Oscar Fate’s bereavement

Oscar Fate’s bereavement is not confined to a single recollection: after his mother’s death, her absence returns in ordinary objects and in the landscapes through which he travels, turning his reporting journey toward Santa Teresa into an uneasy passage through memory. He imagines what she thought, recognizes that his own speculation cannot undo what he does not know, and carries reminders of her that have no clear destination or resolution.

Loss in Transit

At the Detroit airport, while waiting after buying a ticket to Tucson, Fate remembers a dream about Antonio Ulises Jones, dead for several years. He imagines Jones dying without warning on a Brooklyn street: tired, sitting down on the sidewalk, then simply ceasing to exist. That imagined ease of death leads him toward his mother. Perhaps, Fate thinks, something like that happened to her, but he knows deep down that it did not. The thought does not provide an account of her death; it exposes the distance between an image he can construct and the reality he cannot make present.

The form of the memory matters. Fate reaches his mother by way of someone else’s death, then retreats from the possibility his own mind has offered. His speculation about Jones is almost placid, but when it turns toward his mother it meets an unspoken certainty. Bereavement appears here as a limit on knowledge as much as an experience of sadness: the mind circles the question of what happened without arriving at an answer that could settle it.

Images of a Mother

Later, watching a sunset, Fate thinks of his mother, her neighbor, the magazine, and the streets of New York. The thoughts gather under a feeling he cannot put into words: sadness and weariness. He opens a book by a former Sandhurst professor to a passage about the economics of the slave trade. Its account of merchants waiting for payment—sometimes in bills of exchange rather than sugar, indigo, cotton, or ginger—belongs to another subject, yet Fate’s attention drifts from those transactions into the names of the commodities. He imagines indigo as reddish flowers, then as a dark blue paste with copper glints, and then a woman painted indigo washing herself in the shower.

The sequence is less an explanation of his grief than a record of a mind moving through it. Historical prose, commodity names, color, and an imagined figure coexist with thoughts of his mother; the book does not silence the loss, and the loss does not prevent him from reading. When a waitress asks where he is going, Fate answers that he is going to Mexico. His brief reply gives the journey a destination, but the scene’s interior movement remains with the dead and with images that cannot restore her.

The Desert and the Unfinished Past

On the road through Arizona, Fate’s surroundings take on the loneliness that accompanies his memories. In a valley, a distant glow might be a slow-moving convoy, the first lights of a town, or merely his desire to escape the darkness. The uncertainty of the light opens a recollection of childhood: on a bus with his mother and one of her sisters, Fate watched the view shift from buildings and highways to the country. At the edge of a small wood he thought he saw a man walking in great strides, trying not to be overtaken by night. He remembered the man’s loneliness as so intense that he wanted to look away and cling to his mother, but instead kept watching until the bus passed the woods and factories and warehouses filled the view again.

That old scene returns while Fate crosses a darker, lonelier valley as an adult. He sees himself striding along the roadside and shivers. The movement links the remembered child, the solitary man he watched, and the present-day traveler without making them identical: the childhood memory is shaped by a boy’s wish to turn toward his mother, while now the mother herself is absent. The darkness does not merely surround the recollection; it supplies the setting in which the remembered need for her becomes newly legible.

Fate then recalls the urn holding his mother’s ashes, the cup belonging to her neighbor that he never returned, and his mother’s videotapes, which no one will ever watch again. These are different kinds of remainder: the urn holds the physical trace of the dead; the cup marks an obligation left incomplete; the tapes preserve images whose future audience has disappeared. Their presence gives his bereavement a material and practical dimension, but none of them closes the gap between the living and the dead. The cup remains unreturned, and the tapes remain unwatched.

Peacefulness, Memory, and Absence

At a motel near the highway, after a night of drinking and sobering up, Fate sits on the trunk of his car and thinks about his mother in Harlem. He pictures her not looking out the window at the few stars, but sitting before the television or washing dishes in the kitchen while laughter comes from the television. The details are modest and domestic: dishes and a pot she has just used, a fork and spoon, other people laughing on a screen. Fate imagines that she may not have paid much attention to the jokes, occupied with washing up, and tries to name the quality of that scene as peacefulness.

But the thought will not remain settled. He wonders whether the peacefulness he imagines was only peacefulness, or whether weariness and banked embers were there too. He follows the idea further, linking peacefulness with tranquillity and sleepiness, then questioning his own definition: perhaps peacefulness is not a fixed condition at all, but a gauge of movement, capable of acting as either accelerator or brake. Grief is present in this circling, not because Fate arrives at a verdict about his mother’s life, but because the ordinary scene he reconstructs cannot tell him exactly what she felt. He can picture her gestures and the room around them; the inward experience remains uncertain.

His mother’s death also enters through what cannot be returned to ordinary use. The videotapes are not simply records of a life: Fate thinks no one will watch them again. Their future has ended along with their audience, just as the neighbor’s cup sits within a small unfinished exchange. The objects connect bereavement to time passing in practical forms, while the recurring thoughts make clear that remembrance does not proceed in a straight line from loss to consolation.

Narrative Significance

Across these scenes, the narrative places Fate’s mourning inside travel rather than apart from it. A departure from Detroit, a roadside journey, a view of the sunset, and a night beside a highway become occasions for thoughts that return to his mother. The movement toward Mexico does not leave grief behind; instead, it carries his memories into unfamiliar places, where darkness and distance echo the loneliness of the earlier recollection.

The recurring images are deliberately unresolved. Fate can imagine Jones’s death as a moment of simple exhaustion, but cannot believe the same account of his mother. He can picture her washing dishes in Harlem, yet cannot know whether the peacefulness he sees in the scene was truly peace. He can carry the urn and remember the cup and tapes, but those things do not make the dead available again. Bereavement thus takes shape as repeated acts of imagining interrupted by knowledge of their limits: the mind approaches the absent person through scenes, objects, and conjectures, then encounters the fact that none can replace her.