I don’t think it is the case that my mother’s death caused my illness. In fact, I know it is not. But I also wonder about the ways that the disappearance of my mother, that bulwark, led to an absence, an ellipsis, into which both dis-ease and disease rushed, unbalancing an equilibrium that had more or less existed until that point. Or think of it this way: I was more run-down when she died than I had ever been. Maybe exhaustion, combined with the virus I caught, was the tipping point, one hit too many to my immune system, after which whatever was already going on snowballed unstoppably
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