Narrator and her mother

The relationship between the narrator and her mother is the novel’s central bond: a shared language of humor, freedom, and fierce attention to life, transformed by illness and bereavement but not ended by death. The narrator remembers her mother both as the person who taught her how to live and as someone whose final illness made care, communication, and separation painfully difficult. After her death, that intimacy persists through stories, family habits, an imagined encounter, and an ordinary item of clothing.

Intimacy and a Shared Inheritance

The mother is the narrator’s first guide to interpreting experience. When the narrator was grieving her father, her mother comforted her with a story about a ruler who asked his wise advisers for a sentence that would hold true in every circumstance. Their answer was that everything passes. The mother later explained the phrase as a consolation for sorrow and pain as well as a reminder that joy and happiness are temporary. After her own death, the narrator cannot accept the lesson as a complete account of grief: she expects to live without her mother for the rest of her life. The story nevertheless remains part of their shared vocabulary, and its return lets the narrator address her mother across the distance of death.

The mother also mediates the narrator’s knowledge of her father. The parents separated when the narrator and her sibling were very young, and the narrator does not remember being with her father in Cadaqués. Much of what she knows about him comes from her mother, including his belief that being mayor of Cadaqués would be the best job in the world. The mother is therefore not only a parent in the narrator’s memories but also a keeper and interpreter of family history.

What the narrator says she inherited reaches beyond stories. From her mother she names a love of art, books, museums, and ballet; generosity with money; an instinct for decisive gestures; and seriousness about actions and words. She remembers a household with little emphasis on guilt: people were expected to think, act, and accept the consequences of mistakes. She also credits her mother with laughter, delight in games, rebellion, a sense of justice, and an aversion to cruelty, envy, and small-mindedness. These recollections make inheritance practical as well as emotional: the mother’s character survives in ways of treating other people.

Illness and the Strain of Care

The mother’s Parkinson’s disease and dementia alter the relationship by undermining abilities and forms of independence that had once been part of her identity. The narrator recalls her mother as someone accustomed to fighting battles and winning them, with an intense desire to live. As her strength, memory, and social world diminished, she faced a reality she had resisted. Care became entangled with medical crises and successive residential settings, including a residence where she spent two months and a later hospital stay. The narrator’s account holds together the mother’s determination and the fear and distress that accompanied her increasing dependence.

Illness also changed their communication. The narrator remembers scattered medication, confusion, and incidents involving the dogs, as well as calls that ended when her mother hung up in anger. At times the narrator could not leave her children alone in the early hours to respond to her mother’s demands. These episodes describe a relationship under pressure, not a simple reversal of love into resentment: the narrator’s sorrow at seeing her mother behave in ways that would once have seemed unthinkable sits beside her recognition of how illness had changed her. She grieves both the person her mother had been and the difficulty of reaching her during the final months.

The narrator’s memories of the last hospital stay sharpen that conflict. She reassured her mother that she would recover from another bout of pneumonia and that the family would be all right. Her mother could no longer speak, but looked at her and wept. A friend present in the room offered another explanation for the tears; the narrator understood them as her mother saying goodbye. She held her mother’s hand and repeated that they would manage. The exchange is intimate precisely because speech has failed: the daughter offers reassurance, while the mother’s look communicates a farewell the narrator believes she recognizes.

Family Ties and Everyday Continuities

The bond extends through the people and animals connected to their family. After the children return from Guillem’s home, they bring garden produce from his father’s plot. The narrator receives these offerings warmly, though her uncertain attempts to wash them often end when she finds insects. The detail places care within the ordinary, imperfect exchanges of a family whose relationships continue across households.

Guillem, the father of the narrator’s eldest child, is described as generous, intelligent, funny, stubborn, and difficult, and the narrator characterizes their relationship as love and hate in unequal disguise. He kept Patum, the narrator’s mother’s dog, after the narrator left her with him before a trip. The mother had made the dog her own, as she did with what she loved; Patum’s place with Guillem carries that attachment into the family’s present. The dog is more than a memory of the mother: her care helped shape a continuing relationship among people who remain connected after separation.

The mother’s legacy appears, too, in the narrator’s attention to her children. She recognizes in them an emerging courtesy, curiosity, respect, and lack of snobbery that she associates with their grandmother. When they pass the last apartment where the mother lived on Carrer de Muntaner, the eldest child silently looks toward the balcony. The narrator notices this glance in the rear-view mirror. The child’s quiet gesture becomes another form of remembrance, shared without the narrator needing to explain what the grandmother’s absence means.

Death, Memory, and a Continuing Bond

The narrator carries a painful sense of unfinished presence after the death. She had spent the last day in the hospital holding her mother’s hand, but left to sleep after a doctor said her mother was better, despite the signs the narrator herself could see. Her mother died alone that night. The narrator wishes she had remained beside her, and describes herself as living among the living while still feeling partly where her mother is. This regret does not cancel the care she gave; it marks the limit of what she could know at the time and the enduring force of the final separation.

At dawn, after exhausting herself trying to open the door of a hermitage, the narrator sees her mother in an imagined scene at Port Lligat. Her mother walks toward her boat with Patum and two other dogs, appearing happy and ready to set out on a calm day. She turns, smiles, and repeats the phrase she once used to console her daughter: everything will pass. The vision brings together remembered clothing, the dogs, the boat, and the mother’s old reassurance. It offers a moment of contact, but does not resolve grief or prove the mother’s lesson true. Its significance lies in the narrator’s continued ability to summon her mother through the places and details that belonged to their life together.

The mother remains present in the narrator’s household and habits, but the novel does not treat remembrance as a substitute for loss. The children welcome people with kindness, and the narrator searches for the qualities she associates with her mother in them and in other people. She says she is beginning to breathe more easily and has fewer nightmares, while acknowledging that the sense of lightness returns only sometimes. The movement is partial: daily life resumes without making the absence disappear.

The Jacket and the Work of Remembering

The mother’s jacket gives this continuing relationship a concrete, domestic form. The narrator takes it to the dry cleaner, who promises it will come back as good as new. The practical errand stands beside memories that cannot be restored or made new: the narrator is still caring for something her mother wore, while trying to find a way forward after the death. In the closing image, remembrance is neither a clean break nor a return to the past. It is a bond carried through objects, family gestures, and the narrator’s ongoing conversation with the person she has lost.