The sedatives had suppressed her mind, had dimmed her, had made her seem absent.

But they had not been able to reach the deepest place, the place where a mother’s love for her child lives, the place that had gone on quietly remembering me, quietly trusting that I would come, quietly holding the truth that she was loved, even as everything above it went dark.

I find that almost unbearably moving, and also, strangely, hopeful, because it suggests something about the limits of cruelty.

My sister had done everything in her power to erase our mother, to switch her off, to reduce her to an insensible obstacle.