When her extended death throes began with her admission into the aged care facility, I cleared out the last attic room where she had lived. Apart from a few ugly, worthless pieces of furniture, and some chipped crockery, I found a whole box of lipsticks and orange nail polish, and an impressive library of stories about intrepid Jewish women.

All that emerged from what remained of her brain after the stroke were utterly incoherent criticisms directed at me. They related to the millions of euros I was stealing, her very substantial real estate holdings which I was in the process of allowing to go to rack and ruin, and her dear Schnookie, an imaginary fox-terrier, whom I was mistreating.

I had been enduring these rebukes since the day I was born, but it had grown worse over the last decade. One morning, having spent the last centime of the fat sum of money my father had left her — the girls would have been about sixteen, seventeen at the time — she called me and, in the surprised and mildly exasperated voice of a princess who doesn’t think the service is up to scratch, announced: “Patience, there’s no more money in the safety deposit box . . .” It was the tone she might have used if she’d turned on a tap: Patience, there’s no more water. And it was true, all that was left in the bank were the objects she considered precious: a sample of her favourite lipstick to remind her of the number of the colour, her certification of Jewish status, my father’s numerous forged papers, a metal coin that-mustn’t-be-lost-because-it’s-very-important but which nobody knew anything about anymore, the collars of each of her dead dogs . . . but not a trace of the pile of gold coins that her far-sighted husband had left her after his death.

There’s no more money . . . It was as if she were describing to me a regrettable plumbing phenomenon for which nobody in particular was to blame — especially not her. No particular accusation, no hostility. Just: There’s no more money . . . Immediately, of course, she started sponging off me, without for a moment imagining that it might cause me any anxiety or that I might have to slave away to earn this money. Worse, it was as if she were secretly cursing me for keeping her from penury because in becoming poor she also became completely infuriating, constantly asking me for sums of money down to the precise cent, along the lines I need 223 euros 90, and if I ever dared provide the exact change, she would get on her high horse and accuse me of being a cheapskate or of treating her like a beggar.

I came away from these visits to the end-of-the-road hotel utterly wrung out, every time.