Now she was kneeling on the carpet in her faded blue uniform, and she was crying, and in one hand she held a small electric razor.

Silver strands of my mother’s hair lay scattered across the towel draped over her thin shoulders.

The disease and its treatments had been taking her hair for weeks, in patches and handfuls, and I understood, slowly, what I was looking at.

Juliet was shaving away the last of it — gently, carefully, so that my mother would not have to keep finding it on her pillow each morning, would not have to watch it leave her a little at a time.

She was giving her the dignity of deciding when it went.