Gilles Chagnon’s mother has died in hospital of a creeping failure of the heart and lungs at the age of 88. Here, he walks back through the days between her final turn and her ultimate end, recalling the immensity of human experience preserved in her 88 years—and considering how much is lost when a single human life comes to its inevitable close.
It’s a truism that death prompts some of humanity’s oldest and hardest questions—not only questions about death, but questions about life. Chagnon isn’t the first person to put such considerations into writing, but MY MOTHER, MY LOVE, MY CHILD is nonetheless a moving and successful essay in organizing those considerations with beauty and poise. The text hews closely to the sensation of time. Specific dates are called out as the narrative passes through Chagnon’s mother’s final days. The seasonality and the drawn-out tension of individual days are constantly to hand (“The sky is already devastated by a deepening darkness, we are in the arms of the wintery night, cold and pure”). Even moment-to-moment, the prose itself reflects Pauline’s deterioration as she struggles to breathe, that breathlessness reimagined in run-on sentences that can only catch the half-breath of a comma: “My mother’s body is so tired, it refuses to carry her anymore, she is out of breath, everything is narrowing.” And sometimes everything ceases for single, stark moments of overwhelming emotion, as when the text declares, “We have entered the time of agony.”
The death of a human being and the loss of their memories are two separate and immense tragedies. But MY MOTHER, MY LOVE, MY CHILD remains beautiful and even hopeful. Although frequently fixating on medical detail or the deterioration of the body, the text also returns to “talking about flowers, bird-watching, the passing of the seasons, the soothing beauty of the moon at night when we can’t sleep, the joy of talking to each other again.” It’s impossible to know what dying is truly like, or what lies on the other side; but at least Pauline can remark, justly enough after 88 years: “In any case, I really enjoyed it, living.”
Gilles Chagnon’s MY MOTHER, MY LOVE, MY CHILD is a lyrical, closely observed, and relentlessly paced reflection on the lives and deaths of human beings.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader