Motherhood Quote by Dave Eggers

A line like this lands with the blunt force of a medical bill: clinical, transactional, and grotesquely intimate. Eggers gives you no metaphor, no cushioning. “They” is doing the dark work here. It’s not just surgeons in an operating room; it’s the whole impersonal apparatus that can enter your family’s body and life, alter it permanently, then move on. The pronoun turns an individual catastrophe into a system event, which is exactly the kind of uneasy moral pressure Eggers likes to apply.

The phrase “my mother’s stomach” is also deliberately wrong-footing. People don’t casually talk about “taking out” a stomach unless they’re forced into the language of procedures, pathology reports, and survival odds. That awkward specificity sounds like someone trying to regain control by being precise, because the experience itself is uncontrollable. The result is a kind of anti-sentimentality: it’s grief refusing to perform nicely.

“Six months ago” matters as much as the surgery. It marks time the way trauma does - not as a past event, but as a timestamp that keeps updating. Half a year is long enough for shock to congeal into a new normal, short enough that the wound is still narratively fresh. In Eggers’ broader context - work often threaded with family illness, abrupt loss, and the bureaucratic weirdness of catastrophe - the intent isn’t to solicit pity. It’s to show how quickly the unthinkable becomes reportable, even speakable, and how that very speakability can feel like another kind of violence.