When I wrote the date at the top of today’s exercises (it’s 3:08 p.m. and fewer than twelve hours have passed since yesterday’s)—when I wrote the date, as I was saying, I realized a lot of things about my behavior last night and my current uneasy state. Today is my mother’s birthday. She passed away five weeks ago. It’s Sunday now, and last Saturday I was with Alicia at the cemetery, marking the first month since her death. I don’t normally go in for these things, but this is an exceptional case, firstly because one’s mother is always someone particularly important, but also because this death brings with it real reasons—not just unconscious, fantastical ones—for me to feel guilty, and this guilt is very difficult to overcome. I even resorted to confessing to a priest, which was highly uncharacteristic of me. It’s certainly true, as the priest helped me see, that my feelings of guilt are exaggerated and based on unverifiable hypotheses about how different things might have been if I’d done x, y, or z. It’s also true that I was “made” to be very susceptible to guilt and that the person who made me this way was none other than my mother. But be that as it may, I’m still feeling uneasy, though I’ve tried to escape that feeling by watching an excessive number of films and to escape myself using other techniques, evasion tactics I adopted during my mother’s months of intense suffering and continued to make use of after her death. Now I think it’s time to turn back toward myself, to walk the other way down the path of avoidance, and to trust in the fact that even if I am at fault, I’ve been forgiven by my mother and by God. As everyone knows, guilt gets you nowhere and repentance really consists of “not sinning again”—of not returning over and over to a previous action you can’t undo, and instead returning to normal life and generating good things for yourself and everyone around you, which is better than greeting the world with the ghastly countenance of an invalid. And so, on the seventy-eighth anniversary of her birth, the tribute I owe to my mother is this: my health.

Epilogue: The Empty Discourse

Epilogue: The Empty Discourse

September 22, 1991