In the ten months or so after I dropped out of school and, in the spirit of self-destruction and self-discovery, gave myself over to everything that everyone associates with Hollywood in the ’70s, I didn’t telephone Cleveland according to any set schedule. I remember dialing my grandmother around Christmastime from a party at a beach house, using a phone from one of its ten bedrooms so I wouldn’t have to call collect. Two months later, I was sitting on a patio with a poolside phone just like the ones in the movies, at a house where I’d spent the night. Though my general recollection of that period is spotty at best, I remember the exact date—Sunday, February 20, 1977—because as soon as Grandma heard my voice, she told me that my mother was dead. My legs shot straight out in front of me, tipping my chair sideways onto the ground, but I couldn’t feel anything, so it didn’t hurt. Because Grandma and I were both crying so hard, only half of what we were saying to each other made any sense. When she said I couldn’t come to the funeral, I thought she didn’t want me there. Very gradually, like a blind person trying to climb a series of barbed-wire fences, I realized it wasn’t that I was not invited: I was just horribly and permanently too late.

For an indeterminate period of time after that call ended, I stared at some ants crawling in and out of a crack in a terra-cotta patio tile, until I can only assume someone found me, stood me up, and told me it was time to leave. My mother died on Friday, January 28, 1977. When I called home, she was already twenty-three days gone.

The Last Self-Portraits

115. Self-portrait, Cleveland Clinic, January 28, 1977, 4:22 a.m.

SAM DECKER: No one’s always healthy, so sometimes she got sick; except with her, it was more complicated. Once she had to go downtown. For a week they gave her antibiotics and transfusions until she got better again. The final time began the same way, except after a week she wasn’t any better, and they told her the cancer was back.