In Switzerland one has the right to die, she had always said, and that’s what the doctors kept telling me as well. Even the clinic’s ethics committee told me that, advising that I give consent for them to cease further treatment, to just turn the plastic valve of the morphine tube up a little, because how was she to recover from this, what kind of life would that be in the end? And really, life—what was that?

But I found myself unable to give the desired consent, for I saw my mother in her Pucci bikini at the pool in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat whenever I closed my eyes, and not there on the gurney with that obscene tube dangling from the incision in her larynx, beneath her wrinkled chin. And naturally she rallied, woke one morning as though nothing had happened, and a few weeks later rode home again in a taxi.