Summary

This memoir, written twelve years after the death of Jurgensen's young daughters, is composed of letters written to a friend whom she and her husband met shortly after their daughters' deaths, and who had never met the children.

Quotes

page 7. There is no ground between before and after.

page 11. The terror targeted us (G. and her husband Laurent) exclusively, we were its only prey, its only destination, the terminus…
Laurent took me by the wrists and asked me not to scream. He said: "To think we are going to have to get over this." A big part of us stayed there forever.

page 14. …the moment in our lives that we do not all experience, the moment when something takes aim at us…

page 20. Since then I have not called Mathilde or Elise. Or if I have called my oldest daughter, it was without the hope that she would reply. It was to feel the vibration in my larynx of those syllables chosen when I was twenty-five ears old, the arrangement of clear vowels and aquatic consonants which were to name the first of my children, to accompany her all her life, act as her passport, announce her arrival, to be said with only a hint of shyness and finally - in the mouth of the one who would love her - to betray all emotions that this girl would one day elicit, that alone would arouse in one young man, a young man who will never know her, who lives and does not live to love her.

pages 31-32. She said, "They did have a full life all the same." I knew that in the mystery and truth of her affirmation there was great vision. I know that one day before I die I will understand her sentence. I know that it is above reason and that in order to assimilate it I will have to reach a dimension which is not yet a part of me. I know that in a sense, yes, at seven and a half and four and a half, Mathilde and Elise came onto this world to perform their human function, a complete function, lacking not one nuance or a single millimeter of depth.
I also know - because I am their mother - I can only fiercely reject that sort of idea and I have to be satisfied with a feeling of rage at seeing my children robbed of everything, while in my heart a strange creature still roars and chafes, an all powerful chimera which still wants to save them.

page 43. She said: "you will see, you can get used to anything." It is certainly the most simple, true, brutal perceptive thing that anyone said to me at the time. You could interpret it as either a message of hope, or of a crushing contempt of human nature.

page 45. Letters of condolence. If a friend loses someone, write them a letter full of love. You need them, these letters, to get you through the days and evenings somehow. You open them, you read, you search through them for the mot juste, and you always find it. However distant the author of the letter may be, he is there, vigilant; he helps you look at your life; he says that he knows, that he is thinking, that he will keep and protect. The letters cement the bricks laid down by the survivors . Write, write, write. Do not miss one opportunity to do it. If you have the choice between writing and not writing always choose to write. Not a single letter is out of place.

page 47. (On someone who avoided her) There is absolutely no doubt that silence is open to the bleakest of interpretations. You have to come out of the woods into the open and say: I am here, I know, I have seen, I am witnessing, I am here. If you stay in the woods, you are saying just as clearly: I am not here, I know nothing, I have seen nothing, I am turning my back on you.

page 54. Sometimes I believe them alive (my darling little children, my darling little girls; these words which are so light and yet so burdensome cut through me then), and sometimes I believe in their death (on the edge of the motorway, ten or so metres from each other, their legs in dungarees, their arms and legs on the side of the motorway),. There is never a link between the two.

page 63. G tells a friend she is floundering, and he invites her to lunch. It takes great strength to catch you as you spiral away. And great courage too. Especially from someone who only rang to say hello, but who takes you as you are and manages to bring you gently back to earth.

page 65. Even today, when I have lived three times longer without them than with them, I would like to open the drawer in which I kept Elise's underwear, grab a fresh vest and put it on her….Twelve years later, I have still not finished taking off Elise's nightclothes and slipping on her daytime clothes before she catches cold.

page 68. There has been nothing glorious about the way I live my life. I love the living in all their miasma. I love the dead for their temerity. There is nothing in between.

page 74. I am ashamed of everything. Ashamed of these letters, ashamed of not having saved my daughters' lives, ashamed of what followed, ashamed of the world which I have contented myself with since then.

page 77. displaced anger. a woman cuts her mom off from a parking space.
My knees shook throughout the entire play. I did not hear a word of the entire text.
To this day, I harbor for that little couple all the hatred that I do not feel for the boy who killed my children.

page 78. On the one hand -this terrible hardship and - on the other - a life which is rich despite itself.

page 79. It is that moment, the moment in which the smiling relieved adults turn round to the children in their care and discover that they have disappeared from the car; it is that moment that we must examine because we do not understand it at all, all the other details are fortuitous.

page 83. from a letter g wrote at the beginning: Raymond, I'm frightened of the street at the moment, I'm frightened of anything that isn't in the room that I'm in. But as soon as I feel a bit better, I will come to see you.

page 89. G's brother-in-law He had no blood link to our girls, but he found himself, his twenty-four year old wife, his baby and his future children at the heart of an inescapable grief. His wife was driving the car, his baby had escaped unscathed from the accident which killed his two nieces whom he, a young doctor alone by the side of the motorway had pronounced dead. In his direct, intense and restrained way, he told me that once a month for the last twelve years he ran back along that stretch of motorway…. 'I was the only one who saw how they were,' he told me. I did not ask him how they really were by the side of that motorway. I might ask him one day.

page 96. Concerning a friend who changed the topic when she was trying to tell a story about her daughter: It was sad, but his lack of intuition offered me the one thing that I truly accept: loneliness and suppressed tears.

pages 96-97. Some things required enormous effort. But we got the hang of it. We knew that you could not suffer that much for any length of time, that the paroxysm lasts only a few hours and that, once those hours have passed, anesthesia sets in.

page 97. When you are unhappy you are never far from being reduced to the state of a down-and-out. You have only to be deprived of one glass of water and there you are.

(G meets Francine (who has also just lost a child.) They form a strong bond of friendship and deep understanding.)
page 115. The first time I went to see Francine I had to take photographs of the girls in my handbag, just in case. We showed each other photographs, awkwardly, like cripples showing each other their mutilations…

page118. Does anyone ever really confront the contradiction between life and death? Often I felt their life was so powerful that I would tell myself that they could not be dead; but just as often their absence seemed so complete that I no longer believed I had known them.

page 120. The first few years I was anaesthetized: a bomb had fallen on my house. I was no longer afraid of anything. Now it is quite the contrary.

page 125. During the day, I try not to remember, even for a minute, that we lose those we love.

page 128. A birth is not worth a death. Birth and death have nothing to do with each other.

page 133. It is important…to describe how rupture and continuity, sadness and happiness, death and life, mutilation and creation, exhaustion and enthusiasm, loyalty and rejection, disgust and appetite blend and never-the-less make a life.

page 147. I will always be out of place. The working class, immigrants, the self taught cranks, the handicapped, the unemployed, and grieving parents are more alike than people think. They have at least one thing in common; they have to make Herculean efforts to hold a normal banal, bouncy conversation. They can think of only one thing, the moment when they might introduce a sentence about their misfortune.
Thirteen years have passed, and I cannot last half a day without evoking my daughters.

page 162. When you have lost a child all that is left is to understand what you can.

page 163. In Tears in Heaven, Eric Clapton tackles the question of time. He counterbalances the clichés that time heals everything:
Time can bring you down, bring you what you need. Time can break your heart, make you beg and plead.

pages 163-164. I come back to the fall of the empire and the fall of the glove. If you have withstood the fall of the empire, you are invincible. You know what you can survive. You are strong. You have needed your strength and you are proud of it. The only thing that could drag you under would be a completely different kind of fall. Which plucks you gently. So you fall gently and you fall very far. So gently that you do not make a sound as you touch the bottom. No more sound than if you were to pronounce the word, disappearance.

General Themes

The overriding theme is the question: How does one go on living a meaningful life after the death of a child.

"For every human being, the suffering inflicted by the death of those without whom we never would have wanted to live is an enigma; I was, of course, incapable of resolving it, but I wanted to expose its terms. Life is the only way of talking about death, which itself always evades our understanding."

Jurgensen doesn't answer this question. Instead she describes how she lives the question. She offers the reader her courage and hope as well as her despair.

What the Reviewer Liked

This book is so exquisitely and intelligently written that it takes my breath away! Jurgensen's daughters were young children when they died. In contrast my own daughter died on the cusp of adulthood, at twenty-one. Yet of the dozens of memoirs I have read on the death of child, none evoke the grief of a mother as I experience it more profoundly. The imagery of lived grief is lyrical and at the same time precise.

Shortcomings or Flaws

None.

Writing Style

The writing is clear, spare, and at the same time evocative. Jurgensen uses carefully chosen images and details to transcribe her grief. Her descriptions of her life before her children died, their deaths, and the life she carves in the aftermath are compelling and poetic. Her writing is that of a conscientious witness, who makes the reader see her experience.

Author Qualifications

Genevieve Jurgensen is a bereaved mother, writing her own experience. She is the author of several previous books. As a young woman, she studied under Bruno Bettelheim, the eminent child psychologist who is also famous for his writings on the psychology of depression.

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