A good day with no pain, no side effects, and nowhere near the energy to control a thing. Our cat Poupon, a fourteen-year-old ginger tomcat (deprived of his "toms" but none of his commanding appetite) is the first to notice the change. After two days of lying quietly at my side in bed or in the crook of my arm as I sit and read, he approaches my bowl of cold cereal and, without even pausing for permission, drops his tongue into the milk and starts lapping.

I celebrate my serenity by staying in my pajamas and sitting on the kitchen deck in the sunshine.

I think about my mother, dead five years now at 99. The day of my diagnosis she was the first person I wanted to tell. The wish surprised me because the side she turned to my brother Jim and me, all through our childhood, was one of forbidding expectations—to excel in school, to be obedient, and to keep our problems to ourselves. When we succeeded, she expressed her pleasure in a fierce pride that was the closest thing to affection I knew.

To her friends and less immediate family she was one of the most gracious and charming people they ever met. Once or twice, to my amazement, I saw what they meant.

When we left Mexico in the summer of 1956 after five years of exile, it was to live with her widowed father in Manchester, New Hampshire and pretty much on his full financial support. My father Gordon had been bilked of what was left of his savings in Mexico by an elegant, silver haired con man from Mexico City who had found in my brilliant and blacklisted father a willing fool. Till then we had lived well in Mexico on a favorable exchange rate that elevated our few dollars into a small fortune. In Manchester we pinched pennies every day. No one ever talked about why we'd left Mexico so suddenly, but I was expected to understand "the way things are right now" as reason enough for denying me any luxury I craved, like an expensive toy, a new bicycle, or (God knows why) a stopwatch.

Then, on one of our first Thanksgivings after our return, out of the blue, Mother insisted on hosting almost twenty guests. Pies and a cheesecake flew out of her oven, lovely, almost floral arrangements of sliced celery stalks and cream cheese rested on pieces of hand-painted china next to chocolates in silver bowls that hadn't seen the light of day in years, and there wasn't a single guest she overlooked or failed to leave delighted and delightful in her company. I couldn't believe my eyes. Another time, on a visit to some friends, she sat down at a piano and played a little piece by Mozart, I think, without a mistake. It was her first time at a keyboard in forty years. I didn't know she played.

Those two sides of her, the playful soul and the forbidding foreman of whatever excellence I could show, were hard for me to put together. Even her physical presence seemed impossible to pin down. She was on crutches for most of her life because of a childhood accident, but they never slowed her progress as she streaked through a day, and they never entered into any description of her I heard. People just didn't see them. What people saw was her beauty, her agility, her keen intelligence, and her loyalty to my father, whose politics put us through so much. Soon after we settled in Manchester she went looking for work as a high school teacher to help support us and discovered they wouldn't hire her because she was rumored to be the wife of a communist, a woman certain to poison the minds of innocent students or, worse, get anyone in trouble who dared help her.  Again, without losing a step, she found a job, over an hour's drive away in rural New Hampshire, where they didn't know her name and where she became a legend to many young Future Farmers of America whom she showed a bigger world.

Something about the sternness in her eyes haunted me. I feared their judgment and never saw them soften with sympathy or concern at what I might feel. As the years went by, I never did anything to bridge the distance between us. I told her nothing of my depressions after I dropped out of graduate school. Long years later when Harriet and I were married and decided to raise a family, I told her almost nothing of our struggle with infertility before deciding to adopt. And when Andrew grew into an angry and imperiled adolescent, she knew nothing of our worries for his health and safety, nor would I have considered telling her. It hurt to realize how little I trusted her.

I remember the start of one nightmare I had late in my twenties when my confidence in myself was at its lowest.  In panic I am running through the woods from a faceless danger toward a towering wall. I'm terrified of heights, but it's a matter of life and death, so I clamber to the top and stand there frozen, afraid to jump to the other side, certain no one will come to save me.

When Mother was in her eighties, my brother and I helped her move into an apartment in an assisted living community she had found (it was like her to manage her own future) and in her mid-nineties, when she could no longer live alone, I would visit her almost every week in the nursing wing of the building to which she'd reluctantly agreed to be moved. Little by little, as she grew weaker, I would wheel her in her hospital bed for a change of scene or a moment in the sun, or feed her patiently with a spoon. By then she no longer recognized me, but she always greeted me with a smile as some sort of a friend. For everyone who entered the diminishing range of her recollections, in fact, though she often didn't have a name, she always had a welcome and her charm. As she said one day to my wife, "I'm not sure who you are, dear, but I'm certain you're a lovely person."  Her not knowing me as her son came, in fact, as a kind of relief.

As her dementia advanced that relief grew into a kind of quiet joy; as her energy and memory faded, the lifetime of anxieties they had fueled also faded from her eyes. For the first time I recognized them as the hard look that had always stood between us and for the first time, I saw past it to her soul. I can't say I finally understood how much she loved me, but I knew at last how much I loved her.

If you're lucky, I realized, illness can also come as grace. The silences of a lifetime can start to speak. There's no open heart without an entry wound.

Remember the dream I had years ago? Here's how it ended—I am running from danger through the woods toward a towering wall. I'm no climber but I clamber to the top, and stand there frozen, afraid to jump to the other side. I close my eyes and jump and when I land on the other side the grass is soft and green, the sun is shining and I am happy and safe. I look back at the obstacle I've overcome and it is no longer there. It was a one-sided wall.