I know you're supposed to be happy on this day. How weird is that. When you're young, you're generally happy, or at least willing to be. You get older and you see things more clearly and there are less reasons to be happy. You also start to lose people – your family. Ours weren't necessarily easy, but they were ours, the cards we were dealt. There were five of us, in fact, like a poker hand – it's the first time I've thought about it. We are over the river and in New Jersey now, we are going to arrive in Philadelphia in an hour, we left the station on time. I think especially of her – older than me and older than our brother, and so many times responsible for us, always the most responsible, at least until we were all adults. By the time I was an adult, she had already had her first daughter. In fact, by the time I was twenty-one, she already had her two daughters. Most of the time I don't think about her, because I don't like to feel sad. Her wide face, her smooth skin, her pretty features, her big eyes, her fair skin, blonde hair, dyed but natural, with a little gray. She always seemed a little tired, a little sad, when she paused in conversation, when she rested for a moment, and especially in photos. I searched and searched for a photo where she didn't look tired or sad and couldn't find one. They say she looked young and peaceful in a coma, day after day. The coma went on and on – no one knew when it would end. My brother told me that she had a glow on her face, a wet glow—she was sweating lightly. The plan was to let her breathe on her own, with some oxygen, until she stopped breathing. I never saw her in a coma, I never saw her at the end. I'm sorry now. I thought I had to stay with our mother and wait there, holding her hand, until they called. The call came in the middle of the night. My mother and I got out of bed and stood in the dark living room, the only light coming from outside, from the street lamps. I miss her so much. Maybe you miss someone more when you can't figure out what relationship you were in. Or when it seemed unfinished. When I was little, I thought I loved her more than our mother. Then he left home. I think he left right after he finished college. He moved to the city. I must have been seven years old. I have some memories of her in that house, before she moved out. I remember her playing music in the living room, I remember her standing by the piano, leaning slightly forward, her lips tight around the mouthpiece of the clarinet, her eyes on the sheet music. He played very well at that time. There were always little family dramas over the reeds he needed for his clarinet mouthpiece. Years later, miles from there, when I would visit her, she would take out the clarinet, after not playing for a long time, and we would try to play something together, we would work our way, by trial or error, through something. Sometimes you could hear the full, round notes she had learned to play, and her perfect sense of the shape of a line of music, but the muscles in her lips had grown weak, and sometimes she lost control. The instrument squeaked or went silent. When she played, she would force air into the mouthpiece, squeeze hard, and then when there was a break, she would lower the instrument for a moment, exhale quickly, and then take a quick gulp of air before playing again. I remember where I was. the piano in our house, just under the archway into that long, low-ceilinged room shaded by the pine trees beyond the front windows, with the sun streaming in through the side windows from the bright patio, where the rose bushes grew against the house and the iris beds spread out in the middle of the garden, but I don't remember her there on these holidays. Maybe he didn't come home for that. It was too far to go back very often. We didn't have a lot of money, so there probably wasn't any for the train tickets. And maybe she didn't want to come back so often. I wouldn't have understood then. I told my mother that I was willing to give up the few dollars I had saved if I could bring her home to visit again. I was serious, I thought it would help. But our mother just smiled. I missed her so much. When he still lived at home, he often took care of us, my brother and me. The day I was born, that hot summer afternoon, she was the one who stayed with my brother. They left them at the fair. She took him to the games and they walked through the stalls for hours and hours, both thirsty and tired, in that flat basin where the amusement park was and where years later we watched the fireworks. My father and mother were miles away, on the other side of town,at the hospital on top of the hill. When I was ten, the rest of us moved, too, to the same town, so for a few years we all lived close by. She would come to our apartment and stay for a while, but I don't think she came over very often, and I don't really understand why. I don't remember family meals with her, I don't remember us going on excursions around the city together. At the apartment, she listened carefully when I practiced the piano. He would tell me when I played a note wrong, but sometimes he was wrong. He taught me my first word in French: he made me repeat it over and over again until I pronounced it perfectly. Our mother is also gone now, so I can't ask why we didn't see her more often. There will be no more animal-themed gifts from her. There will be no more gifts from you. Why those animal-themed gifts? Why did he want to remind me of animals? He once gave me a ceramic penguin mobile – why? Another time, a balsa-wood gull, dangling on string, flapping its wings up and down in the breeze. Another, a tea towel with badgers.

Trenton does, the world is reborn – outside the window. How many more advertising slogans am I going to look out the window today? Now there are poles fallen in the water with the cables still attached – what happened to them and why were they left there? Those without family are always asked to work on this day. I could have said that I was spending it with my brother, but he's in Mexico. Four hours, a little more. I will arrive around dinner time. I'm going to eat at the hotel restaurant, if it has one. That is always the easiest. The food is never very good, but the people are friendly. They have to be, it's part of their job. Nice sometimes means they'll turn down the music for me. Or they say they can't, but they smile.

Is the love of animals something we shared? He must have liked them or he wouldn't have sent me those presents. I can't remember what it was like with animals. I try to remember her moods: so often worried, sometimes more relaxed and smiling (at the table, after having some wine), sometimes laughing at a joke, sometimes playful (years ago, with her children ), these times filled with a sudden physical vitality, she would pounce on someone across the garden, under the laurel, in the fenced garden that her husband tended so patiently. She worried about so many things. He imagined a bad outcome and worked it out until it became a story that moved away from where it started. He could start with a forecast of rain. To one of his older daughters, he could say something like: It's going to rain. Don't forget your raincoat. If you get wet you could catch a cold, and you could miss tomorrow's performance. That would be very wrong. Bill would be so disappointed. He's so excited to hear what you think of the play. You and he have talked so much about her… I think about that a lot – about how tense she was. It's something that must have started very early, he had such a complicated childhood. Three fathers by the time he was six – or two, I suppose, if you don't count his real father. He only knew her as a baby. Our mother always left her with other people—a nanny, a cousin. For a morning or a day, usually, but once, at least, for weeks and weeks. Our mother had to work – it was always for a good reason. I didn't see her very often, it was a long time in between, because she lived so far away. When we met again, he would put his arms around me and give me a tight hug, pressing me against his soft chest, my cheek against his shoulder. He was half a head taller, and he was bigger. I was not only younger, but smaller. She had been there forever. I had always felt that she would protect me and take care of me, even when I grew up. I still think sometimes, with a pang of longing, before I know what I'm thinking, that an older woman, I see somewhere, one like fourteen years older, will take care of me. When I pulled away from the hug, she was looking to the side or over my head. He seemed to be thinking of something else. So when his eyes landed on me, I wasn't sure he was seeing me. I didn't know what he really felt for me. What was my place in his life? Sometimes she thought that for her daughters, and even for her, I was not important. The sensation came to me suddenly, an emptiness, as if I didn't even exist. There were just the three of them, her two daughters and her, after the death of her father, after her second husband left. I was peripheral, our brother too, although he and I had been an important part of his life before. I was never sure how he felt about anyone except his daughters. I could tell how much I missed them, when they were gone, because she would suddenly become so silent. Or when they were about to leave – from the rented house on the beach, saying goodbye on the threshold, the bright grass growing on the sand of the dunes beyond the cars, the gray roof tiles in the sun, the smell of fish and creosote, the flashes of the sun bouncing off the cars, then the slam of a car door, the slam of the other door, and her silence. It was when she was quiet that I felt I had the most access to the truth of her feelings, a way of looking at them, and at those times they were usually related to her daughters. But I think her feelings for our mother were a heavy burden on her life, At least when we were together. When our mother was away, maybe she forgot her. Our mother always used it to climb higher, she always needed to be right, she always needed to be better than her, and all of us, almost all the time. The terrible innocence of our mother, too, when she did that. I had no idea, most of the time.

Our last conversation--was on the phone, long distance. She said that she had difficulties with the field of vision on the right side. On a form she was completing, she saw the word date and wrote the day, not seeing that there were more words to the right, and that she had to fill in the date of birth. We talked for a while, and toward the end of the conversation I must have said something about talking again in a few days, or keeping in touch so he could let me know how he was doing, because then, in response to that, he said he didn't want to talk again because he wanted to preserve all his strength to speak to his daughters. When he said it, his voice sounded distant to me, or exhausted, he didn't soften what he was saying, or apologize. We never spoke again after that. But the coldness was the sound of her own fear, her worry about what was happening to her, not something against me. After she died, I would go through it over and over again, trying to see how she felt about me, trying to gauge it. , to find affection or love, measure that, assure me. She must have had mixed feelings for me, her so much younger sister – my life at home was easier than hers had ever been. She probably felt a bit jealous, which continued, year after year, and yet she wanted to be with me, she came to where I lived, she visited me, she slept in my living room, for at least two nights. He came more than once. Was it on one of those visits that I heard her little radio on, murmuring and singing along with her in bed for more than half the night, or was it in one of the rented houses on the beach during some summer vacation, the sandy on the floor, someone else's furniture, someone else's pictures on the wall? She had trouble sleeping, and she would turn on the radio and read a crime novel until late. And she would make me visit her, and I once lived with her for a while, when I needed to get away from my parents. Sometimes he thought that he had lodged me out of a sense of duty with me, his little sister, since I always had my own problems.

He always sent our package on time. Inside, each gift was wrapped in tissue paper, or some heavier wrapping paper. All these gifts—she chose them, bought them, wrapped them in bright paper, labeled them in large print with black or colored marker, written directly on the wrapping paper, and sent them out a couple of weeks in advance. I know I always cared a lot about my gifts. Parties were a major event of the year for me growing up, and that has never changed. The year culminates with the holidays and with the change from the old year to the new year, and then the circle of the year begins again, anticipating the holidays. The seagull ended up in a closet, with its strings tangled. From time to time, I tried to untangle it, and I finally succeeded. I hung it on a barn beam with a strip of duct tape. After a while, in the summer heat, the tape loosened and the seagull fell off. There was also a little green elephant with sequins, from India, very pretty. With two small laces to tie it somewhere. I hung it in a window and the green material faded on one side after sitting in the sun for a while. And a thing made of felt, with pockets, to hang behind the door and put things in—I'm not sure what things. I also had elephants, embroidered on the felt. Now I remember – I got these things at craft fairs for the benefit of the indigenous people. That was part of his kindness, and his concern for others, and part of the reason why things were a little weird and sometimes foreign to us. So there was always the excitement of the package coming in the mail. The brown, rough paper a little dented from the trip from abroad. The brown paper was even more exciting than the wrappers inside, because it was so dull, and yet you knew there would be this explosion of little packages inside, each one wrapped in brightly colored paper. I chose my gifts with myself in mind, I think, but twisting the facts a little, optimistically, believing that I was going to think that this thing was useful or decorative. I think many people, when they choose a gift, twist facts with optimism. But I'm not saying I'm against people trying to give someone different gifts, I'm definitely not against those craft fairs. Now that several years have passed, and I have changed too, I would buy gifts at a craft fair. He would do it at least in his memory. It wasn't one to spend a lot of money on a gift. That was his conscience. She wasn't one to spend much on herself, either. I think deep down, he probably thought he didn't deserve any better. But he spent a lot on us at other times. His gifts on those occasions appeared out of nowhere. She wrote to me once to ask if I wanted to go skiing in the mountains with her and the boys. It was early spring and there were patches of melting snow and mud on the slopes. We skied on what little snow there was. Sometimes I would go for long walks. It seemed to her that I should not go alone – if something happened to me, I would be alone and without help. But he didn't forbid me to go, and I went. On the paths I took, in fact, there were many hiking people going up and down, passing each other and greeting each other kindly. Years later, when I was long past the age of needing any help from her, she bought me my first computer. He could have turned her down, but he still didn't have much money. And there was something exciting about the sudden offer, over the phone, on any given afternoon. It was late at night where she was. His offer was an enveloping explosion of generosity, I wanted to plunge into the sensation and stay inside. Yes, he said, yes, he insisted, he would send me the money. The next day he called me again, a little more calm – he wanted to help me, he would send me some of the money, but not all of it, which was a lot in those days. I know what it must have been like – late at night, he was thinking about me, and missing me, and the feeling grew into wanting to do something for me, even something dramatic. Around this time, he started renting a house for us. every summer, or at least to pay almost all the rent, a house on the beach, for a week or two, a different one every summer, and we all went there to be together. The last time we did it was the last year of my father's life, although he did not come to the house on the beach – we left him in the nursing home. The following summer, he was gone, and she was gone too.

Getting to Philadelphia – after the bend, next to the river, there are boathouses on the other side, this huge museum on the cliff on the other side of the water, like an ancient Greek building. I'm not going to see the station this time – its high ceilings and its long wooden benches and the arches and the old preserved signs. I could just stand there and look, your deep space – I do, from time to time, if I have the time. Our station at Penn was even more luxurious. Now it's gone – it always hurts to think about it. And when you walk around in that underground hall, killing time before the train arrives, you see the pictures of old Penn Station they put on the pillars, the long rays of sunlight coming through the towering windows and They were going down the marble stairs. As if they want to make us remember what we are missing – strange. Then we will pass through the country of the Amish. I never remember waiting for her, she always takes me by surprise. In the spring, the teams of mules and horses plow the rolling fields that stretch to the horizon – none of that today. The hanging clothes – perhaps. It is cloudy, but dry and windy. What was that thing I read about putting salt in clothes washed in the winter? It's not freezing today anyway. It is a warm winter.

Over and over I tried to pay my brother's fare to visit her. He never was. He never said why. It was finally when she was dying, when she couldn't know it, it was too late for her to have the pleasure – that he had finally agreed to go. He stayed until the end. When he was not with her, he walked around the city. He took care of some practical things that needed to be done. Then he stayed at the funeral. I did not go to the funeral. I had good reasons, they seemed good to me, it was because of my old mother, and the shock, and how far it was, across the ocean. Actually, it had more to do with the strangers who would be at the funeral, and with the delicacy of my own feelings, which I didn't want to share with strangers. I could share it when I was alive. When she was alive, her presence was eternal, time with her was eternal. Our mother was already very old, and when we, her children, began to think about how long we could live, we thought that we would live as long as she did. Then all of a sudden she had this problem with her vision, which turned out not to be a problem with her vision but with her brain, and then, without warning, the stroke and the coma, and the doctors, who announced that she had no more a long time to live. Once she was gone, every memory became precious, even the bad ones, even the times when I had been irritated with her, or she with me. It became a luxury to be irritated. She didn't want to share it, didn't want to hear a stranger say something about her, a minister in front of the congregation, or a friend of hers who would see her in a different light. Staying with her, in my mind, staying with her, was not easy, because it was all in my mind, because she wasn't really there, and for that reason, we had to be alone, no one else. There would have been strangers at the funeral, people she knew but I didn't, or people I knew but didn't like, people who loved her and people who didn't love her but felt they had to go. But now I'm sorry, or rather, I'm sorry I couldn't do both – go to the funeral and also stay home to be with our mother and take care of my own pain and memories. Suddenly, when she left, her things They were more valuable than before – her letters, of course, though there weren't many, but also things she'd left behind at my house after her last visit, like her jacket, a blue windbreaker with a logo on it. A police novel that I tried to read and couldn't. A clam roll in the freezer, a jar of tartar sauce, on sale, in the fridge door.

How to debone a turkey breast for your Thanksgiving recipe: http://t.co/3WEZCY6n #Holiday #recipe

— Bianca at Delano Tue Nov 13 15:56:54 +0000 2012

We're going real fast now. When you go through it all so fast, you think you'll never be stuck again—in traffic, with neighbors, in stores, standing in line. We're going really fast. The walk is smooth. Just a little metal screeching from somewhere in the wagon, which shakes. We all shake a little. There aren't many people in the car, and they are very quiet today. I have no problem saying something to someone if they talk a lot on the phone. I did it once. I gave a man ten minutes, maybe more, maybe twenty, and then I went and stood next to him in the hallway. He was doubled over with his finger pressed against his free ear. He didn't get angry. He looked at me, smiled, waved his hand in the air, and ended the call before I got back to my seat. I don't make business calls on the phone on the train. They should know.

He also gave gifts of other kinds—the effort he put forth for others, the work he took to prepare meals for friends. The nomads that he sheltered in his house, who stayed to live for weeks or months –boys who passed by, but also, for a year, a little Indian woman who spent every day arranging her books in the library, and who ate so little and meditated so much. And later her old father, her real father, the one she knew when she was an adult, not my father, not the father who raised her. She had dreamed of him, in the dream he was very sick. She went out looking for it, and found it. She was so tired at the end of the day that when I was visiting, when we would all watch a show or a movie on TV at night, she would fall asleep. First she would stay up for a while, curious about the actors – who is that, we didn't see him in…? – and then she would be so quiet that we would look at her and her head was to one side, the lamplight in her hair blond, or his head bowed on his chest, and he slept until we all got up to go to bed. What was the last gift he gave me? Seven years ago. If I had known it was the latter, I would have paid so much more attention to it. If it wasn't animal themed or made by some indigenous person, it was surely some kind of bag, not an expensive bag, but one with some special detail, a gimmick, like folding on itself when it was empty, and with a closure and a small clip to hook it to another bag. I have several of those saved. She used them herself, and other types of bags, always open and full of things – an extra sweater, another bag, a couple of books, a box of cookies, a bottle of something to drink. There was a generosity in the things she packed and carried around with her. Once when I went to visit – I'm thinking of her bags piled against my chair. I was almost paralyzed, I didn't know what to do. I do not know why. I didn't want to leave her alone, that wouldn't have been right, but I wasn't used to having company either. After a while the feeling of panic passed, maybe because time had passed, but there was a moment when I thought I was going to collapse. Now I can look at the bed I was sleeping on and wish it would come back if only for a moment. little while We wouldn't have to talk, we wouldn't even have to look at each other, but it would be a comfort just to have her close – her arms, her broad shoulders, her hair. I want to tell her: Yes, there were problems, our relationship was hard to understand, and complicated, but still. , I would like to just have you sitting there on the sofa bed where you once slept for several nights, it is part of our living room now, I would like to just look at your cheeks, your shoulders, your arms, your wrist with the gold watch band, a loosely pressed, pressing the skin, your strong hands, the gold ring, your short nails, I don't have to look into your eyes or feel any kind of communion. Complete or incomplete, if not to have you there in person, live and direct, for a while, your weight on the mattress, making folds in the quilt, the sun behind you, it would be very nice. Maybe you could throw yourself on the sofa and read for a while in the afternoon, maybe sleep. I would be in the next room, close by. Sometimes after dinner, if she was really relaxed and I was sitting close to her, I would put my hand on my shoulder and let her rest there for a while, so that I felt his heat more and more through the cotton of my shirt. I had the feeling that he did love me in a way that was not going to change, whatever his mood.

That fall, after the summer that they both died, her and my father, there was a moment where I wanted to say to them: It's okay, they died, I know, and they've been dead for a while, they all do. we have assimilated and explored the first emotions we had, the reactions, feelings that took us by surprise, some of them, and the feelings that we are having now, that a few months have passed – but now it is time for you to come back. They've been gone long enough. Because after the dramas of the deaths themselves, those complicated dramas that continued for days and days, for both of us, the calmer and simpler fact of missing them appeared. He wasn't going to be there to walk out of the room at home with a picture or a letter to show us, he wasn't going to be there to tell us the same stories over and over again, from when he was a young man – pronouncing the names that meant so much for him and so little for us: Clinton Street where he was born; Winter Island, where he used to go in the summers when he was a boy; him looking from behind a horse that trotted ahead pulling the carriage in which they traveled; the pneumonia he had as a child, and how he spent his days weakened and lying in bed reading, day after day; in that cousin's house in Salem; when he went to the And on Saturdays to swim with the other boys, where it was customary for all the boys to swim naked, and how it bothered him; the Perkins family from next door. She wasn't going to be there having her first cup of coffee at eleven in the morning, or reading by the window on the sofa. She wouldn't be making us pancakes in the mornings at the houses we rented on the beach, big fat blueberry pancakes a little raw in the middle, standing by the frying pan, still and focused, or talking as she worked, in her flowery blouse and his straight pants, with his low shoes or loafers, the familiar shape of his fingers stretching the fabric or leather. She would not go swimming in the rough seas of the bay, even on stormy days, her eyes a blue clearer than water. She wouldn't stand with our mother near the shore, waist-deep in water, talking with her brows barely frowned from the sun or from concentrating on what they were talking about. Never again would she make oyster broth like she had one Christmas, on that visit to our parents' house after her husband's death, the crunch of sand in her mouth along with the milky broth, sand in the bottom of our spoons. . She would never carry a girl on her lap again, her own daughter, like on that visit, when they were all so sad and confused, or someone else's child, and she would not swing him quietly back and forth, her arms big. and strong around the boy's body, his cheek resting against the soft hair, his face sad and thoughtful, his eyes distant. She wasn't going to be on the couch in the evenings, exclaiming in surprise when she saw an actor she knew in a movie or on a show, she wasn't going to fall asleep there, suddenly quiet, later at night. The first New Years after her death It felt like another betrayal—we were leaving behind the last year they'd lived, a year they'd known, and beginning a year they'd never experience. I had some mental confusion in the months afterward, too. Not that he thought she was still alive. But at the same time I couldn't believe that he was really gone. Suddenly the choice was not so simple: live or not live. It was as if not being alive didn't have to mean she was dead, as if there was a third possibility.

Her visit, that time—now I don't know why it seemed so complicated. You just go out and do something with the other person, or sit and talk if you stay at home. Talking would have been simple enough, since she liked to talk. Of course it is too simple to say that she liked to talk. There was something frantic in the way he spoke. As if he was afraid of something, as if he was avoiding something. After she died, that's what we all said—we used to wish she'd stop talking for a while, but now we'd have given anything to hear her voice. I wanted to talk, too, I had things to say to her, but it wasn't possible, or it was difficult. She wouldn't let me, or I had to force my way into the conversation. I'd like to try again—I'd like her to come visit again. I think I would be calmer. I would be so happy to see her. But it doesn't work that way. If she came back, she'd be back for more than a little while, and maybe I wouldn't know what to do after all, just like I didn't the last time I saw her. However, I would like to try the same. Another gift was a board game related to endangered species. A board game –there was his optimism again. Or she was doing what our mother used to do – give me something that someone else required, so that I would have to bring another person into my life. In fact, I know a lot of people, I even know them traveling. Most people are basically friendly. It is true that I still live alone, I am more comfortable like this. I like that everything is done as I want. But having a board game wasn't going to encourage me to bring someone home to play with me.

There aren't that many of us in the car, though more than I'd expect on this particular day. Of course, I think everyone is going to a friendly place that will welcome them, where there are people waiting for them with hot dogs and eggnog. But it may not be true. And they may be thinking the same thing about me – if they're thinking anything about me at all. And some of them, who maybe aren't going anywhere special, maybe they're happy, although I think that's hard to believe, because they make you feel, with all the hype, with all the publicity, yes, but also because of what your friends say, that you should be somewhere special, with your family, or with your friends. If not, you get that old familiar feeling of being left out, another feeling learned when you were a kid, in school probably, at the same time you learned to be excited about all those wrapped presents, no matter what you might find, other than what you wished. I'm not as cheerful as I used to be, I know. A friend of mine said something about it, after I lost both of them within three weeks of each other, that summer, he said, Your grief spills over into all kinds of different areas of your life. Your grief turns into depression. And after a while you just don't feel like doing anything. You don't care about anything. Another friend – when I told him – said: "I didn't know you had a sister." So weird. By the time she found out I had a sister, I no longer had a sister. It's starting to rain, little droplets running from side to side of the window. Lines and points through glass. The sky outside is darker and the lights in the carriage, the dome lights and the little reading lights above the seats, seem brighter. The farms are happening now. There are no clothes hanging outside, but I can see the lines of clotheslines fanned out between the back porches and barns. The farms are on both sides of the tracks, there are open spaces between them, silos set back on the landscape, with the farm buildings clustered around them, like chapels with their little towns in the distance.

Sometimes the grief was nearby, waiting, barely suppressed, and I could ignore it for a while. But at other times it was like a cup that is always full and overturns all the time. For a while, it was hard for me to think or talk about one of them apart from the other. For a while, though not anymore, they were always linked in my mind because they died so close to each other in the same period. It was hard not to imagine her waiting somewhere for him, and him arriving. We were even comforted by that idea – we imagined that she would take care of him, wherever they were. She was younger and more alert than he. She was taller and stronger. Would he like it or would it annoy him? Would he want to be alone? I didn't even know if he wanted me to stay near his bed while he died. I had taken a bus to the city where he and my mother lived, to be with him. He had no chance of recovering, or backing down from where he was, because they had stopped feeding him. He no longer spoke or heard, or even saw, so there was no way of knowing what he wanted. He didn't seem himself. His eyes were half open, but he couldn't see anything. His mouth was slightly open. He had no teeth. Once, I put a little wet sponge on her lips, because of the dryness, and she caught her mouth shut suddenly. You think you should sit next to someone who is dying, you think it must be a comfort to them. But when he was alive, when we lingered over the after-dinner meal or stayed in the living room talking and laughing, after a while he would always get up and leave us to go to his room. Later, when she washed the dishes, she would say no, she didn't want any help. Even when we visited him in the nursing home, after an hour or two, he would ask us to leave. Our mother consulted a psychic, later, when they were gone, to see if she could contact them. She didn't really believe in such things, but this psychic had been recommended to her by a friend and she thought it might be interesting and it wouldn't hurt to try, so she went to see her and told her about them, and let her try to find out. communicate. The woman said she had contacted both of them. Our father was nice and cooperative, although he didn't say much, somewhat uncommitted, he said "it was fine." My mother thought that after all the trouble that had gone into contacting him, he could have said more. But our sister backed away and got angry, and didn't want to know anything. We were very interested in the story, although we found it hard to believe. We felt that at least the seer believed it and thought that she had had an experience. The two types of grief were different. One type, the penalty for him, was for an end that had come at the right time, which was in the natural order of things. The other kind, grief for her, was for an end that had come unexpectedly and too soon. She and I were just starting a good correspondence – now it's not going to continue anymore. She was starting a project that meant a lot to her. She had just rented a house near us, where we could see her much more often. A different phase of his life had just begun. It's strange how things look when you look at them from a train window. I never get tired. I just saw an island in the river, a small one with a grove of trees, and I was going to take a closer look at it because I like islands, but then I looked away for a moment and when I looked again it was gone. Now we are passing some woods again. Now the woods are gone and I can see the river and the hills in the distance again. Things near the tracks go so fast, and things in the middle distance go slower and quieter, and things far away stay still, or sometimes seem to move forward, just because things in the middle distance move backwards. backwards. In fact, although things far away appear to be standing still, or even moving slightly forward, they are moving backwards very slowly. The tops of those trees on the hill in the distance kept up with us for a while, but when I looked again they were behind us, though not far behind us. I kept noticing things, in the days after death. of her and after his death: a white bird taking flight seemed to mean something, or a white bird perching nearby. Three crows on a tree branch meant something. Three days after he died, I woke up from a dream on the Elysian fields, as if he had entered there, as if he had flown over us for a while, for three days, even over our mother's living room, floating, and had followed later to the Champs Elysées, perhaps before going further afield, wherever it was that he was going to stay. He wanted to believe all this,I was forced to believe it. After all, we don't know what happens. It's so strange – that once you're dead you know the answer, if you know anything. But whatever the answer, you cannot communicate it to those who are still alive. And before you die, you can't know if we're still living somehow after we're dead, or if it's just over. It's like what that woman said to me in the store the other day. We were talking about the expressions our mothers liked to use over and over again – “to each their own”, or “it wasn't mean”. He said that his mother was a Christian, and devout, and that she believed in an afterlife. But she herself did not believe, and kindly mocked her mother. And when he did, his mother would tell him, with a good-humored smile: When we die, one of us is in for a surprise! Our father believed that it was all in the body, and specifically in the mind, that everything was physical – the mind, the soul, our feelings. He once saw a man's brain scattered on the asphalt after an accident. He had stopped his car on the street and went out to look. My sister was a girl at the time. He told her to wait for him in the car. When the body was no longer alive, he said, everything was over. But I wasn't so sure. I felt terrified one night when I was falling asleep – the sudden question woke me up. Where was she going now? I felt strongly that it was going somewhere or had gone somewhere, not that it had simply ceased to exist. That she, like him, had stayed close for a while, and then she was leaving—down, perhaps, but also out somewhere, as if out to sea. First, when she was still alive, but dying, I kept wondering what was happening to him. I didn't know much about it. One thing they said was that when the reflexes got worse, according to the doctors, he would move toward the pinprick instead of away. I thought that meant that the body wanted the pain, that she wanted to feel something. I thought it meant that she wanted to stay alive. I also had that slow, dark dream about five days after she died. I may have had it right around the time of the funeral, or after. In the dream, I was going down from one level to another in a kind of stadium, the levels were wider and deeper than steps, down to a huge, high-ceilinged, ornately decorated hall or hall - I had the Impression of dark furniture, sumptuous decorations, it was a room intended for a ceremony, not for daily use. I had a small lantern that fit right on my thumb and extended outward with a small flame burning. This was the only illumination in the vastness of space, a wavering, flickering flame that had already gone out or nearly went out once or twice. I was afraid that if I went down, as I was going down with such difficulty, through levels too wide and deep to ride easily, the light would go out and I would be left in that deep pit of darkness, in that black hall. The door through which I had entered was much higher up, and if I knocked, no one would hear me. Without light, she would not be able to climb those difficult levels again. I later realized that, given the day and time I woke up from the dream, it was quite possible that she had dreamed it at the time she was being cremated. The cremation was going to start right after the funeral, my brother had told me, and he told me when the funeral was over. I thought the flickering flame was her life, how she had clung to it in those last few days. The difficult levels leading down to the hall must have been the stages of his decline, day by day. The vast and ornate hall could have been death itself, in all its ceremonial, waiting ahead, or below. The strange problem we had afterwards was whether or not to tell our father. Our father was missing, by then, and things baffled him. We would walk him to one side and to the other in a wheelchair through the corridors of the nursing home. He liked to greet the other residents with a nod and a smile. We stopped in front of the door of his room. In June, in his last year of life, he looked at the Happy Birthday sign on the door and waved his long, pale, freckled hand to it, and asked me a question about it. He couldn't articulate his words very well. Unless you had heard it all its life, there was no way to know what it was saying. He was marveling at the poster, and he was smiling. She was probably wondering how they knew it was her birthday. She still recognized us, but there was a lot she didn't understand. He wasn't going to live much longer, though we didn't know how little he had left.It seemed important to us that he knew that she had died – his daughter, even though she was really his stepdaughter. And yet, would she understand if we told her? And wouldn't it distress him terribly, if he understood? Or perhaps he had both reactions at once – he could understand some of what we were saying, and then become terribly distressed by what we had said and not being able to fully understand it. Was it necessary for him to spend his last days filled with anguish and grief? But the alternative seemed wrong, too—that he end his life without knowing this all-important thing, that his daughter had died. It was wrong that he, who had been the head of our small family, the one who, together with our mother, made all the important family decisions, the one who drove the car when we went on excursions, the one who helped our sister with her homework when she was a teenager, he accompanied her to school every morning when she was in first grade, while our mother rested or worked, the one who gave or denied permission, told jokes during dinner that made her laugh and made her classmates laugh, the one who he spent several weeks in the garden building a toy house – that we should not show him the respect to tell him that something so important had happened in his own family. He had so little time left, and we were the ones who were deciding something about the end of his life. life – that he died knowing or not knowing. And now I'm not sure what we did, it was so long ago. Which probably means nothing too dramatic happened. Perhaps we told him, but in a hurry, and nervously, as if he didn't understand, and perhaps he made a gesture of incomprehension because something was going very fast. But I don't know if I'm remembering this or making it up.

On one of her visits, she gave me a red sweater, a red skirt, a round clay tile for baking bread. She took a picture of me in the red sweater and the red skirt. I think the last thing he gave me were those little white seals with their pierced backs. They are filled with charcoal, which is supposed to absorb odors. You put them in the fridge. I guess she thought that since I live alone, the fridge would be unkempt and smelly, or maybe she just thought that everyone might need that. When did she give up the tartar sauce? No one would think that a person could become attached to a jar of tartar sauce. But you can -I didn't want to throw it away because she left it. Throwing it away would mean that the days had passed, life had moved on, leaving her behind. In the same way, it was difficult for me to see how the new month, the month of July, began because she would never experience that new month. Then came the month of August, and by then he had left too. Anyway, the little seals are useful to me, they are at least seven years old. I put them in my fridge, albeit at the bottom of a shelf, where I wouldn't have to see their happy little faces and black eyes every time I opened the door. I even took them with me when I moved. I doubt they'll absorb anything after all this time. But they don't take up much space, and there's not much in there, anyway. I like having them because they remind me of her. If I bend down and move the things, I can see them lying back there in the light shining through some liquids that have been tipped over and dried on the top shelf. There are two. They have black smiles painted on their faces. Or at least a line painted on the face that looks like a smile. Actually, the only gift I ever wanted, when I grew up, was something for work, like a reference book. Or something old. Now there's a lot of noise coming from the dining car – people laughing. They sell alcohol there. I've never bought a drink on a train – I like to drink, but not here. Our brother took the train sometimes, on his way home from visiting our mother. He told me once. This year he is in Acapulco – he likes Mexico. We have a couple more hours of travel. Outside it is dark. I'm glad it was light when we passed the farms. Perhaps there is a large family in the dining car, or a group traveling to a conference. I see that very often. Or to a sporting event. Well, that doesn't make much sense, not today. Now someone is coming towards me, staring at me. She smiles a little – but looks embarrassed. And now that? It staggers. Ah, a party. It's a party—in the dining car, he tells me. Everyone is invited.