In January 2015 my mother was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Despite surgery and months of chemo, by June her cancer had spread and there was a sense among the family that she didn’t have much time left. I took a couple of weeks off from my job in Boston and flew to Montenegro to be with her, Dad, and my sister. “My cervix has become polluted beyond repair,” she said, after we sat down in our family home in the coastal town of Budva. The prognosis was dire, but as always, she was defiant and bent on "pulverizing the little fucker.” That went against her doctor's advice that more chemo would not be very useful at this point. My dad and I shared her doctor's skepticism. My sister and I joined my dad for the difficult conversation with my mother. It was futile, we told her, to spend more effort on this, and that the best we could do at this stage was to spend as much time together as possible, as a family. “Oh, my lovely idiots. Not one of you gets it,” she said.
My relationship with my mother was always close, but in a weird kind of way. I always cringed when she offered unsolicited advice on matters of sex. “Relax, son, and always do go for more sex, diversified sex. Do it without regret.” She wondered why I’d turned out so anxious, awkward, and painfully self-conscious. Every summer I visited her in Montenegro, she’d probe for answers, clues about my sex life, partners, America, a country she disliked, dismissing its social culture as “too stiff and priggish that had one good decade: the 60s.”
Talk of sex was always a loose subject in our home. It permeated childhood, my thoughts and dreams. In their youth in the 1970s, my parents had come to embrace that alternative lifestyle that was still reverberating after the previous decade’s revolution when the two had met. Mother adapted Philip Larkin’s Annus Mirabilis poem to refit her own circumstances of sexual life: Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-five / (which was rather early for me) / Between the end of childhood / and Mr. Big’s Long P by the sea.
As a young couple my parents lived for a time in Paris and attended swingers’ parties. At one of those mysterious gatherings, my mom had met the French folk singer Jean Ferret, who, many years later, would remember my mother as a “Yugoslavian Cleopatra.”
Mother had always hated traditional marriages. Countless times she was quoted for her famous remark that “monogamy is a prison that free people voluntarily check themselves in for the duration of their lives.” And “can anything be more depressing and boring in life than fucking the same person over and over again, for decades?”
In later years, my parents settled in Budva, and my mother toned down her rhetoric. The social environment was now more conservative, and the fire inside her had dimmed. Her youth and her powers of acting behind her, she drank and smoked and painted. Though her acting career had been widely praised, her life came to be seen as too scandal prone. She’d had too many affairs, pissed off many powerful people, insulted church and religion, charged Pope John Paul II with secret gayness, and got tangled in political intrigue that forced high-level funksionaries to resign in disgrace.
About a week after I arrived in Budva, in the early hours of July 7, my birthday, Mother locked herself in her private room with a view of the blue Adriatic waters. She stuck the muzzle of an old Mauser .22 caliber into her vagina and with the help of a two-pronged stick she pressed the trigger, pulverizing the little fucker inside her polluted womb, her bladder, and most of the surrounding organs, which had also been seared and burned by the gasses and combustion inside her. The bullet had perforated her back between the shoulder blades at a difficult angle, which showed she'd strained herself for maximum impact.
I refused to go to see the scene of carnage, which Dad described to me later with a headshake. She was buried two days later in the town’s hilly cemetery, the scene where hero Eva—a character my mother had played in The Wretched Hour—rises from the dead and returns to hunt down and kill her many lovers. The news of my mother’s death spread just as fast as gossip of her affairs used to. “Famous Actress Maria Lompar Commits Suicide,” ran the headline on the front page of the respected daily, The Adriatik. “Queen of Theater Maria Lompar Shoots Herself in Vagina,” reported one of the tabloids. But of all the outlets, no publication was louder than The Scooper, an offensive online outfit with a mission to “report leftover news.” “Nation Mourns Lompar's Famous Pussy, Which Fell Heroically on Saturday in the Most Bizarre Encounter of Queen’s Life,” read the banner above “The Staff '' byline on their website. The article went on to further vulgarize her death by suggesting that all the scandals over the years and even this final act could be blamed on her vagina, which they called “the emperor of all maladies.”
Our family, still paralyzed while processing mother’s death, were furious. Viktor, my closest cousin and always the short-fused one, used his real name in the “contact us" form on The Scooper’s website, and wrote them a nasty death threat that left little room for doubt it was written by a deranged psychopath. He would kill the authors and then rape their corpses, he said. Dad, who was numbed with grief and could barely put a coherent sentence together, mumbled something about this “latrine of insults.” Vera, my aunt, who always thought of herself as smart and composed, volunteered to call a few funksionaries in the government and ask them to “do something and punish those fucking animals who wrote the insults.”
I sat there feeling drained, observing how the article about mother went viral, resurfacing on different sites and circulating on social media. I wondered why she hadn’t blown her brains out or hanged herself. What was this business of the rifle in the vagina? Her “polluted womb”? Was she really that ridiculously serious about “pulverizing the cancer" by sticking the muzzle inside her? And why this grotesque act, exactly on my birthday? I began to suspect I had something to do with it.
