ALL OF US TOGETHER IN THE END

A writer navigates the challenging first year of the pandemic in addition to the grief caused by the death of his mother.

In January 2020, as the Covid-19 virus was just arriving in the U.S., Vollmer, a professor of English and author of two books of short stories and two essay collections, was mourning the loss of his mother, who had died three months earlier due to complications related to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. He was also becoming increasingly obsessed with the mysterious lights his father saw flickering in the woods almost nightly at their family home in the mountains of western North Carolina. Vollmer wondered if the lights were a sign that his mother was trying to communicate with them from beyond the grave. His father, a staunch Seventh-day Adventist, refused to believe in the possibility of ghostly presences, but he grew increasingly unsettled by the lights, to the point that several of his friends and colleagues called his son, concerned about his mental state. By May 2020, his father had reconnected with Jolene, a woman he knew in college now living in Guam. At that time, the lights stopped appearing. Two months later, Jolene was in the U.S., and the two immediately married. Much of the book revolves around the author's swirling memories of the past, particularly of his dynamic and loving mother before her decline. Those memories are entangled with his ambivalent relationship with the strict religion in which he was raised as well as with his mother's concerns that his abandonment of Adventism would risk the possibility that his family could reunite “all of us together in the end” in the afterlife. Raising more questions than he answers, Vollmer nevertheless delicately portrays his “unmoored” state of mind and its evolving connection to radical changes to his family and the world.

A tender and touching, if inconclusive, tribute to family bonds.