Rabo Karabekian's mother dies of tetanus

Rabo Karabekian’s mother dies of tetanus when he is twelve, a sudden, ordinary wound with consequences that shape his sense of family loss and survival. Recalled in exacting biological detail, her death becomes one of the losses against which Rabo measures the calamities that followed in his own life.

The Infection and Her Death

Rabo tells Circe Berman that his mother died of a tetanus infection she evidently acquired while working at a cannery in California. The cannery stood on the site of an old livery stable: tetanus bacteria could inhabit horses’ intestines without harming them, then leave the body as durable spores in the soil. One such spore, buried in the ground around or beneath the cannery, was somehow disturbed and carried to his mother. After lying dormant, it awakened in a cut on her hand. The account traces the infection from an old stable to the cannery dirt and finally to the small opening in her skin, making an intimate death inseparable from the material history of the workplace.

Rabo calls the place where the spore awakened Paradise, turning the name into a bitterly delicate description of his mother’s hand. The contrast is stark: a word associated with refuge and blessedness names the point at which a hidden organism entered her body. His attention to how the bacteria survived and travelled does not make the death less personal; it gives the loss a chain of concrete circumstances rather than an abstract label.

A Loss Recalled Through Later Disasters

The memory surfaces in conversation with Circe, who responds to the account by saying goodbye to Mama. Rabo notices the word and returns to it, the brief exchange making the lost mother present in the scene without altering the fact of her absence. His recollection is also framed by the child’s age: he was twelve when she died, leaving the event at the boundary between childhood and the later life he recounts.

Rabo adds that his mother did not have to endure the Great Depression, which was only a year away, or see her only child return from World War II a cyclops. The comparison joins a family death to historical hardship and his own bodily injury, but it does not claim that her death spared her by design. Instead, the retrospect gives the loss an uneven chronology: she died before the economic crisis, while her son lived to encounter war and its lasting physical consequence.

Family Loss and the Novel’s Wider Pattern

Elsewhere, Rabo remembers his later marriage to Edith as a household filled with love, merriment, and domestic activity. Edith cooked alongside the cook, gardened with the gardener, shopped for food, cared for pets and birds, and befriended wild rabbits, squirrels, and raccoons. The warmth of that domestic life throws the earlier maternal loss into relief: Rabo’s account of his mother is not only a report of death, but part of a story in which intimacy and family life are precious and vulnerable.

The same vulnerability recurs in Rabo’s account of later departures and estrangements. When the cook, Allison White, gives notice, she says she and her daughter had planned to leave before Circe arrived and had stayed because Circe made the house exciting; when Circe goes, they will go too. Allison insists that Rabo learn her name rather than reduce her to her job, a complaint that recalls what his first wife, Dorothy, had told him about treating her as if he did not care whether she was there. These later scenes are not consequences of his mother’s death, but they place that childhood loss within a wider pattern of departures, failed recognition, and the difficulty of sustaining a household.