They simply opened the circle and let me sit down, and I have come to believe that this is the only way anyone is ever let back into anything that matters — not by payment, which is the only admission I understood for most of my life, but by a mercy that asks nothing first.

When the quiet finally settled over her — when my mother’s breathing slowed, and gentled, and at last simply stopped in the warm gold light of the evening — there were no alarms.

There were no frantic calls to high-priced specialists, no machines shrieking, no strangers in scrubs rushing in to do violence to her body in the name of a few more hours.

There was only the rustle of the spring wind through the pines, and the warmth of the last of the sun, and the hand of my sister resting over mine where our two hands held our mother’s.