“Drink it, Maribel,” she always said.

“It’s good for your stomach.”

For ten years I had heard those words as kindness.

I want to be careful, here, about what I will and won’t set down in this account, because there are parts of what my mother-in-law did that belong in a sealed medical file and a court record, not on a page where they might teach someone else how to do the same thing.

So I will tell you what happened, and what it cost, and how it ended — but I will not tell you what was in that jar, or how much, or where it came from.

The how of it is not what this account is for.