My mother remembers that at the hospital people kept asking them, “Who else do you want to be here? Do you want someone to be with the girls?” And my parents kept saying, “No, it’s just us. It’s just us.”

They didn’t think he was going to die. There was no reason to think that he might. He’d been sick the day before with a cough, maybe laryngitis, and it seemed just that. His breathing was labored, and at the hospital they gave him a shot of epinephrine, to steady his breathing, to get his heart rate back up. But almost immediately after the shot, my brother fainted.

 “He fainted, but I’ve fainted before too,” my mother says. “I just thought it was going to be that kind of fainting, that he was going to wake up and be fine.”

These days when I talk with my parents about my brother, I’m surprised to realize that I’m the one who starts to pull away when things feel too hard. I am overwhelmed imagining their grief.

“I never wanted you and your sister to think of me as a sad person,” my mother tells me now. “I didn’t want you to think, after Paul died, Mom could never be happy again. I didn’t want you to think that you weren’t enough for me.”

I am not jealous of her pain but there are times when I wish I could know what it is like to feel it. I bought my mother Blue Nights without having read it. I bought it mostly because it was by Joan Didion, but also because I thought she might like to read about someone else who has lost a child. I also looked at the back cover, at the picture of Didion’s daughter, Quintana, and thought, selfishly, that my mother might read it and think of me.

But she doesn’t read it. “It’s too sad,” she tells me simply. I am disappointed, but I don’t push her. Instead, I take the book for myself and buy her something else. I read it after and I feel horribly inconsiderate.