4 ideas
Aleksy, now an adult painter, writes at his psychiatrist's urging about the summer he was a teenager, when he went with his terminally ill mother to a French village. He began that summer despising her, partly because he blamed her for the family's collapse after his younger sister Mika died. Through months of living beside her decline, he came to love her, and the love fully arrived only as she was dying.
A child's hatred of a parent is not the absence of love but one of its forms. The intensity of the contempt measures how much the child needed from the parent and did not get. That is why forced proximity can turn hatred into love so quickly: the attachment was already there, and only its sign changes.
When a family loses a child, the parents' mourning can make the living sibling feel secondary or invisible. The survivor then turns grief into anger at the parent, because blame is easier to hold than abandonment. That anger hardens into identity and damages the relationship long after the original loss.
The story is told years later by the grown son, so every scene carries two layers: the cruelty he felt then and the regret he feels now. Reading it this way shows memory-writing working as a form of therapy. The narrator cannot change what he did, so he re-witnesses it honestly, and the act of telling becomes the apology the mother never received.