Filial grief: recounting the death of a mother in literature

"Writing about the family is without a doubt the surest way to get angry with it."

Delphine de Vigan writes it in

(Anagrama, 2011), an essential book in which its author tells the story of her mother, Lucile, whom she finds dead at age 61 one morning in January.

"My mother had been dead for several days."

What led your mother to kill herself?

Could I have prevented it?

Can you have such a strong bond with another person and come out unscathed?

Throughout almost 400 pages "love and guilt" shake hands to face the grief over the disappearance of his mother.

Because writing also serves to understand, to forgive and to reconcile, or at least that is what Delphine de Vigan ends up finding after recomposing the fragments of her mother's life –and her own–, with the help of various family members.

Annie Ernaux (

), Milena Busquets (

), Rosalía de Castro (

), Simone de Beauvoir (

) ... Many authors have captured the loss of their mothers on paper Perhaps because even if it is part of life that sons and daughters survive them, the death of the mother leaves a fracture forever.

And perhaps that gap occurs because there are few bonds as intense as the one established between mothers and daughters.

Or between mothers and children.

Argentine writer Paula Vázquez recounts her mother's death in

(Transit).

Reflecting the pain, the loss, the mourning, in literature, is it more useful for the writer to elaborate the mourning or who reads to accept or become aware of the inevitable?

The author answers that in her case writing is a way of questioning, an exercise that serves as a method of inquiry.

“I write to make myself say what I am not otherwise able to say.

But it is not catharsis, nor is it the specific place where mourning is made –which I think happens in all fields of life- but there must necessarily be a literary intention, a work on language over work with the material of the text, which in this case is biographical ”.

She also says that as a reader she has always found refuge in literature: "Reading has been for me a way of accessing the world and assigning meaning to it."

More information

• The perinatal grief photograph to say goodbye to a deceased baby

• How to educate children about death

In

(Trojan Horse), Florencia del Campo recounts in the first person the experience of her illness and the death of her mother.

"When you died I felt a great relief."

For the Argentine author, every book arises from the need to say something, to tell something, but it also serves to confront a bit of the impossibility of that saying.

“I was interested in telling in this story, as in all the stories I tell, that gray area, that area of ​​the question and not of the answer, that area of ​​no-word, but of concern.

I did not want to talk about my mother's death as an individual matter, and I think the book does not.

What he wanted was to ask myself things, question the family and social model, dislodge what is always taken for granted ”.

His book tells of the death of his mother, but also addresses issues of care, mother-child relationships or complicated family mechanisms.

“I didn't want to talk about my mother, but if my mother and her death helped me to talk about everything I wanted to talk about, I was going to use them.

That political incorrectness interests me ”, he acknowledges.

An exercise for reconciliation

We mothers do not choose our daughters, and we daughters do not choose our mothers: does rebuilding the mother's life, and then talking about the loss, serve for reconciliation?

For Florencia del Campo writing

has helped her rebuild her mother's life, and rebuild the bond between the two.

"It is not a reconciliation with her, it is a reconciliation with my own story," he says.

In the case of Paula Vázquez, there was reconciliation, and it came before her death.

“The disease allowed an approach, the moment of vulnerability of her, but especially mine in the face of that pain and the imminence of what she cannot get rid of, of the last opportunities.

And it was wonderful despite all the pain, because I experienced a form of love that until then had eluded me.

I think I say it in the novel at some point: reconciliation is not a sterile mandate ”, he says.

"When you made a face of wax, I knew you were dead and, in that instant, I realized that we had loved each other."

Ada Castells's

(Navona) tells of the complicated relationship between a mother and her daughters following their death.

Despite the drama of the story, its protagonist, Sara, who is also a mother, deals with enough good humor and understanding with her own memories, those of her sisters and those that her mother left in a notebook the last two years of her life.

Ada Castells says that being a mother has helped her understand some of the things her mother did that she found unfair and out of place.

“I had to reconcile myself with it so as not to repeat it or to accept it.

I have had to review my past as a daughter to be able to face the task of being a mother, which is one of the most difficult there is: 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, an unlimited contract and no pay ”.

Castells says that he should not forget (although sometimes he does) that the mother in the book is not exactly his mother but the mother he has wanted to remember and with whom he has been able to reconcile.

Writing this book says it has helped you and, you have been told, has also helped other people cope with motherhood or loss.

“The grace of literature is that, by telling one very intimate thing, you reach many other intimacies.

When you write it, you think that they are things that only happen to you and then you realize that we are all more equal than we think: we all feel confused, we have conflicts with those we love, pending accounts with our mothers, we lose patience with our children ... The key is to be honest with myself so that nothing is a literary imposture.

You cannot give falsehoods to the reader ”, he explains.

I ask Ada Castells if it does not matter how old you are when your mother figure dies, if this event, even if it catches you as an adult, is like “growing up” suddenly.

For her it is a way of becoming aware of our fragility: “When we are in the phase of life in which we have to take care of our parents and our children, we suffer the sensation of being a sandwich pressured from all sides, but when we no longer we have, we feel with the entrails in the air.

In the novel I use the metaphor of the

lonely

that has remained on the bar.

We become more aware of our fragility, which, in a way, means growing ”.

For Paula Vázquez the death of her mother has not entailed a profound transformation at all levels: “Almost two and a half years after the death of my mother, I can say that my current life has almost no points of contact with what it was before.

I think that the experience of such an intimate, so close death necessarily changes perspectives, modifies basic structures, changes the plane on which our foundations are built ”.

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