The narrator's mother

The narrator's mother is remembered as both a formidable presence and an intimate companion: a woman of appetite, wit, generosity, and fierce resistance whose final illness changed the terms of their relationship without erasing its intensity. Her death leaves her daughter grieving not only the person she loved but also the shared world they made, and the mother’s voice and habits continue to shape the life that follows.

Identity and Background

In her daughter’s recollections, the mother is defined by an expansive, restless vitality. She surrounded herself with friends and remained hungry for life even as age began to take away her strength, her clarity, and the company that had once gathered around her. She was used to fighting every battle and winning; only on the last day, her daughter believes, did she recognize that the struggle was lost. The prospect of becoming old frightened her, especially the feeling that people no longer listened to what she had to say.

Her independence could become defiance. When illness made it unsafe for her to remain in a luxurious residence for older people, she furiously rejected the idea that she needed help. Her daughter tried to persuade her to accept the limits imposed by her condition and to face its ending with dignity and calm. The mother’s resistance was not an abstract trait: as Parkinson’s disease damaged her brain, the rest of her life and behavior became harder to manage, and the family’s former ways of dealing with difficulty no longer sufficed.

A Shared Life and Its Inheritance

The family home in Cadaqués gathers the mother’s life into an accumulating history. Her daughter remembers her grandfather bringing crates of fruit from Barcelona, Remei carrying away laundry, Pepita de la Galiota’s enormous custards, Marisa’s gazpacho, long breakfasts of toast and butter, and beach towels drying over the railing. The routines of boating, meals, naps, ice cream, and card games persisted even as happiness changed and the house aged alongside its owner. The doors, once left open even at night, gradually began to close; eventually the house seemed to become the mother herself.

The daughter’s memories also place the mother at the center of a more unruly summer life: first drunkenness, first loves, dawns, drugs, sleepless nights, and the conviction that the world belonged to them. Later came the daughter’s first child and the return to Cadaqués with children of her own. This history makes the house more than a setting. It holds successive versions of the family, including separations, deaths, and the mother’s decline, while the familiar sea and morning light can still make the landscape seem unchanged.

The mother’s influence survives as a set of practices and values rather than a simple moral lesson. Her daughter remembers her generosity with money, her love of art, books, museums, and ballet, her ability to make large gestures at the right moment, and her exacting standards in action and speech. She disliked pettiness, envy, disloyalty, fear, stupidity, and especially cruelty. She also passed on laughter, rebellion, a sense of justice, and an alertness to happiness while it was present. The daughter sees early traces of these qualities in her own children, who welcome visitors to their home with curiosity, courtesy, and care.

Illness, Care, and Estrangement

In the last months, care became a source of fear and conflict. The mother called in the night, saying she was frightened and that a caregiver wanted to kill her; her daughter interviewed successive caregivers, many of whom lasted only a few days. The mother kept them awake, hid or stole medication, dismissed them repeatedly, and sometimes struck them. Her daughter feared for the dogs among the scattered pills and papers. She remembers these episodes with grief and exasperation, aware that the person behaving this way was the same mother with whom they had once met hardship with laughter.

Their phone calls came to carry dread. The daughter sometimes let the phone go uncharged, misplaced it, or turned it off, anticipating another urgent demand or an accusation that she had abandoned her mother. She wanted to hear an apology and reassurance of love, but calls often turned instead to money and reproach. The daughter acknowledges that she did what she could, not always what she should have done, and that she could not face every indignity of the illness well. In the final days in hospital, the mother sometimes called her daughter mama, reversing their roles in a way that made the labor of care unmistakable.

The mother’s illness also unsettled the stories the daughter had relied on about the family. During a conversation at the residence, the daughter invoked her father’s supposed composure in illness and death. The mother answered that his death had not happened as the daughter imagined, then offered no explanation. Her remark remained unresolved, leaving the daughter unsure whether her father had died in terror or with the dignity she had believed in. The mother’s silence thus preserved a painful uncertainty rather than supplying a final revelation.

Death and Continuing Presence

On the mother’s last night, her daughter had spent the day holding her hand in hospital. When a doctor said the mother was better, though her condition appeared otherwise, the daughter went home to sleep. She wished she had stayed in the room until they died together; instead, the mother died before morning. The daughter describes herself afterward as living among the living while always keeping one foot where her mother is. Grief does not resolve into a clean before and after.

A dawn attempt to visit the cemetery makes that continuing attachment visible. After a night at a party, the daughter walks through the village toward the cemetery, exhausted and trembling, imagining that she might finally approach the grave alone and calmly. The wooden gate is locked. She pushes it, calls softly for her mother, then pounds on it until her hands hurt and she collapses on the bench. As morning light reaches the olive trees and the view toward Port Lligat, she imagines her mother walking along the pier toward her boat, accompanied by Patum, Nana, and Luna. The mother turns, smiles, and offers the familiar reassurance that suffering and happiness alike are temporary. The scene is an imagined meeting, born at the threshold of a visit the daughter cannot make.

The epilogue complicates that reassurance. The mother had once told her daughter a tale about a ruler who asked the wise for a phrase suitable for every circumstance; their answer was the maxim that this too will pass. The mother explained that sorrow passes, as do euphoria and happiness. Her daughter now cannot accept the claim in its simplest form: she expects to live without her mother until her own death. Yet the bond persists through memory, through the children’s manners and glances toward the mother’s former balcony on Carrer de Muntaner, and through the mother’s jacket, which the daughter finally takes to the dry cleaner. The daughter is beginning to breathe more easily and has fewer nightmares; the loss remains, but the mother’s presence has become something carried forward rather than something that can be recovered.