In consideration of her illness, we ceased to get sick. My mother’s immune system was so depressed that the slightest infection might have proved fatal to her; she could have used up her day’s entire reserve of energy in five minutes of coughing. Even a touch of a cold would have delayed and extended her loathed chemotherapy. So we lived out her fragility. Sickness took on the status of a forbidden indulgence. To protect my mother, we all became untouchable. I longed for the old discomforts of a sore throat, cups of soup, valiance in the face of sneezes. It had been my habit, every winter, to contract some mild edition of the year’s flu, and to go on in spite of it, to feel strong and brave and young because the illness did not stop me from practicing and performing. In the face of a hacking cough, I had proved my heroism season after season. Now this occasion for dignity had been stripped away from me, and though I would, in previous times, have thought a winter without a single sneeze a great luxury, in this year it came to be another pressure. I refused to see friends who were feeling slightly off, and I never left the house with wet hair, and I made sure that I slept regularly and ate well—not out of concern for my own well-­being, but out of concern for my mother’s health. Much later, it would seem like the ultimate luxury to go out and feel that to risk a cold was to risk only my own cough and congestion. In the time of my mother’s illness I took every possible precaution so as not to be the Typhoid Mary of the family; and so my own health became not my own, but a gift to her.

My mother herself became extravagantly untouched. You could not affect cancer with your own conduct, but you could control your chances of other diseases, and my mother, determined to control something, brought to bear a discipline extraordinary even for her. She would not kiss a friend hello. She would not use a public ladies’ room. She would not sit in a public theatre, where someone might breathe down her neck, and she would visit only those restaurants where she could be guaranteed a corner table at some considerable distance from the other diners. She gave up public transport entirely; even a taxi might carry the germs of a stranger. So she stood unwillingly aloof from ordinary life. My mother hated solitude, but solitude was one of the prices this disease exacted from her, the solitude of a misery she could not authentically share, and then the added indignity of physical isolation from the people she loved, who loved her, who wanted to see her, and whose visits she was often obliged to prohibit. She placed as much physical distance between herself and the world as she could; she lived in a cocoon of privacy, with only her illness for an intimate.