pleased if you came to visit in a day or two,” I said. “She’s very fond of you.” I remembered all that dragging to the hospital. “You can’t imagine,” my mother had said, “how they take advantage of people like Janet in those places.” My father had shrugged. “Still,” he had said. “Every day.”

Janet’s was the first of dozens of such monologues that were to come. Upon hearing about my mother’s cancer, people would dig out tales of generosity, episodes, as often as not, that my mother herself had forgotten. It was a kind of automatic response built on authentic detail. Acquaintances, shop assistants, the doormen in our building, the man who sold vegetables at the store on Third Avenue, the woman who set her hair—everyone seemed to have an anecdote of benevolence. They recounted these partly to be polite, I suppose, but their stories were not fictive, and they were always moving to me. Within the family, and even among close friends, there were more complicated stories to tell, but in the hearts and minds of that world where she had busied herself from day to day, there seemed, at least in the face of her suffering, to be no end of noble recollections.

“All my friends,” Janet went on, “are praying for your mother. In my church last week, we all prayed together for her. You know she’s never yelled at me, not once in twenty-six years.” Janet put down the heron bowl and returned to the chest. “Tell her I’m keeping everything just the way she likes it here. Tell her I’ve even been keeping some roses in that glass bowl by her bed, just the way she likes them. You tell her everything’s just fine here, in case she’s worrying.”