The drinking started quietly. One glass, then another. I told myself it helped me sleep. It didn't. It only made sleep less necessary.
The bottles accumulated. I stopped cooking, and food spoiled in the refrigerator. The crossword stayed on the table, folded to the last page she had touched, and I never finished it. The blue mug stayed in the cupboard. I could not use it and I would not wash it, and that sounds ridiculous, and it was. But grief is full of small rules nobody else will ever understand.
Dust gathered on the shelves. The old kettle with its hole stayed on the stove, and the new one stayed in its box. My phone rang, and I let it. Messages came, and I did not open them. Some were from governments and some from hospitals, one from a journalist, one from an old classmate, one from a doctor who had never met me. Please help us understand the treatment. I deleted it. We have children dying in our ward. I deleted that too. I turned the phone off, because the world could not ask me anything if I could not hear it.
One night I woke on the kitchen floor with the lights off and the refrigerator humming, and for a moment I thought my mother was cooking. I could smell eggs. I sat up, and there was nothing, only the refrigerator and the clock. It said 3:07, and it was seven minutes slow, and I did the arithmetic anyway, as if it mattered. At the sink there was a cup. Blue. I picked it up and found it dirty, and I washed it, and then I stood holding it, and almost put it back. Instead I filled it with water and drank. The next morning I found it beside my bed. I did not remember carrying it there.
The world went on without me, and it became smaller, then larger, then unbearable. News came from everywhere. Hospitals collapsing, cities restricting movement, mass graves. Funerals held on screens. People standing apart from the people they loved. Doctors sleeping in corridors, and nurses calling families on the hospital phones. The best models said that nearly half of all people alive would be dead before it was over. I stopped watching. I could not.
Then one morning I saw a photograph. A hospital hallway, and a doctor sitting on the floor with his head against the wall. The caption said, No beds remain.
I turned off the television. Her voice was in the room, as plainly as if she were standing behind me. You will look at every sick person and wonder if your money bought them a bed.
I had told her it would never get that far. I had been so certain.
My mother had spent her whole life making fear smaller. I had made it enormous.