I?ve only seen my mother cry inconsolably once, when I was in high school. She was talking about her older sister, Bernadine, how she had died of bone cancer six months after she came home from World War II. She was a Navy nurse. I didn?t know this. My mother was eleven years old. She described how she stood in the yard with her father and brothers and watched the sky; her mother stayed in the kitchen at the window. Three Navy planes flew low over their house on Burlingame to honor Bernadine, trailing red smoke like bloody cotton.