NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: “I’ll Be Gone By Then” by Eric LaRocca
NOTABLE WORKS
REVIEW: “I’ll Be Gone By Then” by Eric LaRocca
Iin The Strange Thing We Become and Other Dark Tales, published by Off Limits Press; also reprinted in The Trees Grew Because I Bled There: Collected Stories, published by Titan Books
Reviewed by Geneve Flynn
Trigger Warning: This review addresses mental health.
After leaving behind her home and identity to seek a new life in America, a woman is plunged back into a difficult relationship when her aging, ailing mother arrives from Italy and she must become her carer. As the failed Miss Vecoli settles her mother into her disordered quarters, she contemplates ways to rid herself of her burden. She finally comes up with a plan but just as she’s about to see it through, a wrenching discovery changes everything. “I’ll Be Gone By Then” is a devastating yet tender exploration of guilt and complicated grief, and a deft portrayal of a deeply damaged child-parent relationship, rife with unspoken hurts and unresolved conflicts.
LaRocca skilfully juxtaposes opposing elements throughout the story, creating startling moments that capture the full horror and weirdness of the human experience—we contain multitudes. We are neither wholly good nor bad, absolutely loving nor hateful. There will be times when we are uncharitable, selfish, monstrous, hurt, lost, abject, remorseful, anguished. Seeing these multitudes within a narrative destigmatises them and takes some of the sting from the critical voices in our heads that might tell us how we “should” feel and behave. While the pomegranate is sometimes considered an emblem of prosperity, good luck, and the heavenly kingdom, it also reaches into the realm of death. In the myth of Persephone, her mother, Demeter, finds that her daughter returns from the underworld a stranger: someone she can no longer understand and who must depart every year, because she has eaten the seeds of the pomegranate. The daughter has escaped the closeness of her mother’s presence in order to discover herself. Here, LaRocca uses the motif of the pomegranate to, perhaps, echo Miss Vecoli’s conflict—she has escaped her mother’s presence, only to be subsumed again, and via a chance discovery among her mother’s things, she becomes forever caught in the tailspin of her mother’s unknown fate.
I read this story in the midst of caring for my elderly father, and it helped me to navigate the alien landscape of my emotions leading up to and following his sudden death in April this year. Even though the narrative and characters are horrifying, it was validating to know that these relationships do exist, and these feelings of conflict, entrapment, relief, and disenfranchised grief can be real, given the circumstances. My father was never actively unpleasant, but he was also never actively present. I get a little hollow when I hear people speak of bear hugs from their dads, of fathers who were confidants, of parents who knew them. I wonder if the way I felt when it came time to care for him and when he passed was reflective of my place in his life, and I’m sometimes confounded by my moments of intense sorrow: why am I mourning so deeply?
The story normalises some of the truths in caring for an aging parent who wasn’t the idealised version of a father or mother, and depicts with honesty the turmoil that comes after the loss of someone with whom you had a strained or distant relationship. I’ve written and spoken about the expectations from society and family laid at the feet of Asian daughters. We are expected to place our worth in service to others. So to read a story where a character runs the gamut of resentment and anger at being drawn back into a caregiving role, and then their brief moment of relief when that role is gone, to the dreadful, dreadful weight of guilt and regret at what they have done and what they wished for, right through to the tsunami of grief that follows is incredibly resonant and strangely comforting. “I’ll Be Gone By Then” allows that child-parent relationships and bereavement are messy and complicated and have sharp edges. Sometimes, you come away from them damaged, but it helps to know that your scars are real and valid.
“I’ll Be Gone By Then” is reprinted in The Best Horror of the Year, Vol. 14, edited by Ellen Datlow, and deservedly so. The story has all the hallmarks of LaRocca’s razored ability to explore human bonds in all their complexity and grotesquery: there is brokenness, wounding, and hate…but also love.
Geneve Flynn is a multi-award-winning editor, author, and poet. Co-editor of Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women and collaborator for Tortured Willows: Bent, Bowed, Unbroken; winner of two Bram Stoker Awards, a Shirley Jackson Award, an Aurealis Award, a Brave New Weird Award and a 2022 Queensland Writers Fellowship. Read more at www.geneveflynn.com.au.
