Eileen and her mother

Eileen and her mother are defined by a relationship in which care is repeatedly performed without becoming closeness. Eileen tends to her mother during a long illness, but remembers being frightened by her and emotionally detached from the work; after the death, she keeps wearing her mother's clothes while wondering whether they conceal her or preserve some proof of attachment. The house they leave behind is crowded with possessions yet, in Eileen's account, empty of warmth.

Illness and separation at home

When Eileen's mother became ill, the room beside Eileen's childhood bedroom became difficult to sleep in. At night her mother wailed, cried, and called Eileen's name. Eileen retreated to the unfinished attic, where she slept on a camping cot. The move offered quiet and distance from the lower floors, but also made the separation between them part of the home's physical arrangement: her mother remained in the bedroom, while Eileen withdrew upstairs.

The illness also changed Eileen's education and daily responsibilities. She had been at college, but was made to return to X-ville halfway through her sophomore year to care for her mother. Eileen later qualifies the phrase care for: she was terrified of her mother, experienced her as a mystery, and says that by then she did not care for her in the affectionate sense. She performed the work as a nurse might, but remembers little warmth in it. The distinction matters in her account: the tasks were real, while the loving feeling ordinarily associated with caregiving was absent or inaccessible.

One of those tasks was preparing chicken soup day after day. Eileen boiled it on the stove and brought the clear broth to her mother in a large green salad bowl, using it to catch spills as she fed her spoon by spoon. Her mother resisted weakly and unpredictably. The scene makes care concrete and repetitive, but does not resolve the emotional distance between the two women. Eileen's account presents her as responsible for sustaining her mother's body while remaining unable to describe that responsibility as tenderness.

Religion and maternal teaching

Religion offers another point of contrast between Eileen's mother and the household around her. As children, Eileen and Joanie were sent to Mass with Eileen's father. Eileen's mother did not attend, except for her father's funeral. When people asked after her, Eileen's father supplied explanations such as illness or a visit to her own mother. On Sunday afternoons, after church and Bible study, Eileen and Joanie returned to find their mother on the living-room couch, reading, with vermouth and cigarette smoke nearby.

Eileen's mother also directly challenged the religious instruction that shaped the girls' home life. After a visit from a relative who had criticized the children, she drew them aside and described God as a human invention, denied that anyone watched them when they were alone, and told them that they had to decide what was right and fight for what they wanted. She rejected both divine reward and obedience to Eileen's father. Eileen recalls this teaching not as a comforting liberation but as a frightening pronouncement. She spent hours imagining eternity and a God who judged people's actions, then decided to pretend to believe because pretending seemed as adequate as genuine faith. The mother's skepticism therefore did not simply remove religious fear; it left Eileen trying to reconcile competing instructions about God, morality, and authority.

Death, grief, and the house afterward

Eileen's recollection of the period around her mother's death is intertwined with the death of Mona, the family's dog. While hanging laundry, she found Mona dead in the yard, covered the body with a wet pillowcase, and could not bring herself to touch it when she later buried it. Eileen's father dismissed the dog, and Eileen disposed of its dish without telling anyone. A few days later, her mother was dead, and Eileen says that she then let her tears flow openly. She also acknowledges that the story of Mona's death may have become altered through years of retelling, because she returned to it when she needed or wanted to cry. That qualification makes the memory both an account of loss and a reflection on how Eileen has used recollection to approach grief.

After her mother's death, the family did not sort or put away her belongings, rearrange the rooms, or restore the house. With no one cleaning, dust and unused objects accumulated. The rooms remained full of things, but Eileen describes the home as empty, almost abandoned. The lack of change is part of the relationship's aftermath: her mother's possessions stayed in place, while the work of maintaining the home and living with what remained fell into neglect. The house becomes a material record of a death that was neither organized into a family ritual of remembrance nor fully cleared away.

Clothing, memory, and uncertain attachment

Eileen continued wearing her mother's clothes for years after her death. At the time, she allowed Eileen's father to understand this as loyalty to the dead woman, as though an old dress carried on her spirit. In retrospect, Eileen gives the habit a less sentimental explanation: she thinks she wore the clothes to disguise herself, so that other people would not really see her. The garments thus served as both an inheritance and a mask, without proving that the relationship had been intimate.

She also searched her mother's wardrobe for signs of an affair, noticing ordinary marks such as food stains, coffee drips, and lipstick on old clothing. She hoped to find something useful: a clue, a message, or evidence that her mother had loved her. The search does not produce the reassurance Eileen wants. Instead, its very purpose reveals how uncertain that love feels to her in memory. The clothes remain available to touch and wear, but the evidence of affection she seeks in them remains elusive.

A relationship remembered through contradiction

Eileen's account holds together forms of connection that do not settle into a single verdict. Her mother's illness brings her back from college and makes her responsible for daily feeding; her mother's distress drives her to sleep elsewhere. Her mother's religious defiance offers an alternative to the household's Catholic discipline, yet Eileen remembers that alternative as frightening. After the death, she keeps her mother's clothes, searches them for traces of love, and also understands them as concealment. These contradictions make the relationship more than a simple story of either devotion or estrangement: its defining pattern is care without ease, memory without certainty, and an attachment Eileen continues to investigate rather than claim to have resolved.