Charlotte had knit a pink toque for Elizabeth to cover her bald head. Charlotte’s own funeral instructions include burying her with her knitting bag. Adam imagines you will hear the clickity-clackity of her knitting needles in her pine casket below ground going for as long as her rotting fingers can hold them.

On the way home from that visit, Elizabeth wore the pink toque. The little girls slept in the back of the car.

“How can you stand them?” he asked Elizabeth.

“I think of my life as a Werner Herzog documentary. Herzog says facing the camera is like facing death. That’s how I do it. Face life like a camera. Live like I’m in a Herzog film.” She was looking straight ahead through the windshield, as if through the night the headlights beamed into a secret she could see but Adam could not, no matter how hard he tried. He remembers gripping the steering wheel in frustration but not saying anything, not wanting to yell at a dying woman or to wake the children.

Werner Herzog is an asshole, he remembers thinking. There was a difference between courage and rashness, between living well and being oblivious to danger. The heater was blasting and he strained to hear Elizabeth as she spoke. Adam remembers how soft her voice was, as though she were praying. Then she was silent for a few minutes before laughing, more like cackling really, and then quiet once more filled the car and all Adam could hear was the low sound of the engine and the heater, the heavy breathing of their small sleeping daughters in their car seats in the back.

When the cancer metastasized to her bones and her brain, Elizabeth wasn’t afraid, only angry at the brevity of her lifespan, at the idea of leaving her little girls. She was in a hospice at that stage. Adam remembers there was a photographer who came in to take portraits of the dying. It was for an art show, photographing the dying for the living, a fundraiser for the hospice. Elizabeth loved the concept. The next best thing to Herzog himself, she said. The photographer brought her little boy because she didn’t have a babysitter and he played with their girls. But Elizabeth died before the exhibition and Adam didn’t go to the opening despite the nice invitations extended. A few months later the photographer had mailed him a sympathy card and a photograph of Elizabeth. She was skeletal and bald but the photographer had captured Elizabeth with a tiny smile as though she had a secret or had finally understood an age-old mystery.

He could still hear Elizabeth’s hoarse chemo voice. I’ve already faced death. I know what’s coming.

Before she got sick, Elizabeth never expected Adam to come along when she took the old ladies out. She did it only because her mother had made her promise to keep up the family tradition. She was dead too, his mother-in-law, of the same sort of hereditary breast cancer which Elizabeth said she’d been on the watch for.