A review by dawndeydusk
Is Mother Dead by Vigdis Hjorth

dark emotional mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

This is a work that slightly drags and definitely haunts.

I walk along the road below the cabin and notice a stone in my shoe. I leave it be. I have a stone in the forest, it lies at the end of the path where the mound opens out and it is smooth and broad, at times I lie down on it to rest, but as I walk on, I can still feel the stone in my shoe, that's Mum.

...perhaps I make that part up because I need to.

...and I realize it's not the sky we should be facing, but the earth.

And it felt as if life also stirred, sleepy, and silent, inside my body, as if my grief settled in me and fell asleep.

Some days the things that don't happen are the most important ones. I called Mum, she didn't pick up. The year has sixteen months. November, December, January, Feburary, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, November, November, November, November.

Do I feel alone in the world? No. Not in the way they think or imagine, because I have always felt alone in the world. It's my default setting.

My eyes don't adjust to the darkness. The darkness creeps into my pores and fills my whole body."

I drive home with unfinished business, what is my business? How can I finish it? Life goes by so quickly. There are so many crucial questions we never ask except in our most provate moments, so many issues we avoid discussing even though the people who could contribute to clarification and information are still alive. We could seek them out and demand an answer, but we don't, why ont? And anyway, we wouldn't get an answer even if we begged and pleaded with them, or it isn't worth the trouble, the humiliation, the awkwardness

There were many secrets in the yellow house, I sensed it, Mum sensed it, but we closed our eyes because we couldn't handle what we might see if we dared to look because if we saw it and gave voice to it, the bubble would burst, and we didn't know what would come pouring out, most likely it would be something that would ruin the wall-to-wall carpet and then someone would have to get down on their knees to clean it up, and that someone would be Mum.

There is no freedom without guilt and, by the way, you were born guilty, you became guilty even as a child because of your family trauma and you passed on your pain to your sister or your doll which was damaged by being with you, trapped in a room in a house with a door too small to get out of, where everyt attempt would be a bloody, probably fatal, venture, but I blew up the door and it was bloody and now I'm here, in a cabin in the forest with an elk.

Marguerite Duras writes somewhere that every mother in every childhood represents madness. That your mother is always and always will be the strangest person you will ever meet, I think she's right. Many people will say when talking about their mothers: My mum was mad, no, I mean it, mad. When we remember our mothers, we laugh a great deal, and it's funny.

You are wiser at then than you are at fourtneen.