kick in the gut

So, yesterday I got on the bus to go home and pulled out my latest book. It's called Бухта радости (The Bay of Joy), by Андрей Дмитриев (Andrei Dmitriev); it was short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize in 2007. It starts quietly, with the protagonist - a young man named Stremukhin, though it's a page into the book before he's called by name instead of "he" - is preparing for a trip to Bukhta Radosti, a popular Moscow recreational area on the far side of the Pirgovo reservoir. He's riding on the ferry across the water when he spots a barge full of scrap iron, and he speculates on its destination and the fate of its cargo. This makes him realize that for the first time in a year his thoughts have gone beyond death - all the way, in fact, to Samara. And he remembers the night he took ill, and the EMT team that came to check him out left, not with him but with his mother.

The next paragraph was like a kick in the gut. I know I'm not the only person - mine's not the only family - to experience this, but I was not ready to read this:

Стремухин бросился на Ленинский. Мать была безмолвна и бездвижна, но жива. Через неделью он забрал ее к себе и был сиделкою при ней полгода.

Он никого с тех пор не видел, кроме матери, кроме ее всегда глядящих мимо и словно бы стеклянных непрозрачных глаз; он нечего не слышал, кроме ее похрапывания, такого ровного, что никогда нельзя было понять, спит она или о чем-то думать. Он так и не узнал, могла ли она думать. Хотелось думать, что могла. Он говорил с ней беспрестанно и убедил себя, что она слышит: он пел ей по утрам репертуар ее любимого Вертинского, потом и Козина, по вечерам он с выражением читал ей, словно возвращая, сказки, которые она читала ему в детстве, ворчал ночами, склоняясь над работой, а днем громко ругался, управляясь с пылесосом....

Все это кончилось в ночи на Рождество с ее последним вздохом.

Stremukhin tore over to the Leninsky hospital. His mother was speechless and motionless, but she was alive. A week later he took her home to his place and was her caregiver for half a year.

In that time he saw no one but his mother, but her gaze always sliding past him, her eyes like opaque glass; he heard nothing but her snoring, and that so even he could never tell whether she was asleep or thinking of something. He didn't even know if she were able to think. He wanted so much to think that she could. He talked to her incessantly and convinced himself that she heard: he sang to her in the mornings from the repertoire of Vertinsky, her favorite, and then Kozin; and in the evenings he read to her, in a lively voice, as if in repayment, the stories she had read to him in his childhood; at night he muttered as he bent over his work and by day he cussed while he ran the vacuum cleaner....

It all came to end on Christmas Eve night with her last breath.

A couple of paragraphs in spare Russian prose, and there I was, sitting on the bus, crying.

It's almost two years since my mother died. She was stricken - like Stremukhin's mother exactly - for four years. When she finally went, there was grief but there was release, too. Almost relief.

I guess I'm not as over it as I had thought...