We always had private nurses in the rooms as well. In general, therefore, anyone entering the room would find my mother, a nurse, Freddy, my father, and me. There were never enough chairs in these rooms, and there was never enough space, and there was really not enough oxygen for all five of us. Except for the lunch shifts, we sat crowded together. My mother was usually too weak and too depressed and too medicated to come up with anything much like coherence, and the rest of us bit by bit ran out of news and insight to share, and so we would sit in semi-silence, reading books or working, our backs aching from the awkward angles we had been forced to adopt on the plastic chairs, our skin at once clammy and desiccated. We would spin conversation out of each doctor’s visit, each rebarbative hospital meal, each new bowl of flowers, each telephone call. At first, my practicing got squeezed into early mornings and late nights. Later, I brought an electric organ, a portable thing that could be reset to imitate a trumpet or bassoon. The keys were too oddly sprung to work out subtle questions of phrasing and I kept the miserable electric sound turned off, so I couldn’t hear what I was doing. But I could at least drum through scales, negotiate fingering, and memorize new pieces. I sat with my silent music for hours at a time.

Friends of my parents’ came, the women in attractive day clothes, the men in business suits. They were too animated to be quite believable, as though hospitals made them hilarious. “Concerned,” said my father. “Frightened,” said Freddy. Close family friends came to visit not only my mother, but also the rest of us: later, I would say of certain stretches not, “My mother was in the hospital that week,” but, “We were in the hospital that week.” They sat and joined us and gave us anecdotes, which were fodder for conversation after their departure. There were so many friends; people overlapped for long stretches, and my mother struggled for the energy to be comforted by each one of these many friends, all so eager to give their support; it would have worn out a lesser person to get pleasure from so many visitors. Even now, the thought exhausts me. “You’ve got to be a good listener,” my mother used to say to me when I was little. “It’s more important to hear what other people are saying than it is to get across your own points.” So, now, very little of the conversation was about her cancer; it was about her friends, and their children, and their homes, and their marriages, and their dreams. My father and Freddy and I were struggling for empathy; we did everything but get cancer ourselves.

Some of the time my mother would drift off to sleep. “What do you think?” Freddy said to me on the third day.