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Show A PROPER INTRODUCTION-33 visit. He can't eulogize her, he explains, because he never knew her, but he can mention her name and read appropriate passages from the Bible, recite a few prayers. I ask if the organist would play the shepherd hymn, but Dr. boggs says it's unlikely to be in the Unitarian hymnal. As he he leaves he says again how sorry he is and fixes me with a liquid gaze I assume is meant to convey compassion, and suggests we have the urn and flowers delivered to the church by the next morning, a few hours before the service. We decidee to ask people not to send flowers, but instead to make donations to multiple sclerosis research, and we will choose the flowers for the service. I feel strangely tired. I'm sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, alone. I didn't want to, but I can't help thinking about Dad's visit to me in the New York when told me that Mother had been diagnosed as having m.s. He just couldn't tell her, he had said, "it would upset her too much." "Any more than thinking it was all in her head the way she'd been told for so long?" I asked. "Wouldn't it be a relief for her to know it was something real?" But I'd failed to persuade him, and she found out a month later by reading a letter he'd written to a relative and left lying open on his desk. "I know," she told me on the telephone that night. "It's all right. I can handle it." She sent me letters explaining how she was reading up on the illness, exercising, keeping up her interests. It was, to me, like watching a sparrow try to fly without feathers, but I wrote her back, praising her good attitude. "Perhaps, too," I suggested, "this will be a good thing in a way, to help Dad come out of himself more." She wrote back, thanking me for my support, saying |