Listening to his moans and wails, I realized that, excruciating as my previous night had been, I’d gotten off comparatively easy. Ava, in the waiting room, saw the man’s adult daughter helplessly listening to her father’s agonies, her head in her hands, her face gray. And it’s just around the time your senescent parents die, releasing you from your last grim filial duties, that you start noticing signs of your own incipient decline. The world is arranged to discreetly conceal this side of life from us — the messy, ragged back of the tapestry. Then I was released back into the “real” Paris — the public, lovely one.

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Persons: ’, gurney, I’d, agonies, Ava, Carolyn —, —, Martha Graham’s, Willem de Kooning, She’s, we’ve Organizations: Consulting Locations: Paris