Recently widowed, unhappily stuck on a pricey whiplash tour of Italy, Elizabeth Berman comes face to face with the first documented painting of a teardrop in human history, and in the presence of that tearful mother, and the arresting company of the renowned and anonymous women painted by Giotto in the Arena Chapel, she wakes up to the possibility that she is not lost. Mitchell left me everything, just as he promised. Everything, he liked to say during his last month on the sofa, everything will be yours, as if it wasnt yet. I was left with that and two adult children who could not tolerate my sitting in my home by myselfadmittedly, rather too often in a capacious pink flannel nightgown and the green cardigan Mitchell was wearing on the afternoon he died.
