Using a variety of sources – photographs, poems, fragments of a diary and family memories
– in his collection of short stories The Mother Departs Tadeusz Różewicz presents a complex portrait
of his mother as a young girl, a caring mother, a mature woman and a dying old woman.
The image of his mother, memorized and documented through a range literary means, emerges
as a version of the myth of Magna Mater. The poet also tries to imagine his mother after death,
whether she is a decomposing corpse under the ground or a spirit in the land of the dead.
The stories can be treated as a literary attempt at dealing with profound grief and going through
mourning. It is not only the grief and mourning of the writer but also of the reader who shares
a similar experience. The memories gathered in the collection The Mother Departs have a therapeutic
signifi cance, they enable liberation from trauma and constitute a frame for an eternal portrait
of the mother. It is art that provides the possibility of preserving something for posterity and of immortalizing
people and their work.