My Mother's Ghost

A luminous memoir of how the author's involvement in his mother's accidental death reshaped the emotional landscape of his childhood and adult life.In 1962 at the age of fourteen Fergus Bordewich's life was shattered as his mother attempted to jump off a runaway horse and fell calamitously under the galloping hooves of the horse Fergus was riding. Crouching beside her in a gathering pool of blood he convinced himself that she would be fine. But an hour later in the hospital waiting room he and his father listened in shock as the doctor told them that she had been dead on arrival. At that moment he thought to himself I've killed my mother.. So begins My Mother's Ghost veteran reporter Fergus Bordewich's anguished attempt to come to terms with the emotional chaos his life was thrown into with his mother's death. For all practical purposes Fergus's childhood was over. His mother a fierce fireball of a woman had been the dominant figure not just in his family but as the executive director of the Association on American Indian Affairs a galvanizing force in national politics behind Native American activism and tribal rights. She was a woman who traveled the country meeting with tribal chiefs and regularly dined with senators and congressmen. And Fergus had been the son she doted on. In the aftermath of her death his father slipped further into alcoholism and silence. In the decade that followed Fergus would follow his father into a life of despair and drink. By the age of twenty-seven he was close to suicide.. A devastating and beautifully written account of Bordewich's attempt to make peace with his mother's death and rediscover her place in his heart My Mother's Ghost is a poignant and heartrending memoir that like Angela's Ashes is neither easily put down nor readily forgotten.