Oliver started calling me Mum in a way that made me feel flushed and proud. His mother was wonderful, and when she visited to talk about the wedding, we got along so well! Oliver was an only child, and Helen adored Juliet (as she should have), and asked to pay for half the wedding so it could be as extravagant as possible.

“I adore them together, don’t you?” she asked, and we bonded over our love of our offspring.

Juliet and I spent the most wonderful year talking about colors and flowers, church readings and dresses, without a single cross word or bridezilla moment. We went to New York to pick out her dress, just the two of us, because that was how she wanted it, and oh, yes, I cried when she came out, smiling . . . beaming, really. It seemed that just yesterday, we’d been playing in her room, or I was wrapping her up in a big towel after her bath, breathing in the smell of her clean skin, making her laugh.

My beautiful little girl.

Sadie was eleven when Juliet and Oliver got married, a tomboy with a sketchbook who said she didn’t want to be a junior bridesmaid, “whatever that was.” It was fine. It was better, really, without a sullen tween sighing dramatically and reading Sylvia Plath as the other bridesmaids laughed and chatted.

The wedding was every mother-of-the-bride’s dream. Every detail was gorgeous, from the cream and apricot flower arrangements to the delicious hazelnut cake. At the reception, Juliet thanked me for being a perfect mother in front of 250 guests, and said she could only hope to be half as good a mom as I was.

When she and Oliver moved into their Chelsea apartment, she asked for my help decorating it, “since you have such great taste, Mom.” There was a second bedroom painted in pale blue, my favorite color, and the bed had feather pillows on it, because Juliet knew I preferred them. My favorite tea was always in their cupboard, and Oliver was always wonderful when I visited for the occasional weekend, making us dinner the first night, then sending us out for some “lovely mum and daughter time.” The theater, or shopping, or best of all, just a long, drawn-out dinner at a quiet restaurant with my favorite person in the world.

Meanwhile, Sadie embraced every cliché of a teenage girl. The weariness, the cynicism, the all-black clothing. She became obsessed with painting, giving minimal effort in her other classes, lecturing me on the importance of art over all else.

“Really?” I said. “Over medicine? Do you think art is more important than, gosh, I don’t know, saving lives?”

“Life isn’t worth living without art,” she said airily. Spoken like someone who’d never been sick.