He’s always been the family cook. He’s been feeding me since the day we met. Everything I know about Japanese food I know because of him. So now that’s another pleasure gone, perhaps the greatest. I don’t know how long it takes to die of starvation, or whether it hurts, but I dread it, just as I dread my sons watching me go like that. Because that is what they will remember, their mother reduced to a bag of bones. What it will do to Shin I can’t bear to contemplate.

Not doing the above.

Dependency. Fascism.

A world without music.

Both of the days my children were born. It was like I’d stepped through a mirror and everything turned Technicolor.

My distractibility, diminishing memory, and capacity for sustained concentration. My English master once said I had the brain of a butterfly. I feel that 40 years later, I’ve evolved into Dory from Finding Nemo.

At the right time, and like my father—utterly without fear or pain, at home, with all whom I love. It was his last lesson as a parent to me.

My mother. She’s 85 and rather than diminishing with age, she keeps surprising and growing more marvelous. She finds fun when most are jaded, wonder when most are cynical, and is curious when most are bored. She gave me life and continues to show me how to live it daily. And I know that everyone who meets her thinks the same.

In my bed, a hot-water bottle on my tummy, the windows are open, reading a book that I’m already into, chocolate at hand, all with the knowledge that everyone I love and know is happy.