También esto pasará

También esto pasará is a consoling maxim passed from Blanca’s mother to Blanca and returned to her at the edge of loss. Its meaning changes across the novel: first it offers a child a way through grief, then it appears to promise that suffering will recede, and finally the epilogue questions whether such a promise can hold when the person who taught it is gone.

Origin and First Meaning

When Blanca is a child grieving her father’s death, her mother tells her a story about a powerful emperor who asks the kingdom’s sages for a short phrase that will apply in every possible circumstance. After months of deliberation, they offer También esto pasará. Blanca’s mother adds the principle that gives the phrase its consoling force: pain and sorrow pass, as do euphoria and happiness. The maxim is therefore not confined to consolation in misery. It places suffering and joy within the same movement of change, refusing to treat either state as permanent.

The story also establishes a particular bond between mother and daughter. The mother does not present the phrase as an abstract lesson; she uses a tale to help her child endure a bereavement. Later, the narrator remembers being told the story while sitting on her bed after her own father’s death. The same words thus belong to a shared family memory, carried forward from one loss and one generation to another.

Recurrence in Cadaqués

The maxim returns during Blanca’s summer in Cadaqués, a setting associated with the novel’s movement between grief and renewed engagement with life. The novel begins and ends in a cemetery, but its account of loss is also set against memories of what has been lived and learned, and against the life Blanca continues to affirm through sex, friends, children, and important relationships. In that context, the phrase is a recurring measure of whether life can still move after bereavement, rather than a promise that grief will simply disappear.

Near dawn, after a failed attempt to reach her mother’s grave, Blanca is exhausted from striking a door with her fists and palms. She rests at the entrance to a hermitage as the morning light comes over the olive trees and the paths. From there she sees her mother walking toward the boat at Port Lligat, accompanied by her three dogs, Patum, Nana, and Luna. The image is vivid and intimate: her mother wears a faded blue-check shirt over a swimsuit, and turns back to smile. She repeats the maxim and winks. The phrase arrives not as an explanation of grief but as a familiar gesture from the person who first taught it.

The Epilogue’s Reversal

The epilogue returns to the maxim through a more painful account of the mother’s death. The narrator recalls that she spent the day holding her mother’s hand in hospital. When a doctor said the mother was better, the narrator went home to sleep, although she could see that the reassurance did not match her mother’s condition. Her mother died alone that night. The remembered story is now set against the narrator’s regret that she was absent at the end, and her wish that she could have been beside her mother for their final moment together.

Recounting the emperor and the sages, the narrator repeats her mother’s lesson that sorrow passes along with happiness, then recognizes that it is not true in the way she once needed it to be. She will live without her mother until she herself dies. This is the maxim’s decisive reversal: the death is not undone, and the bereaved daughter does not claim that separation will run its course and vanish. The phrase’s earlier certainty gives way to the duration of an absence that remains part of the narrator’s life.

What the Maxim Can Still Hold

The epilogue does not discard the mother’s story. Instead, it places the maxim beside the specific things the mother has left her daughter: a way of falling in love, love of art, books, museums, and ballet, generosity with money, a capacity for decisive gestures, and a rigor about actions and words. It recalls a household in which mistakes brought consequences rather than guilt, and a mother who gave her daughter laughter, joy in living, a taste for games, rebellion, and a sense of justice. These inheritances do not cancel the death; they make the mother present in the narrator’s habits, values, and memories.

The narrator also remembers moments when mother and daughter recognized happiness together: across a crowded table, in an unfamiliar city, or at sea. She associates them with an almost weightless sense of wonder, and with pleasures as particular as an afternoon at sea, a pink sunset, or laughter after a bottle of grappa. In this light, the maxim holds less as a guarantee that grief will pass than as part of a larger practice of noticing life while it is present. The novel’s account of memory and loss preserves both sides of the mother’s teaching: happiness is fleeting, and the death of a beloved person is not made temporary by saying so. También esto pasará remains a tender inheritance, but the epilogue lets love, memory, and enduring absence complicate its comfort.