Exhumations of missing persons in Cyprus

Abstract

In his short story “Conversation with Mother,” Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello returns to Agrigento following his mother’s death. In an imaginary conversation with his mother, she tells him that she feels sorry for him. He assumes this is because of his pain at losing her. She says no. She feels sorrow for him because when she was alive he also existed, as a representation for her. We exist “in other people” as much as “in ourselves.” Now that she is dead, her representation of him has been erased, and his personhood is diminished through that loss. When people dear to us die, we lose not just them but our existence in them, which “made” us individuals, with our social identities that were in their (temporary) safekeeping. Although we can get over the loss of loved ones, because we live in others their death diminishes our “identity” in a fundamental and nonrecuperative way that we do not normally perceive.