She was seventy three and four weeks into chemotherapy when I brought her home with us, into the first floor guest room across from the bathroom, because the stairs had already become too much for her. I asked Desmond first. He was not enthusiastic, but he did not object. Then a work trip took me away for five days, and my last meeting finished early, so I drove back on the morning of the fifth instead of the evening.

Chips ground into the carpet. Beer bottles on every table. The television going at full volume from my mother’s room, where my husband and his brother had set up because that was where the screen was. When I asked where she was he shrugged and said the basement, and when I repeated her age back to him he told me it was his room and his house and that he was the man of the house. She was on an air mattress on the concrete under a thin blanket, her pills beside a water bottle on a cardboard box, no bathroom within reach.