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Shortly thereafter, on a morning in February when I was again at school, Papa brought home another rental car. “It’s over,” he said to Mama, wanting only for her to stand on her own feet and find her own way. He barely had the strength to take care of himself, and her need for him felt like a weight around his throat. Rather than undergo surgery, he’d decided to try what would be one of two radioactive iodine treatments. The pill was supposed to take several weeks after ingestion to shrink the swollen gland, but so far it wasn’t providing the easy fix the doctors had hoped for. Instead of his thyroid, it felt as if the radioactive iodine was removing his heart, leaving only anger at the world as he turned and walked away from Mama and out of the farmhouse.

“Fuck you!” Mama screamed after him, but she packed up herself and Clara and drove away from the farm along the narrow, icy roads. When she reached the stop sign where the cape road met the main road, she stopped, then turned around and headed back to the farm.

“I’m not going,” she said, standing in the door of the farmhouse, begging, ironically, like Heidi, to be let back in.

“This has got to end somewhere,” Papa yelled, his calm assurance unhinged at last.

“Just go,” he shouted, no longer caring about the pain it caused them both. “Go!”

The strength of Mama’s resolve withered in the light of Papa’s anger. She turned and went back to the car and drove with Clara, both of them crying much of the seven hours along icy winter roads, and the final lonely stretch of 88, to Westport Point.

Her parents were at a loss to see her return yet again, so she sought refuge at a nearby abbey. It seems incredible to me that this could be for real, but the nuns took her in, even with baby Clara, and she found solace in the hymns and quiet pace of life there. A school friend of Mama’s who lived outside of Boston helped her apply for welfare. She couldn’t believe the government would send her a check, just like that, but she rented a place in Cambridge with the money, where she and Clara stayed until she was accepted to Naropa, a Buddhist school she’d heard about in Boulder, Colorado. Then she paid for the tuition and bought a VW bug, driving out to Boulder with Clara to start summer classes in June.

“Can a woman’s tender care cease towards the child she bear?” was the quote Mama copied into her journal that spring above a photo of Clara and me, fighting, as she was, the numbing plunge into depression.

Back at the farm, the white-throated sparrow returned, heralding the still constant reliability of the seasons. “There’s a special providence in the fall of the sparrow,” Hamlet famously said, referencing the line in the Bible from Jesus. “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father.”

The death of even the smallest sparrow was thought by Christians to be part of God’s plan, but that was a comfort unknown to all of us at the time. Helen might have counseled us on what she saw as the comforts of reincarnation. “Death, we felt,” Helen would later write, “was a transition, not a termination. It was an exit-entrance between two areas of life.” Scott agreed, adding, “Death is a change; a good deal like the change from day to night—always thus far followed by another day. Never the same twice, but a procession of days.”

Helen held to the Buddhist and Hindu belief that the spirit survives death to be reborn in another body. That is, when a body has done its work in this world, the spirit makes a choice to move on to another. Why some stay longer in some bodies than others is open to speculation, but this concept eases the pain for the living. When I think of death as an opening and closing of doors, a flash of light, an end and a new beginning, it becomes easier to find peace with it and its part in this