I write this using one arm while a tube delivers bright red hemoglobin to the other. Such a happy color in such a gray room, entering my gray body drop by drop, giving me back my desire to look, to read, to eat, to speak. The physical realities of being gravely ill are not a choice you get to make: your body simply gives up on certain things and there’s nothing you can do about it. My coming to terms with the larger consequences of this disease has been a very different thing. Against all evidence, I’d continued to insist to myself that my recovery was only a matter of time. If not for Mr. Wythe’s visit, I might have continued to think this until it was too late; however, with his help, I’ve formed a plan for Jane and for the future. While it wasn’t easy, and I wish I hadn’t needed to, it would have been much worse to risk leaving Jane with nothing.

After all I’d done with Mr. Wythe, telephoning my parents should have been easy, but I cried all the same. I’d always known I would let them back into my life at some point, only I’d pictured it happening in a hazy, distant future sparked by a change in Father’s health, not my own.

Grete cried when I told her, which made me cry, too. It felt strangely good to cry together, not for my diagnosis but for our friendship, which we hadn’t properly mourned. Jane is to call Grete whenever she likes, Grete’s home is her home, sentiments Jane accepted like the echoes they are. And now I’m crying because I’m reading your description of when I was a new mother just home from the hospital, and you arrived at your apartment to the shaky note I’d taped to your door. Deb, I hope your goddaughter won’t ever need a second family, but it is a great comfort to know that she has one with you.

101. Untitled [View from hospital roof], New York, 1970

At first Danny was nervous about coming over to my place after work, but I reminded him that we were safe: his mother thought my mother was home with me, and my mother was in the hospital. Besides, I told him, he was doing a good deed, keeping me company. I could tell that Danny sometimes just wanted to watch TV with his arm around my shoulder, talking during commercial breaks about his day at the store, or my day at school, or about what was happening with my mom; but that wasn’t what I wanted at all.