The mother's death is the loss around which Blanca’s account of grief repeatedly turns: not only the end of a life, but the rupture of a mother-daughter bond that continues to shape memory, family life, and the narrator’s sense of the living world. Its circumstances leave Blanca with a painful knowledge of the final night, while the novel resists treating bereavement as a clean passage from suffering to recovery.

Illness and the Last Night

Blanca’s mother had been losing strength, mental clarity, and the circle of people who had once surrounded her. A woman who had fought hard and usually refused to concede defeat became frightened as time narrowed. In the final hospital, she could no longer speak. Blanca reassured her that this was only her third bout of pneumonia, that she would recover, and that the children would be all right. Her mother answered with silent tears and a fixed gaze. Her friend Ana tried to shield Blanca by suggesting that the air conditioning had irritated her eyes, but Blanca understood the look as a farewell.

Months earlier, while her death still seemed impossible, Blanca’s mother had told her that knowing her had been an honour. At the time, their relationship was painful, and Blanca did not know whether her mother still loved her or whether she herself still loved her mother. She laughed off the remark, and they were arguing again minutes later. After the death, the exchange acquired the force of an ending that neither had been ready to recognize: the mother had sensed that their long period of unresolved pauses was giving way to finality.

On the last day, Blanca stayed at the hospital holding her mother’s hand. When a doctor said that her mother was better, Blanca went home to sleep, although, as she later recalls, a single look at her mother made clear that this reassurance was false. Her mother died alone that night; Blanca learned of the death the following morning. The gap between the hand she had held and the bedside she had left becomes the event’s most intimate wound. Blanca wishes she could have been there for their ending, in the same room and at the same moment.

Grief in the Living World

The death does not suspend ordinary life. In its immediate aftermath, Blanca describes sex as a brief force that can make death—and even life—seem to disappear. The reprieve lasts only a short while: the room, the clothes, the memories, the panic, and the sorrow return to their exact places. She wakes beside her ex, Óscar, who had been with her through six months of hospitals, doctors, and battles that could not be won. His belief in sex as a cure stands against the permanence of the loss: physical closeness can interrupt grief, but cannot undo it.

Other people offer the consolation that many people love her. Blanca is grateful, but the repeated reassurance arrives when she wants to withdraw into bed and have her mother beside her, holding her hand and touching her forehead. Her private doubt—that even her mother had stopped loving her for a time—makes the comfort of other people feel unreliable rather than sufficient. The longing is specific and bodily: she does not simply miss being loved; she wants the familiar care that only her mother could give.

The novel moves between such moments of loss and acts of living. At the family house in Cadaqués, an early morning view of the sea releases a crowded sequence of memories without overwhelming Blanca. The house holds a family history in everyday particulars: fruit brought from Barcelona, long breakfasts, beach towels drying on the railing, meals, naps, and summer evenings. The familiar routines had continued even as her mother aged and the house grew quieter. Looking backward, Blanca sees how the unchanged landscape can make the past appear near, while the history held within it includes separation, decline, and death.

A Bond That Persists

After the death, the house and its inhabitants register the absence in different ways. Patum no longer enters the mother’s room; the dog waits outside and searches the house for her scent or for some sign that she will return. Blanca recognizes the same impulse in herself. The dog’s search makes grief visible as a repeated act of looking for someone who is gone, while the mother’s rooms and familiar objects preserve traces without restoring her presence.

The loss also sharpens Blanca’s fear of further departures. Guillem tells her that the veterinarian doubts Patum will live through the winter. Patum is the last of a litter born in the house, where Blanca’s mother had cared for the puppies in a wooden box beside her bed, making sure the weaker ones could eat and their mother could rest. Blanca remembers her mother’s enthusiasm and the care she gave the animals, and sees the aging dog as part of a world of attachments that is steadily emptying. Rey, too, has been left without his former owner; later, Rey becomes a new household presence as Blanca tries to teach the children to walk him each day.

Blanca’s attempt to visit her mother’s grave before dawn gives the continuing bond a more direct, almost visionary form. After spending several hours at a party, she walks through the village and up the hill instead of going to the sea. At the cemetery entrance, she finds the heavy gate shut. She pushes, tries the handle, imagines ways to get it opened, and finally pounds on the door until her hands hurt. The effort ends in exhaustion outside, not in the reunion she sought.

As dawn reaches the olive groves and Port Lligat, Blanca climbs onto a bench and looks over the wall. She imagines her mother walking along the pier in her faded checked shirt, accompanied by Patum, Nana, and Luna, on her way to the boat. Her mother turns, smiles, and offers the familiar reminder that this, too, will pass. The scene does not change the fact of death; it gives the bereaved daughter a remembered voice and image with which to meet the morning.

Memory, Inheritance, and Aftermath

The phrase from that imagined encounter echoes a story Blanca’s mother once told her to comfort her after the death of her father: a ruler asks his wise advisers for a short saying that will serve in every circumstance, and they return with the same reminder that all things pass. Blanca now rejects the story’s promise as a literal account of grief. Her pain and happiness do not simply recede into equivalence; she expects to live without her mother until her own death. Yet the maxim remains part of their shared language, and its return lets memory function as a relationship rather than a claim that the loss has been overcome.

Blanca describes her mother’s inheritance not as a single lesson but as a way of living: generosity with money, decisive gestures, rigor in word and action, freedom joined to responsibility, laughter, play, rebellion, and a sharp sense of justice. Her mother’s refusal to be governed by guilt did not mean that actions had no consequences; mistakes had to be faced rather than apologized away. Blanca also remembers her mother’s intolerance of cruelty, envy, meanness, and fear, alongside her unusual capacity to see other people clearly and tolerate their failings.

That inheritance appears in the grandchildren’s conduct. When people enter the house, Blanca observes, her children meet them with kindness, curiosity, respect, caution, and affection. Passing the last apartment where their grandmother lived, Edgar silently looks up at the balcony. Blanca considers telling him that his grandmother is in a better place, but cannot make herself say it: her mother had loved being with her grandchildren and with Blanca. The silence acknowledges both the children’s attachment and the inadequacy of easy consolation.

The ending joins small domestic acts to the continuing presence of the dead. Blanca begins to breathe more easily and has fewer nightmares; on some days, she again senses the happiness her mother associated with a kind of fairy dust. She takes her mother’s jacket to the dry cleaner, where it is promised back as good as new. The cleaned garment cannot restore its owner, but caring for it keeps the past within the present. The death remains irreversible, while the bond survives through stories, habits, remembered gestures, the children, the animals, and the objects still kept at home.