So the... the summer of '72 was a joyous time with the Golden Wedding of my parents, my brother from Australia coming with his wife and little children, and... and completing the case histories. But then... but there was some... I think there was some premonition, I don’t know, I had a sort of fear, I always have fears and premonitions of... of death, and accidents and... my own or... or others. I went back to New York, and then in November I got a phone call from my brother David saying that our mother had died, that she’d had a fatal heart attack in Israel. I... I flew back to London. I think the relationship with my mother was very close, and probably rather ambivalent. And... but I was devastated by her death and what kept me going for the first week was the formal mourning, the sitting Shiva, when all the family – including the surviving siblings of my mother – we all sat on low chairs and people would... and the food was made for us, and people came and talked, often happily and joyfully about her. This was not just a sharing of misery, it was a sharing of celebrations.

Many of her students came along and I heard stories which I’d never heard before of... of her generosity to students. How she had even sent some of them through medical school. It was also clear from listening to my cousins that my mother could be a marvellous aunt, although I thought in some ways she’d been a terrifying mother. But she was gone, and then after the Shiva I was in... I don’t know what to call it, but a very intense and lamenting and tearful mood. And it was then that I stayed in London and wrote the rest... the rest of Awakenings. [John] Donne’s meditations on his sickness were very much in my mind.