My Mother's Ghost

My Mother's Ghost by Bordewich, Fergus M.. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780385491297.

A luminous memoir of how the authors involvement in his mothers accidental death reshaped the emotional landscape of his childhood and adult life. In 1962, at the age of fourteen, Fergus Bordewichs 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, Ive killed my mother. So begins My Mothers Ghost, veteran reporter Fergus Bordewichs anguished attempt to come to terms with the emotional chaos his life was thrown into with his mothers death. For all practical purposes, Ferguss 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 Bordewichs attempt to make peace with his mothers death and rediscover her place in his heart, My Mothers Ghost is a poignant and heartrending memoir that, like Angelas Ashes, is neither easily put down nor readily forgotten.