Yo soy vida, y todo lo que toque estará vivo

Yo soy vida, y todo lo que toque estará vivo is a phrase the Narrator sets against death while examining what it means to be a mother and to write about a crime involving children. First presented as an epigraph and later returned to in her closing reflections, it becomes both a declaration of creative force and a more troubled promise: writing cannot undo death, but it can give the dead a place in memory.

Epigraph and recurrence

The phrase appears at the opening of the chapter titled “Alchemy,” attributed to Arantxa Urretabizkaia’s ¿Por qué, Panpox? Its placement makes it a threshold into a meditation on writing: the Narrator moves from the epigraph’s claim that whatever she touches will live to the assertion that literature is alchemy, a practice in which disparate kinds of knowledge and feeling can reach a form. She describes writing as a mystery that does not need to answer questions, because in the act of writing everything at last finds its place, letter by letter.

The phrase returns near the book’s end in a changed form. The Narrator says that she has acted for herself, following an impulse through to the final comma, but wants to believe that the work has also been made for the dead twins: as recognition, an offering, and a measure of tenderness in memory. She then invokes the phrase again before saying that, at the end of the day, she tries to drive death away. The recurrence turns the epigraph into a personal credo without pretending that the credo can reverse what happened.

Writing as an act of creation

The Narrator’s understanding of the phrase develops alongside her investigation and her uncertainty about what kind of book she can write. During Erik’s gradual adjustment to daycare, she uses time in a nearby café to make lists, identify primary sources, plan places to visit, and decide how to approach the Jade/Alice story. She weighs the rights she can claim as a writer: whether to act like a defense lawyer or a prosecutor, whether the writer should judge or leave judgment to readers, and whether fiction can approach what journalism must leave unknown. The violence against children makes the question of giving the story style so difficult that she postpones it.

Her doubts extend to the practical facts of representation. She wonders whether to alter dates, names, and details for moral, legal, or literary reasons, and whether to contact Jade/Alice or seek a face-to-face meeting. She is ambivalent about the encounter and unsure whether it would help the book or shift attention away from what matters. In this context, the life-giving phrase does not resolve the ethical problems of writing; it sits beside them. The Narrator’s creative work depends on touching a story whose unknowns and suffering cannot simply be transformed into certainty.

Motherhood and the limits of the affirmation

The phrase also resonates with the Narrator’s account of being a mother and a daughter. In one late-night call, she wants to hear her own mother’s voice, not to discuss Erik. She recalls her mother’s boredom while helping her collect toys, her disgusted expression while wiping her nose, and her exhaustion during ordinary errands. These memories complicate any easy equation between motherhood and instinctive tenderness: a mother’s presence can be real while her attention and affection remain uncertain or strained.

A contrasting image appears during a stay at her mother’s home. Erik leaves happily with his grandmother, while Niclas goes surfing; the Narrator is alone indoors with her laptop, working amid the temperature, smell, and sound of the ocean. She calls the scene perfect, then immediately qualifies it: it is not true, and the reprieve will end in six days. When ordinary life resumes, she will return to paid work and to the pages she has left behind, where the living and the dead—including Alice Espanet and the twins—will be waiting. The moment gives the phrase a provisional, lived meaning: life and creative freedom can briefly feel expansive, but neither suspends the claims of work, care, or grief.

Meaning and memorial purpose

The phrase’s final force lies in the tension between creation and destruction. The Narrator admits that her impulse to write about the “muddy territory” is not simply a moral duty or social denunciation; she follows it even while suspecting that she might be happier without it. She acknowledges that she has written for herself, then offers a more tentative purpose beyond herself: to recognize the twins and grant them tenderness in remembrance. The life she claims through writing is therefore not a denial of death or an acquittal of anyone. It is an attempt to keep the dead from being reduced to the fact of their deaths, and to make remembrance one form of care.