We recently published Catherine Swanner’s heartrending “What I Find in My Mother’s House After She Dies.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I love the switch here, from the found items to what they mean — not just to the narrator and their brother, but to the late mother as well. Do you think she held onto his sketches out of a sense of regret? Or did she never really realize what she had done?
I suspect she did realize, but never found the words to make amends. The house is full of items and papers, but they’re silent and blank. 

2) And the mother’s decision not to tell her son of his father’s illness! Clearly her intentions were good (perhaps they were good?), but what of burdening her other child with this responsibility? What were her intentions there?
I imagine she wanted to protect his childhood, that she wanted to preserve for him this idealized, romantic space of “summer camp.” And perhaps the idea that he’s safely at camp and has no idea that this is happening brought her comfort—like as long as he doesn’t know, it’s not really real. But she loses him instead. That summer lives on in the brother’s memory as a time when he was denied the respect of being trusted to handle difficult information, and camp the place where he was kept in the dark while this crisis unfolded back home. 
While I think the mother realized the impact of her actions on her son, I don’t think the mother ever realized or intended their impact on the narrator. I think the mother just thought the narrator was older, more mature, better at writing. It’s so interesting now that you point it out—how she tries to preserve her son’s innocence by pressing her daughter into a world of adult grief.