The Pole

by J.M. Coetzee

She does not believe in life after death, except in the most metaphorical of senses. When she is dead her children will remember her and reminisce about her, fondly or not so fondly. They might also pick her to pieces with their psychoanalysts (Was she a good mother? Was she a bad mother?). As long as they go on doing so she will enjoy a flickering kind of life. But with the passing of their generation she will be tossed into a dusty archive, there to be shut out from the light of day for ever and ever. Such constitutes her belief, her mature, adult belief; and she does the Pole the credit of accepting that, when he was not absorbed in his music and his poetry, he shared it too—that he did not really believe there would be another life in another world where the two of them would find each other and enjoy the happiness that chance had withheld from them in their first incarnation.