The first time you lose a parent, a part of you gets trapped there, trapped less in the moment of grief than in the knowledge of the end of childhood, the inevitable dwindling of the days. It is a concept that Isla often explains to her patients, leaning forward to describe the various forms of stasis. One can start to more fully understand oneself as finite, as coming from a person who was finite and having to inherit that trait, she has said on more than one occasion. When my mother died, she is more careful not to say, I became aware of the limits of things, of the fact of my own ending.
