“Don’t worry about your serve. Jimmy Connors didn’t get his serve together until a year before he retired.” So my mother advised me as she lay in St. Vincents Hospital in July 1993. I had just returned from my weekend “share house” in Westhampton, where I was told I had better strengthen my serve if I wanted to go anywhere in tennis. I was 39.

When Mom and I were alone she would talk about tennis. She revered the game and serious players. In the women's final at Wimbledon that July, Jana Novotna had led Steffi Graff, who was considered unbeatable, by a set, when Novotna's game fell apart. She went on to lose the match, and when formally introduced to the Duchess of Windsor afterward, collapsed into the duchess’s arms rather than curtsying as is usual with members of the royal family. “Tennis can be so cruel,” Mom cried. “You can be playing beautifully and it can just slip away from you in a snap.”

Mom was the second daughter of J. Ben Goldsmith, an orthodontist, and his wife Florence. As a child J. Ben had emigrated to the U.S. from Lithuania. He went to Harvard Dental School, served in World War I, and then married and started a practice and family. Like my parents would do later, he and Florence settled in to a life of stultifying routine. Strangling his family with strictness and rigidity, he created an atmosphere where silence was pervasive, laughter infrequent.

My mother’s spirited older sister Edie fought her father every time he forbade her from going out, while my mother hid in the shadows. Mom described Edie as a wind entering a room and captivating everyone with an acerbic wit and brash frankness. My grandfather would introduce Edie as his brilliant daughter, Barbara, my mother, as his lesser daughter.

When my parents met, my father was a Big Band trumpeter. The country was at the tail end of a postwar swing dance party. He was on the cutting edge, shared a Manhattan apartment with an artist. Mom and Dad got engaged. Married. Within a couple of years, rock n' roll had replaced swing, and Dad left the music business. Mom discovered he wasn’t a cool, freewheeling jazz musician at all, but a narrow-minded working man with traditional values and an iron bond to his mother. Divorce was unusual in the early fifties. A divorcee in her mid-twenties was stained goods. Even if the times had been permissive of divorce, my mother wouldn’t have sought one. She hadn’t the strength to admit the mistake, go through with the ugly proceedings, face up, and return to her parents' house. So what did she do? Start a family.

Over the years, my parents' impatience and intolerance with one another festered. They submerged themselves in routine. By meeting daily expectations they minimized conversation. But hostilities surfaced. Dad abused Mom; Mom, me; I, Karen. We practiced the predictable pecking order of domestic violence, of both the physical and verbal varieties. My mother would fly into rages and slap me hard across the face. I never was able to determine what the provocation was, if any. I once pushed my sister off the top of a sliding pond. Fortunately, all she needed were stitches to her upper lip. I would throttle, push, and pinch her if she didn't follow my orders.

Mom's callousness toward me reversed when she and my father moved into Manhattan when they experience empty nest syndrome. In Manhattan, she sought Karen's and my friendship, now that we were older and no longer a burden, and she needed us. She and my father could no longer plant themselves in opposite ends of a house—they were trapped together in an apartment. Mom needed to escape, and Karen and I could provide company on outings. But she was still distant and uncomfortable with me, didn't look me in the eye, went into discourses on remote subjects. She conversed with herself and I listened.

Over the next few weeks, Mom learned she had pneumonia and stayed home from work. The pneumonia persisted over the next week, at the end of which was her 67th birthday. After two weeks without improvement, Mom was admitted to St. Vincents for intravenous antibiotics. She went to the hospital by herself, took a taxi while my dad and I were at work.

For the next couple of weeks I went to the hospital every evening after work. The pneumonia was advancing. The situation was becoming worrisome, as speaking was becoming an effort because of the amount of breath it requires. And Mom's breathing was getting labored.

One night Mom announced that she wasn’t getting better. She opened the drawer of her night table and removed the bottle of Escape I had given her for her birthday. She had brought it to the hospital along with her toothbrush inscribed with her name; eyeglasses; contact lens case and solution; and lipstick. She opened the bottle, sniffed, and remarked again how rich and lovely it was. I screwed the top back on and put it away. She told me she was sorry, she hadn’t cared for me enough as a child. I made light of her apology. “Do these antibiotics give you the sorries?” I asked.

In the last days before the biopsy, a former boss of Mom's came to visit. She adored him because he had given her a job she loved, and a sense of belonging. He organized business conferences which he would cancel, then keep monies he’d received. She was too weak to groom herself, even to sit up. And he felt awkward, having brought a gift for her birthday. At a loss for words, he said, “Barbara, you’ll get this biopsy done, and then you’ll be just…” Mom interrupted him. “Dead. I’ll be dead,” she stated.

The next day was the day before the biopsy, so numerous blood tests were taken prior to surgery. As Mom lay on her side we could see a part of her back swell as she struggled to breathe. There was little healthy lung left and a small piece was doing all the work. The biopsy was scheduled for 11:30 the next morning. When Dr. Halperin came in to see Mom, he said it looked like she was having a good day. He said, "This always happens. You schedule a procedure and the patient turns out not to need it." But he told my father privately that if they could get her through this, it would be an accomplishment.

The elevator opened into an open area and Mom’s handlers pushed her through wide swinging doors. A team of pathologists, anesthesiologists, surgeons, and nurses surrounded her gurney. Towering over Mom, they discussed what kind of specimen was needed from what part of which lung. I tried to listen to what they were saying but could hear nothing amid the din. Mom tugged at my shirt. I leaned over, and she whispered, “the stateroom scene.” “Yes,” I said. “A Night at the Opera!” Mom nodded. She was reminding me of a scene from the Marx Brothers' “A Night at the Opera” in which tens of individuals crowd into the tiny stateroom of an ocean liner. Room service, manicurists, barbers, and bellhops climb atop one another, each trying to perform a job amid chaos.

Then she was gone. My dad and I sat in the main lobby of the hospital unwinding from the harrowing afternoon. We embraced, weeping. My dad tried to comfort me as the sorrow I’d masked earlier poured out. “If she doesn't make it, I’m afraid I’ll never laugh again. I won’t be able to go on living,” I said. “But death is a part of life," Dad answered, “and it makes it easier, because then the suffering will be with us, she won’t be suffering anymore.”

Mom was engulfed in a maze of wires and machines beeping randomly at high and low tones. A plastic hose and mask had been placed in her mouth and taped to her face. Her jaw was fixed wide open, gaping and ghastly. Railings were up on both sides of the bed, preventing us from getting close. She couldn’t move her mouth to speak, and communicated with her eyes, which screamed, “Get me out of here!”

One day when I arrived at Mom’s bedside, Dr. Halperin clutched my hand so tight he nearly broke it. He said Mom had turned a corner. An x-ray showed the pneumonia was receding. The erythromycin had been working. This meant that in all likelihood she had Legionnaire’s disease. Mom was oblivious to the good news. After all, she still had a large plastic tube taped to her face and was covered by IV lines, catheters, and electrodes. Crying with glee, I told Mom she was the bravest person I’d ever known, that she had done a hundred triathlons.

It was a victorious day when Mom was moved out of the ICU and into the step-down unit, a regular hospital ward. One day the respirator was unhooked and she breathed on her own for 45 minutes. The entire staff of the floor applauded her.

One afternoon my father phoned me and said he had received a call from Dr. Carpati. Mom's lungs were failing, the respirator had to be raised to 100% oxygen. A second, emergency biopsy was underway.

Mom was now in the largest room of the ICU, the one reserved for patients who need more monitors than the others. The bed faces outward toward the hall and a wall of glass enables constant observation. This is where moribund patients are placed.

I knew this was probably the last evening I could spend with Mom and determined to stay the night in the waiting room. Though Mom was sedated, maybe she’d sense my presence, know that I was there. My father wanted to leave. Dr. Carpati pulled me aside, recommended my dad and I stay together. I was young and could spend the night in a hospital waiting room, but my father, 70 years old, couldn’t do that. I went to my Dad’s, slept on the sofa in the living room. I kept the phone beside me in case the hospital called.

It was 6.30 a.m. I dressed and walked to the hospital. Dr. Carpati greeted me with bad news. Mom had not responded to the medications. She could live another few days, perhaps a week or more.

Mom’s body was swelled to the point where she no longer looked female. She was like a figure in a Fernando Botero painting, inflated like a sausage. Mom would have deplored this situation. I wanted to put an end to this lingering state before she heard any of the staff mention her dying.

I saw a nun and told her we needed a prayer read by a rabbi before withdrawing life support. She said that it being the Jewish New Year, the rabbi was off. But she would find the priest. I asked that he bring the 23rd Psalm. He came running up about 10 minutes later with a photocopy. Said he didn’t have much occasion to use the 23rd Psalm, it being from the Old Testament. He was so anxious when photocopying it, that he cut off half the prayer. The three of us huddled in the waiting room as he read the prayer aloud. Dad signed the withdrawal consent.

Before the unveiling of Mom’s head stone a year after her death, my father drew a blank when the rabbi, who hadn't known her, asked him about her. They hadn’t really spoken in 20 years. Dad said she was a very discerning woman, had good taste. I asked the rabbi about the tradition of placing a rock at a person’s grave. What did it mean? He said that in the old days, people used to make a day of it when they’d come to visit loved ones. They’d have a picnic lunch in the cemetery. When it came time to leave, they’d denote their presence by leaving a rock. It was a way to let people know the deceased had been visited. So I collected a dozen rocks and placed them on Mom’s stone.