The book Elena Knows is told in third person, with Elena’s thoughts always framed as “Elena knows.” Yet it closes with “...maybe, she’ll know.” I think it sums up the whole book. Despite its title, it’s really about what Elena doesn’t know. She tries to figure out why her daughter, Rita, a full-time worker who was also her Parkinson’s caregiver, chose suicide. Elena believes she knows, because mothers know the love they have for their children. But do we really know what’s best for those closest to us? Do we have the right to expect gratitude and repayment in life? Even though the book could be read as saying daughters can never be fully understood by their mothers, I, who was in the middle of my most rebellious point with my own mother, somehow found myself understanding both characters. Their choices and thoughts are shaped by society, by religion, and by the harsh truth of illness: how it changes not only you, but everyone around you. We follow what has long been set by society, because “society knows.” But does it, really?
What test could life have placed in front of your daughter to make her do something she never thought she’d do? What could’ve made her decide she didn’t mind going to a church on a day like that? What could’ve been so terrible that she preferred to walk through the thunder and lightning she believed could kill her?
Maybe she wanted the very thing she’d been so scared of before, for a bolt of lightning to split her in two. And when it didn’t happen, when she got there and realised it was all a lie, that she was soaking wet but still alive, she chose to climb the tower, tie the kind of knot she’d never thought she knew how to tie, put the rope around her neck, and hang herself.
Elena would like to have an answer, would like to say she’s going to wait and then get up and leave, but so many words flood her head at the same time that they become tangled, overlapping, crashing into each other, and lose their way or disintegrate before Elena can pronounce them, so she doesn’t say anything, she doesn’t respond, because she doesn’t know. Or because now she knows, she doesn’t say anything, she doesn’t respond, she just pets that cat. That’s enough for today, petting a cat. Maybe tomorrow, when she opens her eyes and takes her first pill of the morning, she’ll know. Or when she takes the second one. Maybe.
That afternoon, Rita, who was not a mother and never would be, forced another woman to become one, applying the dogma she’d learned to another woman’s body.
She’d learned a long time ago that hiding an insult inside a joke would cancel out any anger.
Or breathing in and out for fifteen minutes repeating the word ‘calm’ as if it were a mantra. Calm. Calm. She thought a more accurate mantra would be shit, shit, shit.