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Zusatztext “Beautifully written…. A fascinating portrait of an engagingly complex and admirable woman.”– Los Angeles Times “Vivid. . . . A moving account of Bordewich’s quest to come to terms with his mother’s death. . . . A poignant tribute to a remarkable woman.” --Bookpage “A moving account of love! guilt! death! and finally! and exoneration with consequences. An important book.” --James Welch! author of Heartsong of Charging Elk “This is so straightforward! without pretension! so full of quiet intelligence and discernment–compassion too.” John Bayley! author of Elegy for Iris Informationen zum Autor Fergus M. Bordewich Klappentext LaVerne Madigan led an extraordinary life. In an era when few women even worked outside the home, La Verne was the executive director of the only major national rights advocacy group for American Indians at the time. Brilliant, beautiful, stylish, and independent, she worked tirelessly for what she believed in and inspired those who knew her. Perhaps no one as much as her young son, Fergus Bordewich. One morning when Fergus was fourteen, he and his mother went riding, which they did often. It was the last time he saw her alive. Attempting to jump from her runaway horse, LaVerne fell under the hooves of her son's mount and was killed. Fergus was left with the belief that he was responsible. More than thirty years later and after a lifetime of guilt and self-punishment, the son returned to his mother's life. My Mother's Ghost is the story of a brilliant woman cut down in her prime and of a haunted man who confronted the source of his pain, uncovered startling truths, and reclaimed his own life along with that of his mother.We got off to a bad start that summer, the summer of my fourteenth year. Even now, remembering what happened is like watching a continuous film strip that turns back upon itself and is always the same, always curiously comforting in its familiarity, except for its last catastrophic scene, which changed everything. In 1962 it was a ten-hour drive to the lake from our home in Yonkers, just north of New York City. We had only been on the road a couple of hours when my mother's Buick began to overheat. She let the engine cool off and then started up again and drove for a while before the same thing happened again. Not one to give in easily, least of all to a machine, she toughed it out as long as she could, until we could all see that we weren't going to make it all the way to northern Vermont like that. By the middle of the afternoon she was so snappish that even Maddy, my grandmother, fell silent and the two dogs crouched on the floor of the back seat with their snouts in their paws. Finally she stopped at a repair shop somewhere on Route 22. When the mechanic came out from under the hood, he said it was the thermostat and that he'd have to get a new one from somewhere too far away to put it in that day. When my mother protested, he said that she could go ahead and burn out the engine if she wanted, he didn't care, or we could stay the night in the motel across the road. Not that I blamed my mother. She hadn't counted on driving all the way herself. As I watched her pacing the concrete apron in front of the garage and lighting Winstons one after the other, sucking hard on them, ignoring the No Smoking signs posted all around, I felt only sympathy. She didn't know how to be helpless and couldn't bear it at all. If I blamed anyone, it was my father, who always drove us to Vermont. He was supposed to join us at the lake in a week. The company he worked for, which had hired him just a few months before and where he planned heating systems for housing developments and plants, had asked him to stay on an extra week. I still couldn't forgive him, even though I knew that he hadn't been free to refuse. I stared furiously over the panorama of hills as green and neat as ones in a kid'...
