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Despite all of her disappointments, angers, and embarrassments, she had never predicted her own demise. Eva, on the other hand, had been in the middle of witnessing the mass death of her generation and so knew, instinctively, that her mother was not dying.
    “You’re not dying,” she said. “You have an infection and you’re on IV antibiotics. Soon you’ll be better and go home.”
    “I’m dying,” Nathalie said with a rarely exhibited fear.
    Eva had to repress a terrible desire to tell her mother what dying looked like. Why did she repress it? It would have been unfair. After all, this was Nathalie’s moment to imagine her own corpse. To replace that, in her mother’s mind, with the shocking misfortune of gay people her mother despised would be ungenerous. After all, these men’s deaths meant nothing to Nathalie. Nothing at all. It would have been disrespectful. And yet in some ways it could have been construed as a gesture of kindness, a reassurance. Finally, Eva decided to keep her mouth shut. Her mother would not be reassured by the deaths of young homosexuals, because she could not identify with them or extrapolate from them. So Eva said nothing. Nathalie would not learn from her.

    Her mother was silent. Eva looked at her familiar face and longed for that old myth she had learned from television–that parents love their children and want to help them. Maybe now, maybe this would be that moment, that chance.
    “You’re not dying, Mom. I know you feel horrible, and I’m sorry about that. I wish you didn’t. But I know that tomorrow you will feel better. You’re on IV antibiotics, and by tomorrow the infection will be way down. I know you feel scared, and it’s understandable. But Mom, you are not going to die.”
    “Yes, I am,” Nathalie said. “I’m dying.”
    She wasn’t kvetching. She was really scared.
    “All right,” Eva said softly, the way she had always spoken to truly dying people. “I’m sorry, Mom. I wish it weren’t true.”
    Nathalie’s eyes were barely open. But it wasn’t the exhaustion of the dying—it was the exhaustion of the worried. There, in the precision of detail, is where the truth of life’s duration lies.
    “I’m dying.”
    “Okay,” Eva said. “I believe you.”
    “Good.”
    “Mom, is there anything you want to say to me? Is there anything you want me to know?”
    “Eva,” Nathalie said, terrified. “The greatest disappointment of my life is that you will never get married and have children.”
    Of course Nathalie did not die. In fact she had a full recovery and lived to see her other daughter, Ethel, marry a software engineer.
     
    Now, so many years later, back in Dr. Pollack’s office, Eva’s eyes filled with tears. She was angry. It was an intimate moment of identification
with her mother. Facing her mother’s cancerous future. Why, in her imagined moment of death, would Nathalie have chosen those words? Nathalie thought she was dying, and that was the message she wanted to leave behind. Why remember that now? If Eva died, her words would be compassionate. Not if, when.
    “Now, Eva,” Dr. Pollack was still talking. “Out comes the needle. There you go. Open your eyes! See the fluid? Look! Look! It’s yellow. That means everything is fine. If it were bloody, then we’d have to worry. What classes do you teach? Law?”
    “Freshman Composition.”
    “You know, Eva. Now that I can see more clearly, I think you don’t really need that biopsy after all.”
    “Really?”
    “Why? You want one?”
    “No.”
    She sat up.
    “Good. See, I saved you money and you don’t need a biopsy. I must be a good doctor.”
    Eva began to feel sick. Was this all a setup for him to violate her? Did he just say that thing about the biopsy to make her worried and vulnerable so that he could play kootchie-koo? She put on her paper vest. She didn’t want to lift her breasts into her bra in front of him. The nakedness was bad enough.
    “I’m going to leave