The oatmeal I brought her in the mornings would sit and go cold, half-touched, and she would look at it with something like apology, as if she were sorry to be failing at even this.

She grew tired from the smallest efforts — a few sentences would empty her, and she would have to rest before she could finish a thought.

The winter pressed against the windows, gray and bitter, and the house seemed to shrink around us, down to the small warm circle of her room and the sound of her breathing.

And she began, in those weeks, to watch the door.

That is the thing I remember most clearly from that last winter — how often I would come into her room and find her already looking at the bedroom doorway, her eyes fixed on it with a quiet, patient waiting, as if she expected at any moment that someone would fill it.