DEBORAH BRODSKY: I’d fallen asleep in a chair by the window like I always did, only this time I woke up to the sound of her camera. The room was silent except for that clicking sound, but inside my head, a congregation of voices suddenly started shouting Lilly’s name: some saying Goodbye, some saying Don’t go, and some reciting victory poems because she had managed to do this terrible, amazing thing.

She’d picked her time well. It was late. There wouldn’t be anyone checking in on her until morning. My chair was positioned by the door in case the night nurse came. As long as that camera was running, I knew Lilly needed me to guard the space. I was desperate to go to the bed, to stroke her face and hold her hand, to do all the things the heart cries for when someone you love is leaving, but any one of those would have ruined the shot. And so I made myself stay exactly where I was.

Lilly was very, very still. Her eyes were open and staring at the camera with such intensity that looking at her felt like staring at a bright light. I was perched at the edge of my seat, every muscle in my body frozen in the act of launching from that chair. I barely breathed or blinked as the camera clicked and the film advanced frame by frame. I sat there and caressed Lilly with my eyes. For each second of each minute of that last holy hour, my muscles strained and the voices in my head shouted and howled and sang, until the film ran out and the clicking stopped.

SAM DECKER: Deb was the one who knew what funeral arrangements Lilly wanted, and who to contact at the Art Institute, and about the boxes she’d left behind—basically all the things Lilly had been hoping to tell Jane, and which, in the end, she told Deb instead. Deb got the newspaper to run an obituary, not one of those paid jobs but the real deal. She made the telephone calls. At the funeral, there was me, Dot, Deb, an old friend of Lilly’s from Brooklyn, and a bunch of students and teachers who’d known Lilly from the Art Institute. Afterwards we all went to the café where I’d remounted photos from Lilly’s show four years before. Dot was having a pretty hard time. I told her, for what it was worth, she had me now, and I was a stubborn old bastard who wasn’t going anywhere. I wish I could have been around for Meemaw the way I was for Dot, but most of life is just timing. It took me five years to get my head together after the army was done with me. By that time, all that was left of Meemaw was the building with the empty storefront where Anderssen’s Shoes had been.