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Chapter 39
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Transcendent Kingdom, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Science and Religion
Self-Discovery, Identity, and Individuality
Addiction, Depression, and Control
Trauma, Caretaking, and Intimacy
Summary
Analysis
Gifty considers her mother in bed at 68 and remembers her mother in bed at 52. There are differences in the images, although they are subtle. And she feels just as out of her depth now, at 28, as she did then, at 11.
For Gifty, her mother’s second depression is more similar than different to her first. Even though she’s now truly an adult—not just a child taking on adult roles and responsibilities—she still feels completely out of her depth. This new depression is forcing Gifty to relive her childhood trauma. There isn’t much that Gifty can do to care for her mother during her depression other than keep her fed, warm, and safe, and keep an eye open for suicidal ideation. Although she’s doing all of those things, her mother’s emotional vacancy means that Gifty still feels incapable, even though she’s doing the right things.
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Ambien is in a class of drugs called hypnotics, and when her mother fell into her depression, at first Gifty thought that her mother had been hypnotized. One morning, she couldn’t rouse her mother. She considered skipping school but went anyway since it gave her time to figure out what to do. When the librarian asked her if she was okay, Gifty lied, although the librarian was the person most likely to have cared or tried to help. The moment she said, “I’m fine,” Gifty knew that she was going to take care of her mother alone.
For Gifty as a child, her mother’s depression is deeply alarming in part because of the way it mimics Nana’s addiction, at least superficially. Both Nana and Gifty’s mother are rendered sleepy and unrousable by drugs. But where Gifty force-fed Nana coffee, she abandons her mother to her sleep and goes to school, trying to buy more time to figure out what to do. In both cases however, Gifty allows her caretaking responsibilities to force her into an adult role. She learned to keep family secrets secret when Nana’s addiction cost her friendships, so she doesn’t ask any adults for help now.
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Katherine starts dropping off homemade foods—cookies, pies, bread—at Gifty’s office. Gifty realizes that she’s not ready to need or accept help, really, but she enjoys the foods, and sometimes her mother will eat a little, too. Because the baked goods are beautifully made and presented, Gifty imagines Katherine running a one-woman bakery called “Kathy’s Cakes.”
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The first week that her mother was in bed, Gifty rushed home after school each day. She would find the sandwiches she’d made uneaten, and she would wash the dishes. She deep cleaned the house, imagining her life clearing up in the process. Being emotionally alone with grief and guilt was awful. She left the TV on, hoping her mother would yell at her for wasting electricity.
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One day, Han stops by Gifty’s office after Katherine dropped off a strawberry cake. He offers to get her something from the coffee shop, but Gifty tells him she’s going home soon to share the cake with her mother. She imagines a normal afternoon, sitting on the balcony sharing food. At home, Gifty brings her mother a slice of cake and begins to read to her the words of the Lazarus story from the Gospel of John.
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As a child, Gifty thought this story was too miraculous. She believed that Jesus could do it, but she didn’t understand why. What made Lazarus so special? She was fascinated by him and wanted to know more: how he lived afterwards, what it felt like to have received this gift from God. She realizes how easy this is to psychologize, in the context of her life.
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In college, Gifty read a philosophical examination of neuroscience that claimed that neuroscience can’t replace psychological explanations for behavior; the brain “make[s] it possible for us—not for it—to perceive and think.” Her TA gave her the book to read because she wanted to know what accounts for reason and emotion if the brain can’t. Is it the soul? Her Christian upbringing had primed her to believe in the mystery of human existence, but she was frustrated that the mystery seemed to get farther away the more she tried to uncover it.
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Gifty remembers Anne asking if she believed in evolution. Their friendship was full of arguments and wouldn’t last, but Gifty felt that Anne truly knew her and truly saw her in a way that no one, not even her mother, could. Anne argued that creationism and evolution were “diametrically opposed,” and Gifty answered with the words of her high school teacher that people are made of stardust, but God made the stars.
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Why Jesus would resurrect Lazarus is a mystery, but so is why some mice stop pressing the lever and others don’t. Gifty stopped believing in extravagant miracles after Nana’s death, but she still hoped for smaller ones, like her mother getting up. She created and clung to a routine with her mother, so she felt as if her efforts had been rewarded the day she came home to find the bed empty. Like Jesus she’d willed her mother, in the words of the Biblical text, to “come forth.” Gifty called Pastor John, who called an ambulance. As Gifty’s mother was lifted onto a stretcher, she apologized for not letting the Chin Chin Man take Nana with him to Ghana.
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