The piping on the red snowsuit was yellow, and on the green snowsuit it was blue: fire-engine red, sunflower yellow, summer-grass green, deep-ocean blue, the palette of preschool, the colors in a set of finger paints. I loved everything about those mail-order snowsuits—the snap-off hoods, the ribbed cuffs—but I especially loved the piping, which ran, as thick as a pipe cleaner, across the yoke of each jacket and down each leg of the pants, like the stripes of a military uniform. Just what I’d have done if I’d sewn them myself. It made the boys look like soldiers from different regiments. The red-and-yellow brigade of the two-year-olds, the green-and-blue brigade of the four-year-olds. I still dream about them—the snowsuits, the little boys.

I sewed my first son his first snowsuit when I was pregnant with him, in the middle of a hard and terrible winter, the ramp-up to Y2K, the much anticipated end of the world. He wasn’t due till the very beginning of April; it would be spring by then, thawed, even blooming. Still, wouldn’t he be cold? He was coming out of me: didn’t he need something to go into? I bought a yard of Kermit-green fleece and a matching zipper, and I stitched for him that sort of star-shaped sack Maggie Simpson wears. (Most of my ideas about parenting came from Marge, fretting beneath her blue beehive.) The zipper ran from the left foot to the right shoulder. I sewed on little flaps for his tiny hands to be tucked into, like letters into envelopes. I tried the snowsuit out on a stuffed bear the brown of the bark of a sugar maple. We named the bear Elly, for Eleanor Roosevelt, and I carried her around the house in her new fleece suit, practicing.

The doctors had to unzip the baby out of me. I couldn’t push. Maybe I didn’t want to, I don’t know, I don’t remember. When I was trying to deliver him, my best friend, Jane, was on her deathbed, more than a hundred miles away. We were historians, counters of years, markers of time, so this spring, twenty years since that day, day of birth, day of death, I opened her computer, to honor the anniversary. We’d bought our first laptops together when we were in graduate school. It had taken her forever to pick out hers. No one hated change more. She dreaded disappointment like a disease. She was also superstitious: she hated jinxing anything with her own expectations. She spent eight months deciding on what kind of a phone to buy when her old one broke—not a smartphone, not a cell phone, mind you; this was a mere landline telephone—and when she got sick we were working on the three-year-long decision of whether or not she should get a dog. Her own decisions paralyzed her, but she was immediate and fierce with her advice to me, which never varied: my chapter drafts were always good, my haircuts always horrible.

A Macintosh PowerBook 160: she’d left it to me in her will, along with her books, but it had sat, plastic and inert, a thwarted life of the mind, her mind, a mind that I crammed into a box and stored in the back of the cupboard where I keep my fabric, yards of cambric and calico and gingham. So this spring I yanked it out of the cupboard and hauled it out of the box. I plugged in a power cord attached to an adapter the size of a poundcake, but when I pried open the laptop sharp bits of steel-gray plastic broke off like chipped teeth, and the hinges cracked, and the screen fell away from the keyboard and dangled, like a mostly decapitated head, the Anne Boleyn of Apples. I propped the screen up against the wall and pressed the power button. It made that noise, the chime of Steve Jobs’s doorbell, but nothing happened, so I pressed a bunch of keys and fussed with some parts that seemed to move, and I cursed, until my fourteen-year-old figured out that I had set the brightness to black. He fixed that, and the screen blinked at me, as if blinded by its own light, and then a square Macintosh-computer face turned into a thick black arrow pointing at her hard drive, which, I discovered, she’d named Cooper, for my old dog, a lame yellow Lab, long since dead and buried.

All historians are coroners. I began my inquest. I hunted around this tiny-screen world of black and white, poking at the membrane of her brain. I clicked on a folder named “personal” and opened a file called “transitions notes.” Microsoft Word version 5.1a 1992 popped up, copyrighted to the kid in graduate school we’d pirated our software from; she’d never updated hers. “Transitions” turned out to be notes she’d taken on a book published in 1980 called “Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes,” by William Bridges, who’d started out as a professor of American literature, a scholar of transcendentalism. She was always falling for this stuff, stuff I hated. The endless therapy, the what-color-is-your-parachute quizzes, the courage-to-heal to-do lists, the lifelong self-examination, the bottomless well. Bridges ended up a management consultant, an adviser to C.E.O.s engaged in downsizing. Transitions? Joblessness. “Jane, that stuff is crap,” I’d say, and she’d smile, and shrug, and go back to her book, Oprah for intellectuals, Freud for feminists, mother yourself, the latest claptrap.

I blinked. “Endings are like little deaths,” she’d written in her notes on the Bridges book. “We forget that they can be entrances to the beginning of a new life.” The computer began to bleat, a rumble of distress. The screen flickered, blindingly white, and then faded to black, and so, it embarrasses me to say, did I.

The one time I lost a baby, I was alone, in a bathroom. I hadn’t even known I was pregnant. I remember the color of the linoleum on the floor where I fell, beige, and the pattern, veined, and then the blood, and the tissue, a swirl of red and white: red-wine red, egg-white white. I remember the pain and the cold, I was so cold, and the membrane, diaphanous and wet, and the first convulsion of grief, and the second. I don’t remember the rest.

I do remember that Jane took care of me afterward. When I got married, Jane stayed with us in a two-story cottage on an island. On the morning of the wedding, as everyone was getting dressed, a near-hurricane hit. The iron garden furniture flew away. Upstairs, one of the skylights blew open and the rain came pouring in, onto the wedding dress I’d sewn from a bargain bolt, brocade. Jane had just come out of the shower, but she reached up and pulled the skylight shut with one outstretched arm while, with the other, she held up her towel. “I’m the Statue of Liberty!” she screamed over the howl of the wind.

We met the first week of graduate school, when I gave her a ride home from a department picnic and she tested my knowledge of music, a test I failed. She was the sort of person who could draw anyone out, talk about anything, and forgive everything except pretension and pettiness. She was almost immoderately charming; she was irresistible. Go to a restaurant with her, and in five minutes she’d find out where the waitress had gone to high school. Go again, and she’d remember the name of that high school, and would pick up the conversation exactly where it had left off. Stop to get your dry cleaning with her only to discover that she knew the names of all the dry cleaner’s children and the titles of their favorite picture books, and that she’d brought along another book, as a gift. She was dauntingly brilliant and she knew when to speak up, and who for. She had as many bad girlfriends as I had bad boyfriends. She loved to eat out and hated to eat in, and if she had you over for dinner she made you pasta with tomatoes, basil, and feta. She had an opinion on any movie. She had a crush on John Cusack. She loved to run. She drank coffee at any hour. She adored Jane Smiley. She was terrible at tennis. She had thick, curly dark-brown hair and very silly eyebrows and beautiful brown eyes, and she wore glasses that she called Official D.C. Congressional Intern Eyewear—round, wire-framed—and she’d had them since the nineteen-eighties, when they were a thing, but she was too attached to them to give them up. She was possibly the funniest person I ever met.