“You want me to be dead. You want me to die so you and your father can get on with your lives.” She was wrong. I had hoped the wheelchair would give her back some of her dignity, not take it away. And I’d hoped I’d get her back, too, for a few weeks more, another book perhaps, another series of lessons in her old familiar domestic life. But I knew the only thing that would restore her to her old self, bouncing on the balls of her feet, baking the day away with flour in her hair, keeping her dark feelings inside, was the clean slate of death.
