Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín

died.
    Deliberately, she did not plan what she would say, or even how she would begin. She simply drove towards Josie’s, believing that she would know what to do as soon as she saw her. Aunt Josie had built her own house to the side of the old farmhouse when John had married and when she had retired from her job as a teacher. She was proud of its design, how it looked as though it was part of the original house, with windows the same shape and similar slates on the roof. She had made summer quarters, a living room upstairs with views of the mountains and a small bedroom and a bathroom beside it. Below, she had another bedroom with a bathroom attached, and then a cosy sitting room with an open fireplace, and a small kitchen off it. The doorways and the bathrooms, she loved telling her visitors, were designed for a wheelchair, but she still had not decided what floor she would live on when she was incapacitated. She would laugh then at the very idea of being incapacitated. She spent her days gardening, reading, listening to the radio and talking on the telephone.
    Nora tried to remember how it had happened that the boys had spent two months with her, whether Nora had asked or Josie had offered. She thought back to that time, but certain images were so filled with detail, certain hours so filled with pure, unforgettable moments, that the remaining time seemed as though it had been watched through glass covered with rainwater. Walking with Maurice into the lobby of the hospital in the knowledge that he might not come out of there alive. The moment when he had said he would like to go one more time to look at the sky and that she was to wait for him in the lobby, let him do it alone. And then the watching as he began to cry when he reached the door. All of that was too raw andnew for other things such as the arrangements she had made for the boys to stay with Josie to be fully clear to her now.
    She should remember what happened, she knew that. It was not as though she was not there and alert when these arrangements were made. But whatever they were, she was sure that they had seemed natural at the time, an obvious solution. She was grateful to Josie for taking the boys in, and relieved that they were safe and away from Maurice as he came home and eventually began to decline in ways that his two sons should not have had to witness.
    He had not died at home, of course. She had to move him finally to Brownswood, the old TB hospital outside the town now used for general patients, when the pain grew too great and his faculties failed and she could not nurse him anymore. Even though he was on a stretcher and his eyes were closed and he had not spoken a clear sentence for days, she knew that he was aware that he was leaving the house for the last time. She held his hand, but every time he made to grip hers his hand would jerk out of control as though it were a claw. At least the boys had not been there for that.
    She drove up the long rutted lane to Josie’s, opening and closing the two iron gates along the way, trying to avoid stepping in the patches of mud and muck, noting the bareness of the ditches on each side and some bright red flowers whose name she did not know. The sky was darkening, with clouds hovering low over the Blackstairs Mountains. She found herself shivering as she stood on the gravel path. John’s car, she noticed, was not there. She did not know if it was best to knock on the door of the old farmhouse first or walk around and knock on Josie’s kitchen door, which was the only entrance to her part of the house. Since there was to be no sign of life from the farmhouse, she walked around, her shoes sinking in the grass. It must have rained here recently, more than it did inthe town, she thought. When she looked in the window, she saw an armchair with a small table beside it with a pair of glasses on an open newspaper, and another table with a vase of bright lilies mixed in with the red flowers she had seen growing