He booked a speech on February 14 that required traveling from our home in Washington, D.C., to Toronto. I couldn’t object—he was getting paid. Anyway, I had my own plans: an “anti–Valentine’s Day” dinner hosted by one of the foreign embassies.As I got ready, I called our oldest daughter, Miranda.

She answered from her Brooklyn bathroom, getting ready for her own party. She propped her phone up beside her sink and laughed when I told her about her father’s strategic Valentine’s Day escape.I asked what she planned to wear. She sent a selfie: It showed her looking at her bathroom mirror; her straight rose-gold hair bobbed along her jawline.

A strapless black top exposed her pale, delicate shoulders. (Too pale and delicate, I worried reflexively, maternally.)“Stunning,” I texted back.It was the last communication I’d ever have with her.Two days later, I was coming down the stairs when David’s voice shattered the morning. Words tumbled out in fragments: Miranda’s best friend calling from the apartment. Found unconscious.

Not breathing. Maybe—I seized the phone from David’s shaking hand. I could hear a police officer’s radio chatter, the soundtrack to all urban tragedy.“I’m sorry—” a voice began.What is the opposite of giving birth?I hung up and stepped into my bathroom to pack my toiletry case.

David was slumped in a chair, face in hands, moaning, “No, no, it can’t be.” I rummaged through my drawers, frantically pulling out pajamas, my medications, a toothbrush. My overwhelming instinct was to get to New York right away, to Miranda right away. I suppose I felt that I’d be able to straighten this all out somehow, as I had straightened things out for her so many times in the past.

David was still in the chair: “No, no, no.”I wrapped my arms around him. “We have to get to Brooklyn.”We were waiting for our flight at Reagan National when the medical examiner called from Miranda’s apartment. He was matter-of-fact.

Miranda had been found face down in her bedroom by her housekeeper around 9 a.m. The cleaner called Miranda’s friend—another client—who called the police. Based on body temperature and other physical evidence, the examiner estimated Miranda’s time of death to be approximately 3 a.m.The examiner’s first thought was overdose—pills lay everywhere.

But they were just her daily medications, scattered when she collapsed. Watching planes take off and land, I numbly shared Miranda’s medical history. Five years earlier, she’d had a nonmalignant brain tumor successfully removed.

The tumor had damaged her pituitary gland beyond repair—but this was not a problem. The surgeon had assured us that medication could do everything the gland once did.Lately, Miranda had been fighting what she assumed was a stubborn cold. When she was ill, she was supposed to take more cortisol, the stress hormone that her body could no longer produce.

But cortisol came with a price: It bloated her face, thickened her waist, and made her feel unlike herself. I knew she’d been playing with her dosage to minimize these side effects.The examiner said that people with compromised immune systems could sometimes present with flu-like symptoms that turned deadly if not treated.A hundred questions charged through my mind: How could Miranda have been that sick without knowing it? How did we not know it?

Had any of her doctors told her she risked dropping dead if she got her cortisol levels wrong?But these were not the most urgent of my questions at that moment.“May—may I ask you something … as a mother?”“Of course.”“I just need to know—” I had to run at the sentence a few times before I could get it out. “Would my daughter have been in any … pain … when she … ? If this was how she … ?”“No,” he replied quickly, his voice softening.

“She would have fallen unconscious before her heart stopped beating. She wouldn’t have been aware of anything.”“Thank you.”The examiner passed the phone to a police officer. “When do you think you’ll get here?” he asked abruptly.My brain struggled to refocus.

Maybe by four?“I’m not sure if we’ll be here by then.” That afternoon the police would have to seal the apartment, and Miranda would be moved “to the examiner’s office downtown.” The officer gave me a case number and other details we’d need for what I would come to call the Bureaucracy of Death.There was now no getting around the truth. “The examiner’s office downtown” was not some place where our daughter was going to receive urgent medical care. It was the morgue.By the time we made it to Brooklyn, the apartment had been sealed.

We checked into a hotel and grabbed Ringo, Miranda’s beloved dog, who had been in the care of her friend. We took an Uber to the medical examiner’s building in