"‘There were times when my mother had come down and kept me company, sitting quietly in the blackness as I struggled to load film onto the developing reel. Together we would breathe in the chemical smells, their corrosiveness, from which my hands were protected by rubber gloves, nothing compared with what was taking place inside her body. She would keep time for me with her watch, familiarizing herself with the process enough to be able to tell me when to pour the series of fluids in and out of the processing tank, both of us knowing that I’d have to buy a timer, eventually. “It must be something like this,” she said once in that perfectly dark, silent, sealed space, and I understood without her saying so that she was imagining what it might be like to be dead.’"