Mama Elena’s death ends her rule over the household but does not resolve the distance between her and Tita. It comes after Mama Elena grows convinced that Tita intends to poison her, and its cause becomes clearer only when Tita and John Brown find a bottle of syrup of ipecac among her belongings. At the wake, Tita’s response is not sorrow but a belated recognition of how little she had known of her mother.

Suspicion and the household’s meals

Mama Elena already regards Tita’s wish for her to be gone as a constant presence in their conversations and glances. John Brown’s intention to marry Tita sharpens that suspicion: Mama Elena becomes certain that Tita means to poison her slowly so that she can marry him. From then on, she refuses food prepared by Tita and orders Chencha to cook and serve her meals instead. Tita welcomes the arrangement because it relieves her of the painful work of caring for her mother and leaves her free to embroider the bedsheets for her trousseau. She plans to marry John as soon as Mama Elena recovers.

The change places a burden on Chencha, who is still recovering from a brutal attack. Tita sends her to the village with Nicholas, knowing that distance from Mama Elena is necessary for Chencha to recover. Tita then has to hire a cook. One leaves after three days, another after two, and the succession continues until cooks from throughout the village have worked at the house. The longest-serving, a deaf-mute woman, stays fifteen days before leaving after Mama Elena insults her in signs.

Death and its cause

With no cook left, Mama Elena has to eat what Tita prepares, but she continues to treat every meal as a possible threat. She requires Tita to taste the food in front of her and drinks warm milk before eating, believing it will counteract poison. When she experiences sharp abdominal pains, she also takes syrup of ipecac and squill onion as purgatives. These precautions do not continue for long: within a month, Mama Elena dies after severe pain and convulsions. Her only known clinical condition had been paralysis, so Tita and John initially have no explanation for the death.

The answer is in the bureau. Tita and John find the bottle of syrup of ipecac, and John identifies it as a strong emetic capable of causing death. They infer that Mama Elena had been taking it secretly. The discovery turns the household’s fear of poisoning on its head: Mama Elena’s conviction that Tita’s food was dangerous had led her to take a substance that, in John’s assessment, could itself prove fatal. The account establishes their inference, rather than a separate medical diagnosis of the cause.

The wake and Tita’s recognition

At the wake, Tita watches her mother’s face and sees her differently for the first time. Others might mistake her expression for grief, but Tita feels none. She compares the separation to a lettuce being detached from another lettuce with which it had grown, without pain because there had been no communication between them. The comparison makes the emotional estrangement plain: mother and daughter had lived together, yet Tita had known Mama Elena only from the outside, without access to the person hidden within.

While preparing Mama Elena for the wake, Tita removes the enormous keyring that had been chained to her for as long as Tita can remember. The keys recall a household in which even taking sugar from the pantry required Mama Elena’s authorization. Tita also finds a small key in a heart-shaped locket around her mother’s neck. She recognizes it as the key to a box she had discovered in Mama Elena’s wardrobe as a child. Her earlier punishment for trying to open that box now appears to have been punishment for seeking its contents, not merely for hiding among the clean sheets. The concealed box and its letters point to a private history that Mama Elena had kept beyond her daughter’s reach.

Significance and aftermath

The death changes Tita’s position in the household: the authority that controlled its locked spaces and daily provisions is gone. Yet freedom does not bring immediate intimacy or a complete understanding of the past. Instead, the wake separates Tita’s recognition of her mother from conventional mourning, while the hidden key opens the possibility of knowledge that Mama Elena had withheld. The episode’s domestic details—the assigned cook, the tasted meals, the milk, and the locked bureau—make the household’s conflict inseparable from the ordinary routines through which Mama Elena exercised control.

The death also has a supernatural aftermath. Later, while Tita is preparing Three Kings’ bread, a gust blows open the kitchen door and she finds herself face to face with Mama Elena, who confronts her over her relationship with Pedro. Mama Elena’s authority therefore does not end cleanly with her death: the apparition brings the old prohibition back into the kitchen, the space most closely associated with Tita’s life. The scene extends the conflict beyond the wake, showing that the discovery of Mama Elena’s hidden past has not by itself freed Tita from her mother’s continuing hold.