I’ll live far away from my mother, while she’s drinking herself to death in my old olive-and-adobe bedroom, those desert colors I chose years ago. We’ll talk on the phone, Saturdays, and over the five more years she’ll live I’ll hear that voice go from querulous and difficult and somehow glad to hear from me all at once to something vaguer, more diffuse, finally merely a ramble and drift and disconnection. She sees ghosts in her bedroom; she dreams her dead brother comes and brushes out her hair. Later I’ll find out her brother isn’t dead—but he is, of course, to her: she is at such a huge distance from the past, she has traveled to some isolation where no one can follow, and the vodka (does she still even need to drink?) and tranquilizers and God knows what else seal off her room, consign her to darkness and murmurs and then silence.

“Your father,” my mother says, trying to sit up in the hospital bed, raising her head to look me directly in the eye, urgent, confiding, “has nailed my hands to these boards.”

Why tell a story like this, who wants to read it?

A writer I know says, Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what. Sometimes I think that’s true; difficult experience can be redeemed by the powers of language, and words can help us to see what is graceful or human where loveliness and humanity seem to fail.

But other days I believe it’s the other way round: say it beautifully, or at least precisely, say it as exactly as you can, and you will make it clear. Clarity isn’t in the service of beauty; it’s the other way around. The older I get, the more I distrust redemption; it isn’t in the power of language to repair the damages. Here is a sentence which cannot be redeemed: “Your father has nailed my hands to these boards.”

What we remember, wrote the poet who was my first teacher of the art, can be changed. What we forget we are always. Dick was right: We live the stories we tell; the stories we don’t tell live us. What you don’t allow yourself to know controls and determines; whatever’s held to the light “can be changed”—not the facts, of course, but how we understand them, how we live with them. Everyone will be filled by grief, distorted by sorrow; that’s the nature of being a daughter or a son, as our parents are also. What matters is what we learn to make of what happens to us.