I drove her to physical therapy twice a week.

I changed her linens.

I sat up with her through the long, frightened nights when she could not sleep, and I learned to read the small sounds she made when she was in pain but did not want to be a bother.

Julian, her only child, her son, did none of it.

Worse than none of it — he resented that it needed doing at all.

He complained, more than once, and not quietly, that his mother’s illness had ruined his domestic peace at home.