Sundowning was like shape-shifting. Grandma Lucy’s real self—rambling and delirious, eager to believe in histories that never happened—waited until nightfall and then emerged into the shadows. Lucy would start talking to me like a blind person, her gaze slanted away from my face, as she remembered her lost daughter’s favorite sandwiches and how much trouble Matilda had falling asleep at night.

Between the hard clarity of her days and the medicated speech of her nights, there were these twilights, when it was impossible to tell which parts were real and which might have been imagined.

Matilda could be an actress by now, or a poet or a waitress or a bank teller or simply a suburban mother, quietly stupendous. Lucy said that Matilda was the kind of woman who might have died young. At first it shocked me to hear her imagine the death of her own daughter this way—calmly, a bit wistfully—but I realized death did not make her feel the way it made me feel. It was so near she could almost hear it, a distant hum, and who knew what it held? Maybe it held her daughter, waiting. Maybe it would bring them closer than they’d been.

My mom called me every day. She wanted reports over the phone. “I’m not getting the full story from Mother.” She paused. “She’s always been too damn proud.” She couldn’t see what was happening to her mother’s pride. “Is she eating enough?” she asked. “What is she eating?” I told her about the meals but could not explain the long hours between them—hours of mess and boredom, embarrassments of the body. Nobody can tell you that a person is dying, or what her dying looks like, until you see it for yourself.

Grandma Lucy often spoke about Matilda, though she didn’t talk about why she’d left, or been left, or broken ties, or been broken. She talked only about what her daughter had been like when she was young.

“It never should have happened,” she said once. “It was a terrible thing.”

“What thing?”

I thought this would be it, perhaps—a story that had never been told, a story about the break.

“Matilda was just a girl,” she said. “But after him…” Her voice was sharp and singing, as if an old nerve had rubbed raw against the wind.

I got a sick feeling in my stomach. She’d been raped or gotten pregnant.

“She was gone after him. I don’t think I ever found her again.”

One night Alice took me to a play about AIDS in rural Africa. It was performed by a mime troupe, meant to echo those who didn’t have a name for why their families died. They clawed at their skin to mime lesions, and traced bony fingers down their torsos to show the slender sticks that human bodies could become.

Afterward we drank. We drank Jack and Diets and told strangers in a strange bar about this sadness that we’d seen.