In the early stages of her illness, Jane's daughters brought in a hospital bed and rearranged her bedroom to make her comfortable. I arrived one April evening at her house in the country, and Janice and Sarah were with their mother.

Jane slept, and we sat in wooden kitchen chairs around her bed, and her daughters by their stories about her shaped her life for me: I could see Jane chasing children around the yard; killing a snake up on the hill; milking her cow, making purple quilts.

The old iron bed had been shoved over next to Jane's hospital bed, so that when she woke in the night, afraid or ill, whoever slept next to her could hold her hand. The curtains had been pulled back, and the windows framed the countryside, where two white cats walked under cedar trees. Jane's best quilt, with tulips, was on the bed. Red silk roses were on her dresser near pictures of all her children and a lighted picture of Jesus. Her daughters were holding her hands, giving her water, hugging her—it was like a poem, or like prayer: this life, just one, living out the last of itself on this Tennessee hillside. Rain was coming, cats were playing outside, Jane was able to drink a strawberry milkshake, and had seen her great-grandson Alex, a toddler—Janice had lifted him carefully onto the bed to greet her, and Jane, delighted, had said, "Somebody brought a boy in here!"

Later Jane slept again, and Janice and Sarah showed me how to make windmills out of plastic strips. We sat on the linoleum floor in the living room, and Sarah opened the front and back doors so we could hear the April rain. A train clattered by behind the house, and we sat peacefully listening, threading the silver and red beads onto wires, bending strips of plastic into graceful shapes that would spin in the wind in Jane's garden.

When we finished our windmills—Janice's was purple, mine red, and Sarah's yellow—we carried them in to Jane to show them off. She watched the gaudy colors spinning around her bed, and smiled at our foolishness.

Later, as I drove home down wet roads, I thought of Jane's serene lamplit room, the red silk roses on the dresser, the tidy stack of linens on a work table; I knew Janice would be sitting near Jane's bed, folding towels by lamplight while her mother slept and the rain fell; I knew that if Jane woke during the night, she would have a daughter nearby to hold her hand.

Spring ended, and Jane's double hollyhocks came into bloom.

Being at home, in the center of her family's everyday life, with her grandchildren in and out, the Lake City train racketing by at five p.m. each day, Jane's dying seemed undramatic and peaceful, a natural part of her life.

As her mother's condition worsened, Janice rarely left her side. Finally, in the last hot summer weeks, Jane called for her daughter endlessly: "Janice. Janice Ann." Janice was always there. I watched as she became more and more patient, compassionate, and tender with her mother, until finally Janice was transformed by her mother's dependence, acquiring a gravity of demeanor, a gracefulness and beauty about her that had not been there in the early days of her mother's illness. By giving herself over wholly to caring for her mother, Janice had received the final gift of Jane's life—the gift of being needed.

On the morning Jane died, I drove out to their house. It was filling up with relatives. Janice led me out onto the front porch, and we talked for a minute.

"You've taught me a lot," I told her, "about being patient."

Janice nodded. She looked out at the yard and said quietly, "See Mama's garden?"

I looked with her, at the red double hollyhocks, the bachelor buttons, fiddleback ferns, and oak leaf hydrangeas, all tangled together, healthy and colorful in the clear September light.

"When Mama first started this garden," Janice said, "she had just that one little bush over by the sidewalk.

"But she took her time, and little by little her garden grew, until now it's like this."

"It's beautiful," I said. Everywhere were colors and trellises and flowers heaped up.

"That's how I think God takes care of us," Janice said. "Patiently. Slowly."