But no matter how hard Lucy tried, her work could not matter to the suburban economy as Kate’s work mattered to the farm’s; in Connecticut’s economy, it was cash that counted, not provision of service. In the old rural world, cash lay outside the work-center; meanwhile, the work-center was powerful to provide the necessities of warmth and nutriment—and self-esteem.

In her thirties my mother became ill with severe unexplained weight loss followed by a series of operations: gallbladder, hysterectomy. Gradually, she recovered her vigor and acuteness. By the time my father began to die she was strong; she took tender and assiduous care of him as he wasted. He died young and she survived him—and developmental stages did not cease with widowhood at fifty-two. A year after my father’s death, she developed an ulcer. She went to a surgeon looking for an operation; he said to her: “Work.” As a volunteer, she worked with children at a hospital in New Haven and her health improved. Then supermarket loss-leader milk sales reduced Brock-Hall’s home delivery market, the stock stopped paying dividends, the company headed toward ruin—and my mother needed a wage. She had not taught since 1927, but she took courses to bring herself up to date and in her mid-fifties entered the marketplace as a substitute teacher. She taught in Hamden schools with great success for ten years, grew more energetic and livelier-minded as she grew older, and thrived again in a high pride of work and accomplishment.

For Henry Moore or any ambitious work-lover there is not only the best day but the worst. For many achievers the worst day is depression—lethargy, discouragement, conviction of failure. Some temperaments, like Henry Moore’s, are more fortunate than others, more able to ride over a bad patch by steady work, by playing over the pain as NFL announcers like to put it. Until sickness and death at least: Sickness and death take care of everybody. Henry suffered bad family times late in life, estrangement from his daughter and therefore from his grandchildren. Then a gallbladder operation almost killed him, and his short-term memory diminished catastrophically. The great worker, still wishing to rival Michelangelo late in his eighties, sat helpless and cathetered in his wheelchair a few years later, occasionally trying to sketch.

It sounds like bliss: “late in his eighties.” I am about to start chemotherapy. I read the medical literature concerning my disease and understand how poor my chances are to live more than a few years; maybe three, but what will the third year be like? Will there be energy enough for work? I imagine that another lesion grows rapidly, in my remaining liver. When I panic, panic confounds itself with guilt and rage—because Bernie Siegel, Chopra, and other visualizers tell me that I kill myself by negative imagining, the victim guilty as ever. Sometimes I understand that the people I love the most believe, against their own wishes, that I have little time to live. When we were in Connecticut Jane told me, clearly wondering whether she should speak, that in my mother’s house she kept glimpsing a man she had never seen before, a figure at the corner of her eye who vanished quickly. It was my father, she understood, who died of cancer when she was eight years old. Her notion depressed me sharply and I didn’t respond. “He’s just looking out for you,” she suggested, but I don’t think it was her only thought; the room we sleep in, in my mother’s house, is the room he died in. Talking with my mother I suggested that, if she didn’t return to smoking, maybe she could stay out of the hospital for, oh, maybe two whole years. She shook her head no: “One year for me,” she said; “two years for you.” She wasn’t talking about staying out of the hospital.