Josse and Susanna: Mother and Son

Josse and Susanna’s relationship is marked by a repeated movement between separation and shared care. The death of Josse’s brother and the decline of the Family dog leave them confronting what remains of their family; later, Hermann’s illness draws Susanna back to him and gives Josse an unexpected experience of his parents as a loving pair. Their bond emerges less through declarations than through difficult decisions, remembered scenes, and the care they undertake together.

Shared grief and the Family dog

When the Family dog becomes gravely ill, Susanna and Josse must decide whether to take her home or let the veterinarian end her suffering. Susanna hesitates, considering whether they might wait, but acknowledges that the dog has never struggled so badly to breathe. Josse, too, feels the pull of delay: he thinks that the dog might be taken home for a few more days, yet tells Susanna that she has been unwell for weeks and can barely rise by herself. His practical judgment and his wish to keep the dog alive coexist; the decision is painful precisely because neither feeling cancels the other.

The dog’s illness exposes a deeper grief they share. Susanna often reminds Josse that the dog belonged to his brother, who died in an accident. For her, and for Josse, the dog carries a piece of an earlier family life: the brothers and parents together around the table, answering questions in their family quiz game, when Josse believed the family could not be broken. Susanna and Josse recognize that, without the dog, only the two parents and their adult child remain in the house. The dog’s failing body has become a living connection to people and a family arrangement that are no longer present.

They take the dog outside before returning to the veterinary practice. As she trails behind them, Susanna recalls how powerfully she once pulled on the leash, how she had to tie her to a tree or fence when another dog approached, and how wildly she responded to the sea. The recollection briefly restores the vigorous animal they remember, but it also sharpens the contrast with the exhausted dog sitting at Josse’s feet. Their shared memory does not soften the decision so much as make the loss more legible.

Josse buys a Bounty bar at a kiosk and gives the dog both pieces, although she had ordinarily received only a tiny corner. He calls her his Blood-brother and coaxes her to eat; at first she seems uncertain that the whole treat is truly for her, then eats it. The gesture gives their last walk a concrete tenderness, while also returning Josse and Susanna to the decision they have made. On the way back, Josse wonders whether he has driven it, whether he could have prevented or delayed it, and whether the dog’s life had been in his hands. The scene shows the two of them deciding together, but not sharing the decision’s emotional burden in exactly the same way.

Illness, separation, and return

Years later, Hermann’s illness disrupts the family again. Josse has already moved away from home when his father receives a devastating diagnosis; the diseased kidney is removed within a day of Hermann noticing blood in his urine. Hermann tells Josse that the risk of recurrence will take six years to fall substantially. In the meantime, the parents can scarcely bear living together. With no child or dog at home, Hermann’s worries and Susanna’s fears weigh on a marriage already under strain.

Hermann moves in with a woman he has met, who lives in Lübeck with her two young children. His departure makes the long-impossible separation of Josse’s parents real. Josse hears children in the background when he calls Hermann, while Susanna spends her evenings on a balcony above the lake. Their house, situated within the psychiatric hospital, stands empty, and there are plans to turn it into a supported-living ward. The split separates Susanna and Josse from Hermann in different ways: she remains in the family home, while Josse encounters his father through visits and calls.

The separation does not last as a simple withdrawal from one another. Hermann’s cancer returns, first as pain in his leg and then as tiny shadows in his lungs. Susanna calls Josse in alarm to ask what is wrong; he initially fears that Hermann has killed himself, then learns that another operation is needed. She also tells him that Hermann contacted her as soon as he learned the news, despite the estrangement. Within six weeks, the lung findings confirm a further turn in the illness.

Hermann undergoes surgery on his leg and radiation treatment for his lungs, but cannot return to work. He tries to resume his practice, then has to clear it out. He begins to experience ordinary activities as things he is doing for the last time. Though he lives with his new family, he increasingly feels like a burden, and the arrangement is difficult with the children. He eventually returns to the house in Schleswig, ill and alone, in the midst of the psychiatric hospital. Josse has not seen him for two months; when Hermann opens the door, Josse hides his shock at how greatly his father has changed in a quick embrace. This encounter places the son’s care for his father alongside the rupture in his parents’ life, rather than presenting either as a separate story.

Susanna’s return and a changed family intimacy

Josse takes time to understand Susanna’s decision to dismantle the life she had recently built and return to Hermann. He knows that Hermann had betrayed her for years and tormented her through his emotional inaccessibility, and he advises her against going back. Susanna nevertheless leaves Italy and returns to Schleswig. The choice carries the history of their marriage into the present: she does not return because the earlier injuries have disappeared, but because she believes she cannot leave Hermann alone.

Josse’s discovery of his parents together changes how he understands his place in the family. He comes home, calls out, and finds no patients in the house; searching through it, he finds Susanna and Hermann asleep in the same bed, his father’s arm around his mother and her head resting on his chest. Josse has never seen them so close. He recognizes them not merely as the separate figures of father and mother he has always known, but, for the first time, as parents together. When Susanna opens her eyes, he kisses her and Hermann’s hand; Hermann wakes and welcomes him. Josse remembers the moment as the happiest of his life with his parents.

Susanna stays with Hermann and sets a clear condition after the woman in Lübeck calls: there must be no more secret telephone conversations, or Susanna will leave him to die alone. Josse doubts that Hermann kept his promise. Her return therefore does not resolve the marriage into a simple reconciliation. The renewed closeness exists alongside old betrayals and continued uncertainty, and Josse sees both the tenderness of his parents’ shared bed and the unresolved terms on which they live together.

Care through Hermann’s final illness

As Hermann’s cancer advances, pain becomes a physical and domestic presence. It moves, in the narration, from one organ or bone to the next, each new pain arriving after Hermann has gathered the strength to endure the previous one. Josse describes the suffering as radiating beyond his father’s body into the hospital room and the house, reaching even the narrator’s former bedroom. The son is not the primary caregiver, but he is made a witness to the way Hermann’s illness occupies their shared home and unsettles his own ability to rest there.

Morphine begins late, after the pain has become difficult to control. Hermann injects large doses into his swollen abdomen, and the treatment brings its own danger: the morphine threatens to suppress his breathing, while reducing it brings withdrawal symptoms. When the cancer reaches his spinal cord, he screams through the night. Patients in the psychiatric hospital scream as well. Josse repeatedly goes to his father, but after about ten minutes he is overwhelmed by Hermann’s suffering and returns to his own room. His response registers the limits of witnessing: he stays involved, but cannot remain continuously beside a pain that he cannot relieve.

Hermann’s paralysis brings an abrupt reprieve. After a night of struggling for life, he wakes without pain for the first time in nearly two years. Susanna cares devotedly for her paralyzed husband, while Josse visits them as a couple who appear to him as lovers—playful, exhausted, and sustained by attention to one another. The change is striking against the history of estrangement and Hermann’s long illness. Yet relief is temporary: within three or four months, his breathing worsens, pain forms again in his shoulders, and fear of suffocation joins the symptoms.

Hermann wants to die at home, but after another life-threatening attack of suffocation he is taken to hospital. Susanna moves in with him. The account describes the two parents enduring the last weeks together through the practical, daily labor of dying, far removed from theory. For Josse, their care is no longer only a matter of a son visiting an ill father or a wife tending her husband; it is a shared family passage in which Susanna stays at Hermann’s bedside and Josse arrives to witness its final moments.

Separation, reunion, and what Josse witnesses

The relationship between Josse and Susanna is repeatedly tested by losses that cannot be reversed: the death of Josse’s brother, the loss of the Family dog, the parents’ separation, and Hermann’s terminal illness. In the dog’s final days, mother and son make a painful decision by bringing their memories into the present. In Hermann’s illness, Josse initially opposes Susanna’s return, then sees the intimacy between his parents that he had never known. Their closeness does not depend on pretending the marriage was untroubled; it develops amid the record of hurt, illness, and practical care.

The narrative gives their bond its force through acts of attention rather than a complete reconciliation or explanation. Susanna asks Josse to face the dog’s decline with her; Josse brings the dog a once-rare treat and questions his own role in the decision. Later, Susanna returns to Hermann despite Josse’s advice, and he discovers the two of them asleep together. In the final illness, she undertakes the daily care while he comes and goes as a son who cannot absorb his father’s pain for him. Across these scenes, Josse and Susanna remain joined by grief and responsibility, but their shared life also contains different judgments, limits, and choices. Their relationship is most clearly seen in the fact that they keep meeting one another at the bedside, at home, and in the difficult work of letting go.