We recently published Amy DeBellis’s searing “Mercy.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) The grandmother’s lie about how she got her scar is really the crux of this story. She has put a lot of thought and care into this lie, crafted it carefully. Is this lie for her grandchild? Or is it for her?
I think the grandmother crafted the lie, not just for her grandchild, but for the world in general: all of the people she came across after the end of the war who wanted to know what happened to her arm. As we notice, the narrator doesn’t prompt her grandmother to tell her about the scar; the grandmother just goes ahead and does it. To me, this behavior is the result of many decades of fending off odd looks and intrusive questions.
The lie is also, in part, for her. Like any lie, it comes closer and closer to eclipsing the truth (for her) with each telling. It is a way of distancing herself from the truth, but whenever she tells it she must grapple with the new question that arises from it: Did God have mercy on her after all, for allowing her to survive the camp and eventually raise a family across the ocean? Or did God have no mercy on her, for putting her into that situation in the first place? I think this is a question that haunted her for the rest of her life.

2) I love this line: “I believe that my grandmother was beautiful, once, but eventually she wasn’t, and so it was fitting for her to die. Right?” There’s so much anger in it, anger at the narrator’s loss, anger at a world that thinks that way. When would it be fitting to die, in the narrator’s eyes?
In the narrator’s eyes, death is an inevitability: it’s all around her no matter where she turns. To her and to most people, it would be “fitting” to die when you’ve reached an advanced age and lived a full life, as her grandmother did, but the fact of this doesn’t lessen her grief, nor the knowledge of exactly how her grandmother died—as well as all of the losses her grandmother faced in her own life.