The narrator’s mother

The narrator’s mother is a figure of care whose attentiveness is both sustaining and, at times, painfully out of step with what her son needs. She works as a mobile physiotherapist, takes him along on rural visits when he is sent home from school, and later cares for her gravely ill husband with extraordinary devotion. Across these different forms of care, the narrative holds together affection and misunderstanding: good intentions do not always prevent hurt, but her presence becomes essential when the family faces illness and death.

Work and Family Life

When the narrator is sent home after only four months in first grade, his parents spare him the return to kindergarten and let him spend the rest of the school year at home. His mother works mornings as a mobile physiotherapist, and he accompanies her on her visits across the countryside. While she teaches farmers with slipped discs how to lift and carry heavy objects, including fertilizer sacks, he wanders or plays with the toys of children who are away at school. Once a week she also gives riding therapy and uses the breaks to teach him a few tricks on horseback. At times she takes him along to swimming therapy for people with severe disabilities, where a crane lowers him into the water with them. Her work thus shapes this unusual interval in his childhood: she brings him into her working world rather than treating his exclusion from school as a reason to keep him at home.

The family’s social life is more restricted. At the traditional birthday coffee gathering, four psychiatric patients—Margret, Ludwig, Dietmar, and Kimberly—are the only guests her husband permits. She tries to persuade him to invite other people as well and says she would enjoy hosting a proper dinner. He rejects the idea; even the prospect of the deputy director visiting their living room is unwelcome to him. Her wish for a broader, more ordinary hospitality remains unanswered, and the gathering continues on his terms.

Affection and Misunderstanding

The narrator describes his mother as genuinely loving, but also as someone whose conviction that she is being kind can leave her unaware of the injury she causes. Two days before her husband’s fortieth birthday, she and her son have a severe confrontation. He sees a pattern in which she tries to help by pressing precisely on his vulnerable points, then is bewildered by the distress that follows. The account does not present her as secretly cruel: the difficulty lies in the gap between her loving intention and the effect of her actions.

A story about a Picasso drawing given to her by the narrator’s eldest brother makes that gap visible in a domestic comedy. The drawing, a single continuous line joining matador and bull, pleases her so much that she hangs it in her son’s room while he is away fishing. When he objects that it was his gift to her, she answers that she is lending it to him. His anger puzzles her; she assumes he may simply be disappointed by his fishing. The episode echoes the larger portrait: she can be generous and affectionate while failing to recognize another person’s claim or expectation.

The same mismatch becomes more painful in the preparation of forty marzipan potatoes for her husband’s birthday. Her son has made them as a careful gift and wants to coat each one in cocoa himself, making the meticulous process part of what he is giving. While he is away, his mother finishes the coating and places the completed potatoes in a covered bowl. He discovers them piled in a cocoa-dusted pyramid. She is pleased with the result and cannot understand his repeated cries of disbelief; he, unable at first to explain himself, squashes the potatoes together and retreats to the bathroom to wash them. What has been spoiled for him is not simply a set of sweets, but the chance to show care through the particular work he had planned. The episode gives concrete form to the book’s distinction between making something good and allowing someone else to make it with care.

Separation and Return

Years later, when the narrator has long since moved away, his father becomes seriously ill. After a diagnosis and the removal of an affected kidney, the parents’ strained marriage breaks apart. With no child or dog left at home, their worries and fears become harder to bear together. The father moves to Lübeck to live with a new partner and her two young children; the mother remains in the family home, which stands empty within the psychiatric hospital grounds and is considered for use as a supported-living ward.

The separation does not end their connection. When the father’s cancer returns, beginning with pain in his leg, the mother calls their son in a panic to tell him that another operation is needed. The father has contacted her as soon as he learns the news, despite the expectation that they would no longer be in touch. After surgery on his leg and radiation treatment for shadows found on his lungs, he tries to resume work but cannot. He feels increasingly like a burden in the new household and makes the bitter decision to move back to the family home, sick and alone amid the psychiatric hospital.

The mother then becomes his principal caregiver. She looks after him after he is paralyzed from the waist down, and the narrator, visiting her there, sees his parents as lovers—playful and exhausted, sustained by their attention to one another. That intimacy is a striking reversal of the estrangement that had seemed to make their marriage impossible. When the father is hospitalized after a life-threatening attack of breathlessness, the mother moves in with him. She remains beside him through the final weeks, sharing the practical labor of his dying rather than standing at a distance from it.

Care at the End of His Life

The account of the father’s illness emphasizes how care is lived amid symptoms that resist neat explanation. His pain grows more severe, and he begins morphine only after it has become difficult to control; he injects large doses into his swollen abdomen. Later, when the disease reaches his spinal cord, his lower body becomes paralyzed and, for the first time in nearly two years, he wakes without pain. The narrator describes the mother caring for him through this altered condition and the brief period of relief that follows. Her work is not presented as a cure, but as sustained presence through changing and increasingly demanding needs.

As his breathing worsens, morphine both remains necessary and threatens to suppress his respiration. He would like to die at home, but after another near-fatal suffocation attack he is taken to hospital, and his mother goes to stay with him. The parents endure the last weeks together through the ordinary, strenuous work of tending to a dying person. In the hospital, she sits at his bedside beside a burning candle, his hands folded. When she tells their son that the staff will soon take his father away, he asks the chief physician to delay; the physician agrees to let him stay as long as the family wishes. The scene makes her presence part of the final family vigil, even as the son’s request briefly extends it.

Significance

The narrator’s mother is not defined by a single role: she is a working therapist, a mother who includes her son in her rounds, a wife frustrated by her husband’s closed household, and a caregiver who returns to him after their separation. The earlier domestic episodes resist an uncomplicated portrait of maternal kindness, showing how affection can fail to register another person’s intentions. In the later illness, however, care becomes concrete and mutual: the former spouses attend to one another in the altered circumstances of paralysis, pain, and impending death. Her trajectory gives the family story one of its central reversals—not a simple restoration of the marriage, but a return to shared attention when the demands of illness make practical presence indispensable.