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well.”
    I pulled a few of our mother’s journals from the pile. As the years passed, I saw how they became smaller and more portable. She daily mulled over her dreams, trying to interpret them and discern if they were real or not. She recorded exactly what she ate each day—mostly donuts, small cups of chili, cheap black coffee, and hamburgers from McDonald’s. She recorded what she spent, down to the penny. She spoke to someone in her head and struggled to understand what was an outside influence and what came from within. She wrote about how light fell on certain trees and described the delicate scents of flowers she saw in the park; she also wrote each flower’s common and Latin names, and drew a picture of it. One sentence stuck inmy head and I marked its place in the book. It sounded like something she had written to me in a letter once: Of my life at the piano, I shall say nothing for the time being.
    I picked up her very last journal, the diary I had found when I looked through her backpack. In the pages I read prescient signs of her living with cancer, unaware. My mother was nauseous, dizzy, incontinent, and had blood in her stool. She doubled over with abdominal pain. She was bloated from a tumor but thought it was because she was overweight, so she tried to eat even less. She ate most meals in hospital cafeterias, the cheapest places, and rode the subway all over the city to get there, no matter how bad the weather. She recorded the weather daily, sometimes every hour. Near the end of her last diary, she wrote: Awoke today with stronger remembrance for loved ones.
    I knew I should go to bed—it was well past midnight and we wanted to get an early start. but I couldn’t stop reading. She wrote:
This A.M. I’m in a hotel I can’t identify, I see so many gray closed doors. I cannot work with poor memory. To note something, a rat will find incentive to report. Caution: I’ve suffered as much as anyone in history. Note: Metamorphic rock means changes deep inside earth from heat and weight of other rocks.
    I cannot work with poor memory either, I thought. How will I remember these passing days? Once again, I thought of Nicolaus Steno. My mother was dying and yet I turned to history for solace, to ancient geology. I thought of when Steno made his final public appearance as a scientist. These things I remember well, these odd little facts from science, history, and art. That year, in 1673, Steno was dedicating an anatomical theater and gave a speech on the importance of scientific research. He told the audience, “Beautiful is what we see. More beautiful is what we understand. Most beautiful is what we do not comprehend.”
    Natalia was fast asleep in the bed next to mine, like when we were little and our names were Rachel and Myra. I read about how many nights my mother slept outside in the rain one November, hungry and cold, suffering from a bladder infection and a terrible cough. She had been sleeping in her old backyard while the owner was out of town. This was how she spent her birthday in the fall of 2001, two months after the tragedies of 9/11. I felt sickto my stomach, knowing that my own mother spent so many nights outside in the rain. Why didn’t anyone help her, lead her to safety? I wanted to go back in time and be the person who took her in.
    In my mother’s very last diary, from the fall of 2006, she returned to the history of the earth:
The outer shell... is divided into about thirty large and small pieces that fit together... called tectonic plates. They move on hot layers of rock within the mantle. Continents sit on top of the plates; plates are also under the ocean floor. As the plates move, the continents and oceans slowly change.
    What hadn’t she studied these seventeen years? I searched her journals for my name, my sister’s, but she barely mentioned us at all, and even then only obliquely:
Long nightmare dream of losses. Bury the nightmare. Bury the losses. Bury the dream.
    On Friday