the mother who can't hear the question about her son · S1
Except what if it's that they're almost like even more themselves than normal? Than they were before? If it's not that he's blank or dead. If he's himself even more than before a sad thing happened. What if that happens and you still think he's sad, inside, somewhere?
Context
Mario asks the truest question anyone in the book asks about Hal — whether a person can be sad while seeming more himself than ever — and Avril, fluent, kind, armed with a whole clinical taxonomy of sadness, simply cannot receive it; she guesses at candidates and offers vocabulary Mario has to beg her to simplify, but the actual thing he's describing slides right past her. The mother who narrates other people's frozen fathers can't parse the frozen son in her own house, and the scene's quiet horror is that the failure isn't coldness — it's that her eloquence has nowhere to put a question shaped like the truth. [sweep · shared-ground depression-anhedonia family-hamlet]