ABSTRACT
I was fifty-six when this poem was written and, as is clear, it is about a week of conversations with my mother shortly before she died. They were the most important conversations I ever had with her and wronght a huge change in me and, I believe, were extremely important to her. I wrote down the conversations after each visit as close to verbatim as possible. About two years later I transformed them into this poem. In addition to the things we actually said to each other I also included in the poem some of my own self-reflections.
