2 WHAT? My mother grew up in a small farm town in upstate NY. Modern music (then or now) wasn't her thing. She liked the "Sound of Music" and "Ode to Joy." I would not have guess she'd even known the name Billie Holiday. But it turns out that she had lived for a summer as a teen in East Harlem.

3 My mother attended nursing school in the Adirondacks near Vermont. The school required that nurses train for a time in at big city hospital. So in summer 1959, she worked as a junior nurse at NYC's Metropolitan Hospital in Harlem. And in May, Holiday was admitted. She would never leave.

4 Holiday, broken, suffering from cirrhosis and heart disease and years of heroin abuse, had collapsed at home. She was in bad shape. She may have been in a coma. She was also hounded by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, overseen by a notorious racist. At some point she was handcuffed to a gurney.

5 Much has been written about Holiday's hospital stay, lots contradictory. My mother only recalls nurses jockeying to care for her. Mom saw her once or twice. She recalled a guard by her door and musicians and Harlem visitors, but didn't recognize them. Mom didn't see Sinatra, who may have visited.