duelo y pérdida

In the novel, grief and loss are not confined to Blanca’s recognition that her mother has died: they alter her sense of home, unsettle her place in the world, and keep the mother-daughter relationship active through memory and imagined encounters. The story’s frame—a cemetery at its beginning and return to one near its close—holds together the pain of absence and the possibility that life may again feel inhabitable.

An inherited way of understanding loss

When Blanca was a child grieving her father, her mother told her a story about an emperor who asked sages for a phrase that would apply in every circumstance. Their answer was “También esto pasará.” Her mother made the lesson reciprocal: pain and sorrow pass, but so do euphoria and happiness. After her mother’s death, the phrase becomes more than consolation. It offers a way to recognize that neither suffering nor joy can be made permanent.

That inherited perspective does not make Blanca’s immediate bereavement manageable. At the funeral, under the punishing heat, she feels close to fainting and struggles to accept the fact of her mother’s death, repeating it to herself and asking her friends whether there could have been a mistake. Carolina takes her by the hand and leads her away from the crowd toward a wall overlooking the sea. The physical help matters where reassurance cannot: Blanca has heard that many people love her, but in her distress she cannot rely on love as something dependable, even recalling a period when she felt that her own mother had stopped loving her.

Grief’s returns and interruptions

Mourning arrives in waves rather than following a steady movement toward recovery. At night Blanca experiences an inner howl that becomes more insistent when she lies down alone; she imagines it scratching at her chest and striking her temples. By morning, the children and the demands of ordinary life quiet it for a time. Their routines do not resolve the loss, but they change its intensity and give the day a different shape from the night.

Sex offers another brief interruption. Blanca describes its effect as sweeping away death, life, memories, and fear for an instant, only for everything to settle back into place afterward. She wakes beside her former partner, Óscar, in a quiet house, with children calling from the pool outside. The scene places bodily comfort beside renewed absence: desire can suspend grief, but it cannot remove it. The return of familiar objects and memories makes the reprieve temporary rather than false.

The house as a history of what has passed

In Cadaqués, the family home gathers memories across several stages of Blanca’s life. Looking out at the sea, she recalls her grandfather arriving with crates of fruit from Barcelona, breakfasts of toast and butter, beach towels drying on the railing, and the recurring pattern of swimming, meals, naps, and card games. The same house holds first loves, early-morning parties, the conception of her first child, holidays with children, and separations. Its rooms preserve not one settled image of family life but a sequence of changing lives.

The memories also register decline. The doors, once left open even at night, began to close as her mother grew old; happiness gradually changed, although many of the summer routines continued. The house aged alongside its owner and, in Blanca’s perception, eventually became her. This makes the home both refuge and evidence of loss: it contains the family’s past while making the mother’s absence present in the spaces and habits that remain.

The continuing bond and an unfinished farewell

The loss reaches beyond missing her mother’s company. Blanca says that her place in the world had been secured by her mother’s gaze, which had seemed so permanent that she never needed to ask where she belonged. Now she cannot be seen by those eyes again. Her mother’s death therefore changes not only who is physically present but also how Blanca understands herself: after a life that included two children, marriages, relationships, homes, and jobs, she fears that she has been a child into her forties and does not know how to become an adult without her mother.

Other absences gather around this bereavement. Patum waits outside the mother’s room and searches the house for her scent, while Blanca too imagines finding her mother again by revisiting the places they travelled together. She fears Patum may not live through the winter and feels that her part of the world is becoming emptier. The dog’s waiting gives grief a visible, daily form: the house still carries the expectation of someone who will not return.

Near dawn, after a night out, Blanca sets out for the cemetery alone. She reaches its entrance as the sky brightens, but the gate is locked. Exhausted, she pounds on it until her hands hurt, then sits outside as the dawn light falls over the olive trees and Port Lligat. From the wall she imagines seeing her mother walking toward her boat with Patum, Nana, and Luna. Her mother turns, smiles, and repeats “También esto pasará.” The vision does not undo the death or open the cemetery gate; it gives the inherited phrase a final, intimate form.

In the epilogue, signs of recovery are modest and compatible with continuing attachment. Blanca says she is breathing more easily and has fewer nightmares; her children still look silently toward their grandmother’s balcony when they pass her former home on Carrer de Muntaner. A new dog, Rey, has joined the household, and Blanca takes her mother’s jacket to the dry cleaner, expecting it to come back “like new.” These acts do not restore the life that has ended. They show grief sharing space with care, memory, and the ordinary work of carrying on.