Clare Abshire—Lucille Abshire

Clare and Lucille Abshire’s relationship is marked by love that Clare has difficulty trusting: Lucille’s affection seems changeable, and her death leaves Clare with grief as well as unresolved hurt. After Lucille dies, a poem among her papers gives Clare evidence of a love she had not been sure she possessed. The poem does not undo the past, but it changes how Clare can hold it, becoming a small, lasting refuge within her bereavement.

A Difficult Bond and a Final Vigil

Lucille’s final illness brings the mother-daughter relationship into the intimate setting of Lucille’s own bedroom, which has become like a hospital room. On the night before her death, Lucille calls out for Philip and for her mother, among other cries. Clare stays with her through the night, then sits by the window as morning comes. The vigil makes the distance between them palpable: Clare looks out toward the garden rather than at the medical equipment around the bed, and tries to face the approaching loss without looking directly at her mother.

When Clare realizes that Lucille has stopped breathing, she checks for a heartbeat and finds none. She gathers her mother into her arms. In that moment, even as Lucille’s illness and physical decline remain present, Clare experiences her as beautiful and released in memory. The scene holds grief and tenderness together: death ends Lucille’s life, but Clare’s embrace briefly restores the mother she loves beyond the failing body she has been watching.

The Poem Among the Papers

Years earlier, in 1979, Lucille lost a baby and attempted suicide. When Clare later finds papers connected with that period, she understands more clearly what her mother had been through, but the discovery is painful enough that she sets the papers aside without reading further. Her next discovery is different: among more recent poems, she finds one addressed to her, titled “The Garden Under Snow.” Its dedication makes the poem a personal message rather than merely another piece of writing in Lucille’s papers.

The poem’s importance lies not only in what it says, but in the fact that Lucille wrote it for Clare. The written page preserves an expression of feeling that Clare can return to, distinct from her recollection of Lucille as changeable. The discovery does not erase the history that precedes it, including the painful events of 1979, but it gives that history a new piece of evidence: her mother addressed a poem to her.

Recognition and Consolation

Henry finds Clare sitting on the floor by Lucille’s desk, surrounded by papers. Clare shows him the poem, and he reads it with her. His response marks a change in how he understands Lucille: he has resented what he sees as her selfishness and her dying, but the poem makes him forgive her a little. For Clare, its force is more immediate. She repeats in wonder that her mother wrote her a poem, and cries as Henry holds her.

Clare’s reaction is a recognition rather than a simple resolution. The poem allows her, for a moment, to feel that her mother really loved her; it cannot make Lucille’s affection seem consistently available or undo the pain of losing her. Henry’s embrace accompanies Clare’s return from grief’s emotional isolation to the safety of their marriage. The scene therefore links the recovery of a maternal bond, however partial, to the care Clare receives from her husband.

The Relationship’s Meaning

The movement from Lucille’s deathbed to the poem transforms the relationship from something Clare can only endure and remember into something she can also read. During the vigil, she faces the physical fact of her mother’s death; at the desk, she encounters a surviving expression of Lucille’s feeling. The paper cannot answer every uncertainty between mother and daughter, but its address to Clare makes affection concrete enough for her to hold.

Lucille’s poem becomes a form of refuge precisely because the relationship was not uncomplicated. Clare does not discover a perfect mother or a repaired past. Instead, she finds a singular, enduring sign of love amid the papers and the grief, and for a moment it lets her feel that she has reached the shore after a shipwreck. Their bond remains shaped by loss and ambivalence, but the poem gives Clare a way to remember Lucille with tenderness as well as pain.