“Where the years ahead had once seemed vague and unknowable, amorphous in shape and indeterminable in size, after my mother died I began to see a set of decades stacked neatly in front of me like bricks... When I allowed myself to think of the brevity of the time ahead of me, and the futility of spending any more of it on cooking and mending and gardening, it frightened me so much that I almost couldn’t breathe.”
