Rugo's Mother

"Terminal Quest." 

Rugo's long dead mother:

"...must have remembered him and been sorry she left, for lately she often came back at night." (p. 2)

When he is dying:

"He wondered if his mother would come for him." (p. 28)

Thus, she:

has not died but left;

returns at night;

might come for him when he dies.

Therefore, Rugo is at the earliest stage of religious experience and belief. It seemed to our ancestors to be a matter of experience that, when our body is unconscious, we leave it and enter another realm where we can meet, i.e., dream about, the dead. Therefore, they have entered that other realm permanently at their deaths and we will at ours.

Our ancestors projected destinations for the dead:

an underworld that was merely the absence of life;

later, a continuation of Earthly social divisions, e.g., warriors to Valhalla, others to Hel (not Hell);

later still, a social reversal with the just poor rewarded and the wicked rich punished;

as an alternative to all of that, reincarnation.

Another view was that the dead would be immortalized not as immaterial souls but as resurrected bodies. 

Christianity, the ultimate religious synthesis, has both: an eternal fate for an immortal soul immediately after death but also an eternal fate after an eventual bodily resurrection to be followed by a Judgement.

Rugo is still at the earliest stage where dreams and the hereafter are identical.

Tomorrow we visit Andrea who lives above the Old Pier Bookshop and who usually says something quotable - if not always repeatable.