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The morning we were scheduled to pick her up, we got a call from someone at the nursing home. There was a bad virus going around and my mother had caught it. “You shouldn't come over,” the woman said. “It's too contagious.”

Lee and I went anyway. I have never seen anyone as sick as my mother. All I could do was hold her. In the hallway, I passed the attendant who'd advised me to get my mother out of the place; she gave me a sympathetic glance and then quickly looked away.

Several days later, we returned to New York, where we'd planned a Christmas dinner for Lee's family. His ninety-one-year-old mother had just been diagnosed with lung cancer and was scheduled for surgery in mid-January. On Christmas Eve, I caught the nursing home virus and spent Christmas in bed. Lee carried the turkey and the rest of the food over to his mother's apartment. I was sick for the next ten days and couldn't imagine how my mother had survived the illness.

Finally, on a wintry January morning, we hired an ambulance to bring my mother home. I'd made sure to keep all the decorations in place so she could see them, but the ambulance workers brought her directly upstairs on a stretcher. I'd ordered a hospital bed and it was now in Nancy's old room.

My mother was dying, but I didn't know it then. She'd been in the process of dying in the nursing home, but I didn't know that, either. Maybe doctors and nurses are so inured to death that they think what's obvious to them is obvious to everyone. Maybe it's like the Victorian figurines or the love in my father's eyes. It's visible and invisible.

I rubbed her feet for hours. “You have such healing hands,” she kept repeating. We drove to her favorite restaurant, Joe Fish, to bring back her much-loved tuna melt, but she ate only a few tiny bites. Nevertheless, I was sure she'd rebound. Nothing could keep my mother down for long. In a weak voice, she told me that the neighbors had a new beagle puppy. I think she was angling for me to write a children's story about it. I told her I loved her and that I'd see her soon. Lee's mother was being operated on for lung cancer the next morning and we needed to be back in New York.

Three days later, I received a call from Nancy telling me that she was heading to Andover. The nurse said my mother was ready for hospice. She was failing, and failing fast. I called Emily, but she told me that she and my mother had said their private good-byes the previous weekend. Lee and I raced back to Andover, but by then, my mother had lapsed into a coma.

My father held my mother's hand. Nancy's nine-year-old daughter Isabel sat across from her. She'd made her grandmother a special monogrammed pillow, which she nestled under my mother's arm. Isabel hadn't wanted to leave the room, even though Nancy was afraid it might be too upsetting for her. Later, I asked Isabel why she'd stayed. “Because I loved Nana,” she said simply.

Lee and my brother-in-law Mark stood at the foot of the bed. Nancy and I sat on either side of my mother and stroked her head. I'd read that hearing is the last sense to go. I don't know if it's true, but Nancy played a CD of the Irish tenor John McCormack, whose voice sounded exactly like Bumpa's. As he sang Handel's Panis Angelicus,
my mother stirred slightly, took several big breaths, and then one long exhale. “She's gone,” I heard the home-care attendant say. I immediately put my ear to her chest and listened to her heart. It beat four more times, and then a half beat, and then nothing.

My father wept openly. I'd never seen him shed a tear in his life and it was heartbreaking. The priest arrived to perform the Anointing of the Sick, and afterward the men from the funeral parlor removed my mother, who was now “the body.” They took her—“it”—down the stairs feetfirst. Nancy went into my mother's bedroom to find clothes for the wake.

“What about the suit Mommy wore to my wedding?” she asked.

“Mommy wore black to your wedding?”

“Yeah, what's wrong with that?”

“Oh, nothing . . . but it's perfect for a wake.”

We searched the closet for shoes but could find only the New Balance sneakers. Perhaps she'd known her traveling days were over and had given most of her other shoes away. Nancy and I were frantic. My mother couldn't wear sneakers with a suit.

“We can't find shoes,” Nancy told the funeral director, a sweet-faced man who projected quiet confidence.

“She doesn't need them,” he said matter-of-factly.

She doesn't need
shoes
? I thought of Paul walking barefoot on the
Abbey Road
cover. Was it a ritual I didn't know about, something about entering the Kingdom of Heaven without shoes? But it was a more practical consideration. She didn't need shoes because the coffin covered the lower part of her body.

“At least she needs pantyhose,” Nancy said.

“And my pillow,” Isabel added.

Thirty-nine years, twenty-seven days, and three hundred and sixty-nine minutes later, we were back at St. Augustine Cemetery in the snow. Except for the green carpet leading to the gravesite, practically everything was white—the flowers atop the casket, the trees glistening in the sun, the tops of the headstones, each a different size and shape. In another context and setting, my mother would have said, “It's a winter wonderland.”

The priest recited prayers over the coffin. I remember the sprinkling of holy water, the sign of the cross, the phrase “Let perpetual light shine upon her.” I remember Warren and Woody's sympathetic eyes; my father in the car too frail to make it up the hill; Lee's hand touching my back; Nancy fighting back tears; Emily and her family opposite me. When it was over, we all walked back down the hill, Isabel in heels for the first time. They were black satin dotted with rhinestones and made her look very grown up.

“Isn't she a little young for heels?” I whispered to Nancy.

“They're better than the leopard combat boots she wanted to wear,” she said. “She's become totally shoe crazy.”

Despite the setting, despite everything, we had to laugh.

Inside the funeral car, I told Isabel how much I liked her shoes. She smiled for the first time in days. “Yeah,” she said. “They're totally awesome.”

Pilgrim's Progress

A
month after my mother died, my father's last sibling passed away at ninety-nine. “Now I'm the only one left,” my father said. The house, which had once buzzed with my mother's high energy, was heavy with sadness. My father spent his days sitting in his blue chair reading the newspapers, but it wasn't the same. Though he'd always prized his solitude, it was different knowing my mother wasn't going to pop into the room at any moment to announce she was heading off to return another pair of shoes.

My mother had been right about finding “kind” people when you needed them. My father's home-care attendant, a lovely woman from Ghana, had recently lost her own mother. She was attentive to my father but knew when to leave him alone. There was Jack, who lived in the house that once marked the bus stop where in ninth grade I debuted my ghillies. His wife of thirty-five years had recently died of cancer, and although he was my age, he and my father bonded, two widowers from different generations but with something profound in common. He stopped by every day to say hello and trade
The
Boston Globe
for the
Eagle-Tribune
. There was Klara, who headed the church's outreach program, and who gave him communion each week and then sat and talked to him.

And then there was Joan, the nurse who'd assisted in my delivery. Joan remembered my father from his college days when he used to frequent her husband's restaurant in Andover. Now in her mid-eighties, she was blond, blue-eyed, and radiantly beautiful, with a soothing presence. She said that when I was born, my mother treated me like a fragile little doll. “I think she was horrified when she saw the way Barbara and I were tossing you around in the hospital,” she recalled. Barbara was the other delivery nurse and Joan's best friend.

No one fed the birds anymore and the white squirrels, looking for more hospitable backyards, disappeared. When I returned for Easter, I noticed that my mother's garden was overgrown with weeds. The window boxes were empty. I immediately went to the garden shop and bought flowers, planting bright petunias interspersed with ivy. I filled the bird feeder, hoping the white squirrels would return, but none of it mattered to my father.

Over the years, I'd related to Jane Fonda's struggle to have a relationship with her own distant father. Every time I watched
On Golden Pond
I'd dissolve into tears when Fonda's character tries to earn her father's approval by doing the backflip. Everyone knew that Chelsea and Norman were really stand-ins for Jane and Henry Fonda. I'd always dreamed of an
On Golden Pond
moment but had no idea how it would take shape, or if it would even happen. Six months before my mother died, Lee and I were were getting ready to drive back to New York when my father casually said, “Take the photo albums.” My mother wasn't happy. “I like looking at them,” she said, although I'd noticed that she'd begun ripping out unflattering pictures of herself. “Go on, take them,” my father insisted. I raced upstairs and grabbed the five albums. I understood how much they meant to him and appreciated all the time he'd put into them. They were his “books,” a visual diary of our family, and he was entrusting them to me. Whether or not he realized it, I also think he was acknowledging that the story he'd labored over, the story of our family, was coming to a close.

Since then, we had smaller Golden Pond moments. He was fitted with new top-of-the-line hearing aids, which made a huge improvement. It allowed us to talk on the phone, though our conversations were mainly about finances. He was worried about the high cost of twenty-four-hour care and how fast he'd deplete his savings. In 1988, Shawmut Bank had acquired the Arlington Trust Company and the two entities became part of Bank of America, one of the biggest offenders in the subprime mortgage scandal. For someone who'd spent the majority of his career carefully screening people for mortgages, it was ironic that my father's Bank of America stock would take a hit due to such irresponsible practices.

The table next to his blue reading chair was piled high with bills and bank statements, all neatly organized and wrapped in elastic bands. He kept his will and other important documents in a metal lockbox at the foot of his chair, along with a white three-ring binder in which he'd laid out in meticulous detail all the steps my mother needed to take in the event of his death. He'd assumed he'd be the first to go. He'd even written his own obituary, telling Nancy to make sure I didn't add any unnecessary flourishes.

Once when Nancy was visiting, he brought up the idea of going into a nursing home. “But don't you want to stay at home?” she asked.

“What's a home?” he responded.

When he'd lost his mother as a young boy, he'd also lost his home. He'd lived in a convent, a boarding school, and a series of Army barracks. When he found my mother, he'd found a home, but without her, he felt he had none.

At the end of July, he fell in the bathroom, and when he was taken to the emergency room, he was diagnosed with pneumonia. It eventually cleared up, but he'd hurt his ankle and knees, which made walking even more difficult. In a repeat of what happened to my mother, he went from the hospital into a nursing home for rehab. This time I made sure to select a different one. It was part of a retirement complex, where people fifty-five and older can buy a condo and then transition into assisted living and the nursing home. The director of admissions turned out to be a former colleague of Nancy's. They had a private room in the rehab section where, if he decided to stay, he could remain permanently. It was bright and cheery and on the first floor.

Before Lee and I moved him from the hospital, we stopped by the house to pick up his mail. As we drove down my old street, I commented that it would be one of the few times I'd be going into the house without one of my parents greeting me. We pulled into the driveway and there, by the front steps, was one of the white squirrels.

“I think it's your mother,” Lee said.

“And she's telling me to write a children's story.”

I thought I'd feel sad entering the house, but it was a beautiful sunny day, the living room infused with light, the flowers still blooming in the window boxes. I'd called the landscapers and they'd done extensive cutting and weeding. It felt like a home, not necessarily mine anymore, and indeed, I'd left it decades ago, but a place still filled with love.

Afterward, we went to the nursing home, which is in North Andover, on thirty-seven acres of rolling hills and meadows. My father's room has a lovely view, where he can watch the seasons change. I asked him if he wanted me to bring over a few family photographs to tack on the bulletin board or place on his bureau, but he said no. At first I was offended, but then I realized it was too painful for him. I also imagined bringing the little porcelain boy, who'd accompanied him everywhere on his journey, but I couldn't bring the little boy without the matching little girl, and the little girl was gone. When we said good-bye, he told me, “I don't know what I'd do without you.” I cried most of the way back to New York.

With everything that had happened with both our families, Lee and I hadn't taken time off in a year and a half, and we were both exhausted. At the end of August, we decided to go to Tuscany. Our hotel was in the tiny southern village of Palazzetto, near the slightly larger Chiusdino. The thirteenth-century stone-clad villa overlooked the Serena Valley and had once served as a stopping-off point for medieval pilgrims walking the Via Francigena, which ran from Canterbury, through France and Switzerland, and finally to Rome. The hotel's small spa, located in a stone building, had once served as the bakery where the pilgrims would be given bread before heading to the nearby Abbey of San Galgano.

After resting for a day, we took off to the abbey, part of a ruined thirteenth-century Cistercian monastery that was named after Saint Galgano. According to legend, he'd seen a vision of Jesus, Mary, and the Apostles, who told him to renounce his materialistic ways. He replied that it would be easier to split a rock with a sword. Embedded in a stone, the sword is on display in a circular church above the abbey. For years it had been considered a hoax, but recent metal-dating tests confirmed the sword's medieval origins. Many believe it was the inspiration for the Arthurian legends, but even if it wasn't, the abbey and church are beautiful.

We continued to walk, creating our own pilgrim's path. We climbed up and down cobbled medieval streets, dropping in at small churches with disappearing frescos, eating mozzarella and tomato panini in outdoor restaurants with views of clock towers and fortresses and remnants of Etruscan walls. At night, we fell into bed exhausted, only to start walking again the next day. I wore comfortable navy sneakers with heavily cushioned inserts. I was no longer thinking about shoes but about the pure joy of walking.

We ended the trip in Rome, where our hotel was preparing for a big Middle Eastern wedding. In the lobby, I encountered a group of women dressed in traditional head scarves and long black abayas. Apparently they, too, wanted to be comfortable as they walked the city streets. Peeking out from beneath their robes were identical Jimmy Choo sequined sneakers.

After we returned to New York, we went to visit my father, whose rehab period was about to end. We discussed bringing him home, but he feared that even with twenty-four-hour care he might take a bad fall, and there were too many medical complications. I think he also enjoyed the activity. He made friends with the nurses and attendants, and Jack and Joan dropped by at least once a week. One of Joan's close friends happened to be in the room across from my father's. Though she slept much of the day, when she woke up, she and my father waved at each other. It comforted him.

That night we stayed in the house, in the room where my mother died. It felt surprisingly peaceful. The next morning, I gathered some of my old things to bring back to New York. At the beginning of the summer, I'd spotted a pair of white oxfords that I liked but were too expensive. By July, they were half-price, so I bought them. As I walked from room to room, I heard my mother's voice telling me, “White
shoes? Are you crazy?
” But white was the color of my “first love,” Mary Janes. White was the color of the squirrels. It was the color of the snow that fell during weddings and funerals and births. And now it was the color of the shoes I wore when I said good-bye to the house. Though I knew I'd be returning, it felt like the final walk-through.

The big surprise was that my mother hadn't “pitched and chucked” everything after all. In fact, she'd been downright sentimental. She'd kept my Shirley Temple doll, with the unraveled ringlets; all my letters from London; every report card and school paper and magazine article that carried my byline. Hidden away on the top shelf of her closet was a pair of brand-new shoes. A former neighbor asked if she could have them. She'd gone with my mother to buy them, and knowing how frustrating that must have been, I happily gave them to her. I also found the gold mesh bag my mother had carried to cocktail parties fifty years earlier. Inside was a handkerchief that still smelled of My Sin. Inhaling the scent, I immediately pictured her black stilettos. Next to the purse was my baby book covered in pink satin. I slipped it into my overnight bag to bring back with me to New York.