The boy sat on the edge of the hospital bed where his mother lay dying. He squeezed her right hand while softly caressing her straight, gray hair.

The boy – by then a grown man – and his mother had never been close. They fought constantly starting in his teenage years and were unable to be in the same room for five minutes without arguing.

Yet he sat there in the darkened room – the only light the dismal, green flickering of a heart monitor – comforting her, listening to her whisper, and assuring her it would be all right.

It was not love that brought him there; it was a feeling of obligation and the knowledge that the woman with an increasingly irregular pattern of breathing was his mother, for better or worse.

He was there because he knew he would have to bury her soon, and he also wanted to bury the anger, the bad times, and the differences between them. It no longer mattered that their lives had been a constant war of wills. His mother had her demons, as he had his, and it was time to exorcise them.

She had been born early in the 20th century, a few years after her father and mother had come to America as teenagers from Eastern Europe, met, fallen in love, and gotten married.

In the brittle old photographs, her father was a strong-looking, serious, ramrod-straight man. In life, he was a fruit and vegetable peddler, a rumrunner during Prohibition, a small-time thief, a bar owner, and a man who cheated on his wife and ran roughshod over his children, particularly his only daughter.

Her mother was a strong woman who tolerated her husband’s philandering, took him back after he’d left for another woman for two years, and tried to protect her three children as best as she could.

The girl was smart and became a teacher, though her father ridiculed her and preferred she work at the family’s fruit stand. He made her feel stupid and ugly, and she ran into the arms of a man who sweet-talked her, made her feel special, and then dumped her.

She was always a bit out of sync, had wild mood swings, and was compulsive – a disease then called manic depression. When the man abandoned her, she sought refuge in the arms of a gentle immigrant with whom she had little in common. She married him.

Then she had a nervous breakdown – the first of three – and spent more than a year in a stark, dreary state psychiatric hospital in New Jersey. She had her second 12 years later, when her only child was born, and her last 12 years after that, when her mother died. She spent 18 months in the psychiatric hospital the second time and two years the final time, about 17 years before she died.

When her mood was good, she could be loving and generous, to the point of spending compulsively and pulling her husband deep into debt. When she was dark, she could be mean and cruel. The worst thing, though, was the volatility. The boy never knew what to expect.

When the demons had her, she would degrade him, calling him stupid and ugly and saying he would never amount to much. Once, as a teenager, he raced up the back stairs of the house where they were living, opened the screen door, and asked, innocently, he thought, “What’s for dinner, mom?”

She wheeled, a saucepan filled with stuffed cabbage in her hand, threw the pan straight up to the ceiling, and screamed, “That’s what’s for dinner, okay?” The orange stain of the sauce remained on the yellow ceiling for years, until her husband finally had it painted.

The son, rebellious and confused, dropped out of high school and did foolish things. “See,” the mother snarled, “you won’t amount to anything.” Years later, after he returned to school and graduated from college, he gave her his diploma. She threw it on a bookshelf without looking at it. She never said, “Congratulations,” and he couldn’t remember a time she told him she loved him. They argued until the end drew near, and he carried hatred and anger in his heart. But as the darkness dropped down, he knew he owed her – and himself – a kindness they never managed to give each other in life.

She did not die that night. The final darkness did not come for a few weeks. But as he stood at her graveside, shoveling rocky brown dirt onto her wooden casket, he knew he was burying some of his demons – and he hoped she was now finally free of hers.