Hermann’s terminal illness turns the family’s long-standing separation into a story of painful return: as his cancer spreads and pain consumes his daily life, The narrator’s mother comes back to care for him, and the narrator witnesses a brief, unexpected reprieve before his death. Recounted by Joachim as a remembered family crisis, the episode makes illness more than a diagnosis or a sequence of treatments. Pain fills rooms and relationships; care becomes practical, exhausting work; and the ending arrives not as a simple release, but as a warmth that disappears when its source is recognized as a machine.

Diagnosis, recurrence, and separation

Hermann’s illness began after Joachim had been living away from home for several years. The diagnosis, the narrator recalls, made time accelerate and events crowd together. After Hermann passed blood in his urine, surgeons removed the affected kidney within twenty-four hours. He told Joachim that six years would have to pass before the risk of recurrence fell significantly; after that interval, he would have the same chance of reaching old age as he had before becoming ill. That hopeful measure of time remained in the background when the disease returned much sooner.

By then, Hermann and The narrator’s mother could scarcely bear living together. Their children had left home, and there was no dog; worry and fear had become the atmosphere of the household. Hermann had met another woman and moved to Lübeck, where she lived with two young children. The narrator’s mother stayed in the family home for a while, then went to Italy, found work at a hospital on Lake Maggiore, and tried to begin again. Their separation, which had seemed impossible for years, became real. The family house, set amid the psychiatric hospital, stood empty, with early plans to turn it into an assisted-living ward.

The recurrence began with pain in Hermann’s leg, only a year after his first operation. The narrator’s mother called Joachim, whose first fear was that Hermann had killed himself. Instead, Hermann needed another operation. Though Joachim assumed that his parents no longer had contact, Hermann had called her as soon as he received the news. Six weeks later, tiny shadows appeared on his lungs. Hermann understood what they might mean and found it difficult to begin the arduous treatment. His leg was operated on and his lungs irradiated; he returned to hospital, while Joachim visited whenever he could.

The return to the family home

Hermann tried to resume work, but could not. Clearing out his practice was, the narrator says, terrible for him. He was living with his new family, yet increasingly felt that his illness made him a burden; life there had not been ready to accommodate it, and the children made the situation difficult. He chose to move back to the family house, where he was sick and alone amid the psychiatric hospital. The move reversed the earlier departure without restoring the life that had preceded it: the house that had stood empty became the place where his illness would unfold.

When Joachim saw him after two months apart, he tried to conceal his shock with a quick embrace. Hermann had grown heavier, but his former corpulence had seemed buoyant and healthy; now his body appeared weakened by illness, loneliness, and a lack of prospects. The change is conveyed through the contrast between the man who once floated on his back in a public swimming pool after a week of work and the diminished figure whom his son now faced. Joachim also recalls Hermann’s striking eyes, friendly and exceptionally intelligent, as a quality that had helped explain his success with women. The illness alters the body without erasing the personal presence Joachim recognizes in him.

Pain, treatment, and bodily change

The account gives pain a relentless progression. Whenever Hermann believed he had reached its peak, it moved into an adjacent organ; after he had used his remaining strength to accommodate one pain, a worse one arrived. The effort to endure also kept renewing itself: what seemed like his last strength was not actually the last, and what had been catastrophic two weeks earlier could later seem almost paradisiacal. The narrator describes pain radiating from Hermann’s body into organs and bones, then beyond the body into the hospital room and the whole house. Lying in his former childhood bedroom, Joachim felt it through the walls and could no longer settle himself in bed.

Hermann began morphine too late, in the narrator’s view. By then, the pain had become so unruly that only enormous doses could restrain it. Hermann injected himself in his swollen abdomen; the doses would have killed a healthy person. The narrator frames the escalating demand for morphine as the visible sign of an otherwise invisible pain, and observes that pain suppressed only after it has grown fierce is harder to control than pain treated at its first flare. Later, Hermann continued to inject large quantities: without them he experienced withdrawal, while the drug threatened to suppress his breathing.

The illness eventually reached Hermann’s spine and spinal cord through the discs. On a warm night he screamed, as did patients elsewhere in the psychiatric hospital. Joachim repeatedly went to him, but after about ten minutes the sight and sound of his father’s suffering overwhelmed him, and he retreated to his room. Under the enormous morphine doses, Hermann hallucinated and repeatedly shouted about a bathtub brand. The detail does not lessen the crisis; it registers how pain and medication had disrupted ordinary speech and perception.

Paralysis and renewed closeness

The next morning, the house was quiet. The narrator’s mother had spent the night beside Hermann. She described how he had first lost movement in his feet and then his legs, crying out that they were burning as the sensation rose toward the damaged place in his back. At one point he took her face in his hands, and she thought he was dying. Then the pain stopped. The numbness extended downward from his chest: Hermann was paralyzed. When he woke hours later, he was unexpectedly cheerful. For the first time in nearly two years, he had no pain.

For the next three or four months, Joachim found his parents together in a way he had never imagined. The narrator’s mother cared devotedly for her paralyzed husband; when Joachim visited, he saw two lovers, worn out yet buoyed by attending to one another. The reprieve was not a cure. Hermann developed increasing breathing problems, new pain in his shoulders, and fear of suffocation. Morphine remained necessary, but it also threatened his breathing. After another life-threatening attack of suffocation, he was admitted to hospital, though he had wanted to die at home. The narrator’s mother moved in with him there.

Their final weeks are presented as practical work rather than an abstract lesson about illness. Hermann’s wish to die and his body’s readiness to die repeatedly failed to coincide: at times he wanted death but his body held on; when his body might have let go, he began to fight. Together, his parents endured those weeks, far from theory and absorbed in the everyday labor of dying. The narrator’s mother’s return thus completes neither a restoration of their old marriage nor a denial of its rupture; the account shows their renewed intimacy in the concrete acts of care at the end of Hermann’s life.

Death and the last vigil

At the hospital, a weeping nurse met Joachim in the corridor and embraced him. The narrator’s mother sat beside Hermann’s bed; a candle burned, and his hands were folded. His face looked relaxed and relieved, with pain and fear finally gone. Joachim asked the chief physician to delay taking Hermann away, and was told he could stay as long as he wished. The request prolongs the vigil for a little while, but cannot reverse what has happened.

After The narrator’s mother went home to her own bed, Joachim remained alone with his father. He took off his clothes and lay beside him, as he had done as a child and even as a young adult, when they would talk beneath the covers. Hermann’s body was still warm. The bed’s Dekubitusmatratze continually shifted him by inflating and releasing its air chambers. Joachim lay close to his father, felt the mattress working beneath them, and fell asleep.

On waking, he realized that the warmth came not from Hermann but from the electric mattress. He switched it off. The room became silent; Hermann quickly grew cold, and the body that had seemed familiar became strange and forbidding. The transition from warmth to cold gives the death scene its final, physical boundary: the machine had sustained the sensation of closeness, but could not preserve the person. After Joachim’s brother arrived from Berlin, Joachim went for a walk and felt unexpectedly liberated and happy, as though a fist in which he had lived for years had opened. The account ends this illness with that contradiction intact: grief and release coexist, and the end of Hermann’s pain also marks the end of his presence.