She talked more of Cuba. Sometimes when he came home he would find her sitting in the dark of her room by the window, looking down at the traffic sliding silently over Arlington Street.

What was she seeing, he asked himself: Cuban waters? Cuban forests and Cuban fields? The faces of ghosts, people he had never known?

“Mamacita,” he said one night, unable to be completely silent. He kissed the top of her head. He wanted to reach out, stroke her face, pull her gently to him, place his arms around her in such a way that nothing could reach her, so anything that might harm her would have to go through him first. But he was afraid that he would frighten her, so he did nothing.

Within seven weeks the aspirin and codein had proven ineffectual. The cancer man replaced them with Demerol.

Eleven weeks after that, he returned her to the very nice, sunny room in Phillips House at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Charming nurses filled her veins regularly with the gift of poppies.

Two days after his mother went into coma the cancer specialist told him gently but matter-of-factly that he could continue to do a number of things to prolong the agonized functioning of her vital organs or he could discontinue to do them, in which case she would die rather quickly.

“We are not talking about euthanasia,” the elderly physician said. “We are talking about deciding not to give support to a life in which there is no longer hope for real living; only, perhaps, for intermittent periods of terrible pain. I never make this decision alone when there is a relative. Think about it. It is a decision you will be faced with again and again as a doctor.”

Rafe did not take much time to think about it. “Let her go,” he said.

On the following morning he entered his mother’s hospital room to see a dark shade bending over her, a tall, skinny priest whose freckled baby face and carrot hair above his black cassock was a joke.

Oil already glistened on his mother’s eyelids, reflecting winks of light.

“. . . May the Lord forgive you whatever sin you have committed,” the priest was saying, his dipped thumb making the sign of the cross on her twisted mouth, his voice an abomination, the worst kind of South Boston accent.

You unwholesomely sober young man, what serious sins could she possibly have committed, Rafe wondered. The juvenile thumb dipped again. “Through this holy anointing . . .”

Ah, God, as they say, you are dead. If you existed, why would you screw us around like this? I love you. Do not die. I love you. Please.

But he said nothing aloud.

He hovered at the foot of his mother’s bed, feeling suddenly the aloneness, the awful isolation, the knowledge that he was a speck of pigeon waste in the terrible, terrible emptiness.