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My brothers and I spent an inordinate amount of time with our mother when we were children, not only because we went to school where she worked, as the head of the middle school, but because she loved being with kids. She was a bit of a child herself. She had married when she was seventeen, and in some ways never lost the teen-ager inside her. Over the summer, she would study the names of Northeastern birds in her Audubon books and, with utter focus, write a list of the ones she’d seen. She had a vivid sense of what makes children feel safe, and she believed in a child’s experience of the world. Students trusted her, even when they’d been sent to her office and she was asking them why in the world they had done whatever it was they had done.
我和哥哥孩童时期时有无数呆在母亲身边的日子，不仅仅是因为我们在母亲当校长的学校里上学，更因为她喜欢和我们这些孩子们呆在一起。她自己也有一点孩子气。从她17岁结婚后，在某些方面来说她一直保留着她内心的童真。夏天结束的时候，她就研究她的奥特朋书籍里东北鸟类的名称并且全神贯注，还会列出她看到过的种类。她具有明显的使孩子们感到安全的气质，相信孩子眼中看到的世界。学生都信任她，即使他们因为做了一些被她认为不当做的事被送去她的办公室，接受她的疑问。
She spent hours with my brothers and me, making gingerbread houses or sledding or cutting out paper snowflakes. She taught us all to make apple pie, and read “The Black Stallion” out loud to us at night—though she also had a habit of promising to read a book out loud and then giving up partway through. The boxes of memorabilia she kept for each of us were always disorganized. One of the things I found there after she died was a card I had made for her birthday when I was about six. It began:
TO MOM
I LOVE YOU.
I LOVE THE STORIES
YOU MAKE WITH ME.
她花了很多时间和我和哥哥在一起，做姜饼屋，滑雪橇还有剪纸雪花。她教我们做苹果派，还会在晚上大声读 “黑神驹”给我们听——尽管她有在答应了要大声读完一整本书后总是半途放弃的习惯。这个她保存着关于我们的重大事件的盒子里总是被翻的杂乱。她死后我找到其中一件东西，那是我六岁那年送给她的生日卡片。上面写着：
致妈妈
我爱你
我爱你讲述的
所有故事
On a hazy October morning, after months of chemotherapy, my mother and I drove down to New York-Presbyterian Hospital in the near-dark, listening to traffic reports like all the other commuters. The cancer had spread to her lungs and her liver. This wasn’t likely to be a story that ended well. But, in a last-ditch effort, we had enrolled her in an experimental treatment program. I thought, darkly, that the creeping cars around us were like souls wandering in Hades. My mother was quiet. I worried that she resented my fussing about what she was eating and whether my father had given her the right pain medication.
在一个雾蒙蒙的十月上午，结束多月的化疗后，傍晚时我和母亲开车去纽约长老教会医院，一边和所有搭乘公车的乘客一样听着交通报道。癌细胞当时已经扩散到了她的肺和肝，这不像是一个有好结局的故事。但是，在义无反顾的努力下，我们让她参加了一个实验性的治疗项目。我思考着，暗沉沉的天色，周围缓慢移动的车流就像地狱中游荡着的幽灵包围着我们。我的母亲保持着安静。我很担心她会对我过分关心她的饮食而感到不满，还担心我的父亲是否给她拿对了止痛药。
