My father was one of those charismatic professors who forever have a coterie of graduate students pressed around them. My mother was a nurse who left work to raise children. It was along these broad strokes of character that the general story of their marriage was understood: the absent-minded intellectual who never learned to drive and his capable wife who managed the practicalities of their lives. He was respected; she was loved.

The truth was more complicated, of course, but the story reasserted itself even on the day of my mother’s memorial service. Thanking the assembled guests, my father observed how many poets made the journey to honor her. “Jean liked poets,” he said, thoughtfully, and then — with a gleam in his eye — he added, “although she didn’t like poetry.”

The remark got a laugh and managed to convey the exact nature of his relationship with her: fondness, condescension, exaggerated bewilderment and willful dishonesty. My mother, in fact, loved poetry, and anyone who knew her well knew that. She knew lots of complicated poems by heart, especially ones that could delight children, like “Jabberwocky.” She knew more Yeats than most people with advanced degrees in English. But there was no poem she recited more often than “Spring and Fall.”

How many times was I near her — sitting in the passenger seat at a red light, setting the table — when out of nowhere she would ask, “Margaret, are you grieving/Over Goldengrove unleaving?”