By the time my mother came home from her first surgery, we had become a new family. We were the afflicted, our pain a subject for public consumption. My mother, who had always required support and protection, was now to be buoyed up against all odds by every ounce of our energy, and by every ounce of energy we could solicit from her friends, our friends, from doctors, from the doormen in our building and the man who filled prescriptions at the local pharmacy and the shoemaker who had been resoling our shoes since before I was born and the headwaiters at her favorite restaurants. My mother had such broad systems of friendship that her friends seemed almost to compete for her notice, anxiously presenting their attention and their flowers (I associate my mother’s entire illness with cut flowers), which we accepted as though they were sung ballads and tributes of gold.

We were transformed, but at the same time we were very much as we had always been. We were of course no longer bravely untroubled, but we were to compensate for that by having the perfect experience of illness. We would mention in a casual way the particular attentions paid by famous specialists whose names we had, two weeks earlier, never heard, as though these men and women were the medical equivalent of family silver. We noticed how much sympathy there was around us, so much sympathy that it became like part of the air, a supplement to oxygen and carbon dioxide. My mother had decided, for public purposes, to be brave and pessimistic. “Leonard tells me I’m not dying, but I don’t believe a word of it,” she would say lightly to a friend. And as we continued not to separate for more than an hour at a time, she would sometimes say, “The boys are keeping a deathwatch over me. I keep telling them to go out, but they don’t want to miss a minute of the fun.”

My mother had a succession of strange and powerful whims, like a child princess in a fairy tale or a pregnant woman in a myth: she would suddenly conceive a longing for the particular pasta she sometimes ordered at a restaurant we all knew, and so my father would go down and persuade the chefs to give him dinner to take home. She read books she would ordinarily not have read, and refused those she might under other circumstances have enjoyed. She arranged for a manicurist to come to the apartment and paid exquisite attention to her nails. A few days after she came home from the first surgery, she agreed to take walks around the block; it was the brink of autumn then, a favorite time of year, and the sun was pleasant, and my mother would wear loose clothes that did not constrain her and walk slowly, holding her head steady as if she had a book on it, and moving as though an abrupt gesture might dissever one of her limbs.