I have no clue what the upstairs neighbors must have thought. I wouldn’t call what I was doing at the time singing—more like a semimelodious howling while strumming a guitar. Back then I correlated sincerity with volume, and at twenty-three, I was nothing if not sincere.
That spring, I had taken a semester off from seminary and was spending my days on Long Island with my terminally ill mother, reading William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and George Herbert. I was trying my hand at writing too. Poems, songs, and short stories rushed out with urgency. Those months of anticipatory grief became a strange limbo. I tried to savor each moment, but death cast a long shadow.
When the doctors found Mama’s initial tumor, under her arm, they thought it might be breast cancer, a diagnosis she had always feared. A needle biopsy proved inconclusive, but
