“I don’t know if my mother is dead or alive”

The expression “I don’t know if my mother is dead or alive” gives language to Sofia Papastergiadis’s uncertainty about caring for Rose Papastergiadis. It is not a report that Rose has died: Sofia says it while her mother is alive. Instead, the words hold together the fear of losing her mother and the difficulty of knowing her as a person with desires and decisions of her own. Repeated in two encounters with medical authority, the phrase becomes a measure of Sofia’s changing understanding of care: knowing what is wrong with Rose is not the same as knowing what Rose wants.

Meaning and Context

The expression makes uncertainty sound starkly absolute. Its two alternatives, dead or alive, seem to permit no middle ground, but the situations around it complicate that division. Sofia is responsible for a mother whose health needs require practical attention; at the same time, she struggles to distinguish Rose’s needs from her own role as caregiver. The phrase gives this entanglement a voice without resolving it.

That tension appears in small acts as well as crises. At an injury hut, Sofia hears a little fridge hum “like something dead and cold but with a pulse” and wonders whether it holds still or sparkling water. She says she is always thinking of ways to make water more right than wrong for her mother. The image joins bodily vulnerability to Sofia’s impulse to find the correct response, even in a choice as ordinary as what water to offer. Elsewhere, Dr Gómez finds ulcers on the sole of Rose’s foot, one slightly infected, and says they must be attended to immediately. The medical detail makes care concrete, but it cannot settle the broader uncertainty captured by the expression.

First Utterance

Sofia first says the words during a review meeting at the Gómez Clinic. With Rose present, the panel asks about her hospital admission: Rose says she was dehydrated, and Dr Gómez explains that she received intravenous saline and could not easily swallow water or medication. When Mr James invites Sofia to speak, the ticking of Rose’s watch is the only sound in the room. Sofia answers, “I don’t know if my mother is dead or alive.” The statement breaks through the clinical account of hydration and medication into the unresolved emotional reality of their relationship.

The setting matters: Sofia voices her uncertainty in a formal discussion ostensibly about Rose’s treatment, where medical information is being examined and assessed. Her words do not supply another diagnosis. They expose what the clinical account cannot determine for her: how to understand her mother’s condition as a daughter who has also become a caregiver. Julieta Gómez’s reaction—staring at the wall as if she had disowned Sofia—registers the discomfort of the disclosure, while Mr James encourages Sofia to continue without jargon. The bluntness of the phrase is itself a refusal of technical language.

Repetition and Reframing

Sofia repeats the exact expression later in a conversation with Dr Gómez. When he asks what is wrong with her, she gives the same answer. This time the words prompt a direct interpretation: Dr Gómez says that children of mournful mothers ask themselves every day, “Why is she dead when she is alive?” The alias turns Sofia’s first-person uncertainty into a pattern he recognizes, while preserving its paradox: a mother can be alive and yet seem absent to the child who cares for her.

Dr Gómez then shifts the question from Rose’s condition to Rose’s agency. Sofia has left her mother in the middle of the road, and he suggests that Rose may accept the challenge of saving her own life. “It is her life. They are her legs.” If Rose wants to live, he says, she will walk out of danger; Sofia must accept her decision. The response does not tell Sofia what Rose will choose. It makes room for the possibility that the choice belongs to Rose, even when Sofia fears the consequences.

Care, Control, and Agency

The phrase gains force from the treatment routines surrounding it. Dr Gómez asks Rose which medications she is most attached to and which she can let go. Later, he tells Sofia that administering her mother’s medication has become familiar, that medication was a ritual he has now erased from both their lives, and that Sofia must invent another one. He also says she is using her mother as a shield against making a life. These remarks connect the practical work of caregiving to Sofia’s own stalled autonomy, but they do not make her uncertainty disappear.

Nor does medical care offer a single, final account of Rose’s needs. At the clinic review, Dr Gómez emphasizes her dehydration and difficulty swallowing medication; Rose says she is back on track after a doctor at the hospital in Almería became concerned. Against these clinical statements, Sofia’s repeated expression names a different limit: neither treatment facts nor constant attention can give her certainty about her mother’s inner wishes. Dr Gómez’s reply finally asks her to accept that Rose’s life and decision are Rose’s own. The phrase therefore marks not a resolution, but a change in the problem Sofia must face—from trying to decide what her mother’s life means to allowing her mother to decide how to live it.