At one point she asked if I was disappointed in her. Why, I said, for only beating the odds three times over? Ninety-five percent of the people who’d gotten sick when she did were already dead. Was she asking if I was mad that she’d beaten leukemia for five years instead of ten or fifteen? Lilly shook her head. I never came to you, she said. I never met Yuma as a boy. We never taught together like I said we would. She looked so disappointed in herself that I knew I couldn’t laugh, even though I wanted to. Lilly, I said, I stopped expecting you to move to Arizona after you first turned me down back in ’74. Well, she certainly wasn’t expecting that. But Deb, she said as her eyes went big and round, all these years I really thought I was going to do it! I smiled and got her some water. It used to be when a person didn’t live up to something, I’d pitch accusations at them and jab at the air like I was fighting invisible dragons. I spent a lot of energy trying to make people in my image and then getting mad when they didn’t look the part, but if being a mother and a teacher has taught me anything, it’s that you have to work with what’s already there. I told Lilly there was a difference between a promise and an aspiration. The whole point of an aspiration is to make yourself reach. The only people who achieve everything they aspire to are lazy or cowards. If one of us had been either of those, we never would have stayed friends.

Day after day, no matter how bad the pain got, Lilly wouldn’t let the docs give her anything for it: she wanted to stay present. I pointed out that when the pain took hold of her, she was gone anyway, so she might as well grant herself some relief, but Lilly was afraid that once she started on morphine, she wouldn’t be able to stop.

Each day she asked if Jane had called, and each day something inside her clamped down tighter when we told her no. Lying in that bed, she came to look like a marathon runner, her muscles straining, her eyes focused on a distant point, except that she was trying to run away from something instead of toward it. Finally, I had to tell her it was okay to stop. She wasn’t a bad mother if she needed to leave without saying goodbye.

116. Self-portrait, Cleveland Clinic, January 28, 1977, 4:43 a.m.