de beauvoir is unflinchingly honest in her intimate account of the last thirty days of her mother's life. we move through the month together— the fall, the surgery, the cancer, the lows of the suffering, and the rare glimpses of light.

i have been involved in this exact scenario in differing roles— as both part of the healthcare team involved in the care of a patient on an end of life pathway, and on the other side as a family member watching someone you love slip away. it isn't pretty. it often isn't gracious. and no death is easy.

de beauvoir brings to light many of the questions and misgivings that arise in these situations— for whose benefit are the interventions that prolong life really for? is an extra month or two worth the suffering? when do you draw the line and let go?

some lines that stood out to me included:

"whether you think of it as heavenly or earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death."

"how completely alone she was! i touched her, i talked to her; but it was impossible to enter into her suffering."

"she dropped off, and her breath was so imperceptible that i thought, 'if only it could stop, without any violence.' but the black ribbon rose and fell: the leap was not to be so easy."

I had grown very fond of this dying woman. (97)

When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets. Her death brings to light her unique quality; she grows as vast as the world that her absence annihilates for her and whose whole existence was caused by her being there; you feel that she should have had more toom in your life - all the room, if need be. You snatch yourself away from this wildness: she was only one among many. But since you never do all you might for anyone - not even wihin the arguable limits that you have set yourself - you have plenty of room left for self-reporach. (121)

I pictured Maman, blinded for hours by teh black sun that no one can look at firectly... (122)

...we are all mortal; at eighty you are quite old enough to be one of the dead ... But it is not true. You do not die from being born, nor from having lived, nor from old age. You die from something. The knowledge that because of her age my mother's life must soon come to an end did not lessen the horrible surprise: she had sarcoma. Cancer, thrombosis, pneumonia: it is as violent and unforseen as an angine stopping in the middle of the sky. My mother encouraged one to be optimistic when, crippled with arthritis and dying, she asserted the infinite value of each instant; but her vain tenaciousness also ripped and tore the reassuring curtains of everyday triviality. There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happpens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation. (136)

“The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her.”

When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets. Her death brings to light her unique quality; she grows as vast as the world that her absence annihilates for her and whose whole existence was caused by her being there; you feel that she should have had more room in your life – all the room, if need be. You snatch yourself away from this wildness: she was only one among many. But since you never do all you might for anyone – not even within the arguable limits that you have set yourself – you have plenty of room left for self-reproach. 

The misfortune is that although everyone must come to this, each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days which she confused with convalescence and yet we were profoundly separated from her. 

"Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death."

"Only this body, suddenly reduced by her capitulation to being a body and nothing more, hardly differed at all from a corpse – a poor defenseless carcass turned and manipulated by professional hands, one in which life seemed to carry on only because of its own stupid momentum. For me, my mother had always been there, and I had never seriously thought that some day, that soon I should see her go. 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."

In deze novelle beschrijft Simone de Beauvoir de dagen die haar moeder eind 1964 doorbracht op haar sterfbed. De ontluistering, de aftakeling, de vernedering, de pijn, de twijfel, de wroeging, alles brengt De Beauvoir in beeld.

Voor de meeste vrouwen is de verhouding tussen moeder en dochter een voortdurende beweging van toenadering en terugdeinzen, schrijft Joke Hermsen als ze in een essay verwijst naar deze novelle van De Beauvoir. In Een zachte dood spreekt De Beauvoir van ‘een beminde en gehate afhankelijkheid’.

Het beminnen en het haten, allebei krijgen ze woorden in deze novelle. Een aangrijpend relaas in kort bestek.

a heart-wrenching recount on her mother's death ): the details she put in her writing to depict her relationship with her mother made me easily feel her emotions. the last few pages, when she starts to show/describe her mourning, was so devastating, but it was written so beautifully.