A Very Easy Death

“Death itself does not frighten me; it is the jump I am afraid of.” 

Despite her ignorance of her terminal diagnosis, Françoise mentions death frequently during the six weeks she spends in the geriatric clinic. This raises the question of whether she suspects that she’s dying or whether her age, injury, and sickness just conjure death to mind. And, as she states here, what she is truly afraid of is not the void or the afterlife, it’s relinquishing life—the transition between life and death. She fears this transition because she loves life but has spent most of it in misery.

“Her vitality filled me with wonder, and I respected her courage. Why, as soon as she could speak again, did she utter words that froze me?”

The transformation of Françoise in Simone’s eyes has begun, but she still retains a dual aspect: both a brave woman facing death and the detestable figure disparaging the working-class patients in the public hospital in which she endured a night. At this point Françoise retains her old prejudices but as she deteriorates, they disappear from the narrative, either because she loses them or because Simone is no longer bothered by them.

“‘You are perfectly right not to have any,’ I said. But I turned away and gazed fixedly into the garden. The sight of my mother’s nakedness had jarred me. No body existed less for me: none existed more.”

In a role reversal Simone finds herself the one feeling shame instead of her mother, who is more typically motivated by social mores. In the clinic Françoise quickly relinquishes any shame or propriety she has about the nurses manipulating her naked body. In contrast, Simone is disturbed not just by her mother’s nakedness but by the fact that her mother doesn’t mind it. This pronounced change in Françoise disrupts Simone’s fixed image of her as a decorous woman.

“Her death, like her birth, had its place in some legendary time. When I said to myself ‘She is of an age to die’ the words were devoid of meaning, as so many words are. For the first time I saw her as a dead body under suspended sentence.”

Seeing her mother’s frail, defenseless body in the clinic makes her death real and consequential to Simone; it no longer exists as an abstraction in the “legendary time” in which the child so often sees the parent. The stark reality of Françoise’s death renders this cliché meaningless because it cannot lessen the suffering of death or the grief of bereavement.

“Cancer. It was all about us. Indeed, it was patently obvious—those ringed eyes, that thinness. But her doctor had ruled out that hypothesis.”

This quote highlights how much uncertainty Simone and her sister Hélène face as a result of the doctors not being omniscient, as they often act like they are. Simone is disturbed to realize that she didn’t notice something so obvious, but more than that she feels betrayed by the doctor and dismayed that she trusted him when usually she is careful to blindly accept the opinions of authorities.

“‘But what’s the good of tormenting her, if she is dying? Let her die in peace,’ said Poupette, in tears.”

Simone’s sister Hélène (Poupette) encapsulates the absurdity of trying to extend a dying person’s life. It’s not that such life-extension shouldn’t be an option, but that there should also be the option to grant the terminally ill a peaceful death. Hélène makes as good a case any in the memoir for the availability of euthanasia. However, euthanasia conflicts with the duty the doctors feel they have to keep the patient alive for as long as possible, resulting in a stalemate that leaves Simone and Hélène no choice but to watch their mother’s suffering prolonged.

“And he told me that my own mouth was not obeying me any more: I had put Maman’s mouth on my own face and in spite of myself, I copied its movements. Her whole person, her whole being, was concentrated there, and compassion wrung my heart.”

Simone comes to literally embody her mother, unconsciously mimicking her expressions with her own mouth. This is a personification of the reconciliation occurring: Once wanting nothing to do with her mother, Simone finds herself sharing the same expressions, the same emotions of loneliness, hope, and distress as her mother. It is also a reminder of the mortality of humans, and the aging process and death which must be Simone’s future too.

“One had to listen very intently to catch the words that she laboured to breathe out; words whose mystery made them as disturbing as those of an oracle. Her memories, her desires, her anxieties were floating somewhere outside time, turned into unreal and poignant dreams by her childlike voice and the imminence of her death.”

As she deteriorates physically, Françoise lives more and more in her mind. This journey into her own reality isn’t psychosis but a revisitation of her life, as is clear in her reversion to her childhood voice. This transformation illustrates Beauvoir’s sentiment that all people die alone. Not only that, people die reflecting on their lives, on what they have accomplished, and what they have not achieved.

“‘Yes,’ she replied. And with a frown and a look of determination on her face she said, as though she were uttering a challenge, ‘The dead certainly do it in their beds.’”

Françoise again shocks Beauvoir with a breach of her usual propriety, in this case resolving to defecate in her bed because it’s too painful to sit on the bedpan. Instead of suffering such things as humiliations, Françoise tackles them under her own volition, taking charge of herself. Her mention of death again suggests that on some level she’s aware that she’s dying even though she remains ignorant of her terminal diagnosis.

“‘Since it is good for me.’ In order to get well. In order to die. I should have liked to beg someone to forgive me.”

Simone’s anguish over her lie to her mother results from the absurdity of the situation: Thinking they will heal her, Françoise determinedly bears the doctors’ treatments. Simone could spare her mother the absurdity of her situation, but doing so would risk poisoning her final days with dread. This dilemma tortures Simone for the six weeks she spends beside her dying mother who doesn’t know that she’s dying.

“Maman laughed and said, ‘I always say to my grandnieces, “My dears, make the most of your life.”’ ‘Now I understand why they love you so much. But you would never have said that to your daughters?’ ‘To my daughters?’ said Maman, with sudden severity. ‘Certainly not!’”

Sometimes a bad mother can make a good grandmother. Françoise has enough distance from her grandchildren to not have her own sense of self-worth invested in their lives, as she did with her daughters. She retains this double standard for daughters even now that they are adults caring for her in her old age, showing just how entrenched her strictness toward them is.

And that evening too, as I looked at her arm, into which there was flowing a life that was no longer anything but sickness and torment, I asked myself why?”

Beauvoir juxtaposes the IV infusion—a symbol of waxing health, of life—with her knowledge of the futility of this measure, conjuring an image that encapsulates the absurdity of extending the life of someone with a terminal illness when their life has become nothing but suffering.

 “A race had begun between death and torture. I asked myself how one manages to go on living when someone you love has called out to you ‘Have pity on me’ in vain.”

The motif of this race defines Françoise’s predicament in the medical system. Not only does the system deny the option of euthanasia to such patients, it bullies patients and their families into approving life-extending treatments (a fact made clear by the doctors’ use of Simone to convince her mother to consent to the operation without understanding it. Contradicting their vow to do no harm, the doctors exacerbate the suffering of patients and their loved ones.

“And even if death were to win, all this odious deception! Maman thought that we were with her, next to her; but we were already placing ourselves on the far side of her history. An evil all-knowing spirit, I could see behind the scenes, while she was struggling, far, far away, in human loneliness.”

Beauvoir envisions herself as a kind of omniscient power in a world above Françoise’s. This imagery conjures both the claustrophobic bubble of Françoise’s ignorance and the vast, cold expanse of Beauvoir’s knowledge. Simone and her sister aren’t present with Françoise because in choosing to withhold the diagnosis and avoid confronting their mother’s dread they’ve chosen the path that will most ease their suffering the wake of her death. This is what Beauvoir means when she writes that they’re “placing themselves on the far side of her history.”

“Her hands clawed the sheets and she articulated, ‘Live! Live!’”

Françoise literally clings to life, showing how desperate she is not to give it up now that she’s just started living again. Her imperative command to herself also indicates her existential transformation: She doesn’t appeal to God or any other authority outside herself; she invokes her own will, her will to live.

“‘The doctors are very pleased.’ ‘If they are pleased, that’s all that matters.’”

This exchange between Simone and Françoise illustrates the doctors’ hegemony in her care; they come first, the patient second. Françoise accepts this because she’s used to accepting authority but also because the doctors’ pronouncements of her improvement truly raise her hopes.

“These doctors are beginning to irritate me. They are always telling me that I am getting better. And I feel myself getting worse.”

As Françoise’s bodily reality diverges from the doctors’ proclamations, Françoise has the newfound confidence in the validity of her experience to question these paragons of authority, something she wouldn’t have dared to do only weeks prior. In the dialectic between herself and the world, Françoise always gave up her sense of self. In the dialectic with the doctors—them saying one thing, her feeling the opposite—she refuses to give up herself as she once did, instead standing behind the reality of her experience.

“‘Oh, no!’ he said in a half-pitying, half-triumphant tone, ‘she has been revived too well for that!’ So it was to be pain that would win?”

Dr. N. exults in telling Simone that her mother will continue to live—to continue to suffer. His emotion, so incongruous with the situation, is a damning example of the cavalier, self-aggrandizing attitude he has toward Françoise and her care. To Dr. N., Françoise is something on which to demonstrate his expertise, not a person to treat with compassion.

“Scents, furs, lingerie, jewels: the sumptuous arrogance of a world in which death had no place: but it was there, lurking behind this façade, in the grey secrecy of nursing-homes, hospitals, sick-rooms. And for me that was now the only truth.”

As she spends more and more time with her mother at the geriatric clinic, death overtakes Simone’s mind, rendering the world outside the clinic inconsequential, even ridiculous. The world of death that Simone now inhabits reveals the frivolity of these everyday objects of vanity. Normally approving of restrained vanity—once remarking on the “satisfactions of vanity” (44)—Beauvoir can now only see such pursuits as ludicrous.

 “If only it could stop, without any violence.”

This is the prolonged agony of watching a loved one die when euthanasia isn’t an option. This sentiment is so natural, so human, and so compassionate, yet the doctors’ in Françoise’s clinic refuse to consider it. However, Beauvoir also expresses an impossible hope: death is inherently violent, no matter how it happens. This is not so much a physical violence but an existential violence: As Beauvoir writes, death is an “an unjustifiable violation” of life (128).

“‘But, Madame,’ replied the nurse, ‘I assure you it was a very easy death.’ The lies, the falsifications of reality told at every step.”

Recounting Françoise’s death to Simone, Hélène sobs that she didn’t go out like a candle as the doctors said she would. The discrepancy between Hélène and the nurse’s opinions indicates two possibilities: The nurse is lying to assuage Hélène’s grief or that the nurse, having witnessed countless deaths, has a much larger frame of reference than Hélène, for whom Françoise’s death is a singular, terrible event, and is telling the truth. The latter seems more likely because as Beauvoir reflects later, in the grand scheme of things Françoise, comforted by her daughter in a private clinic, did die an easy, bourgeois death.

“Time vanishes behind those who leave this world, and the older I get the more my past years draw together. The ‘Maman darling’ of the days when I was ten can no longer be told from the inimical woman who oppressed my adolescence; I wept for them both when I wept for my old mother. I thought I had made up my mind about our failure and accepted it; but its sadness comes back to my heart.”

Sometime after her mother’s death, Beauvoir reflects on how memory compresses into one figure the different things Françoise was to her over the course of her life, making it impossible not to mourn the tyrant of her adolescence. Françoise’s illness reopened Simone’s feelings for her, feelings that she’d ordered and stored away, accepting the failure of their relationship. In allowing herself to feel sympathy for her mother in sickness, Simone grieves at once the protector of her childhood, the tyrant of her adolescence, the distant figure of her adulthood, and the pitiful elderly woman.

“My mother was awkwardly laced into a spiritualistic ideology; but she had an animal passion for life which was the source of her courage and which, once she was conscious of the weight of her body, brought her towards truth.”

Beauvoir contrasts the spiritual to the physical, the divine human to the human animal. This “animal passion for life” is pure pleasure in the very fact of living, a drive so strong that not even the convent school of Françoise’s youth could extinguish. Beauvoir identifies the body as the foundation of our freedom because its immediacy anchors us to the truth of ourselves. Sickness alerts Françoise to the weight—the undeniable importance—of her self.