De Beauvoir beautifully balances her feeling of emotional detachment and an ever present connection to her late mother. Even before her passing we see how she has already come to terms with her mother’s inevitable death.

“It is useless to try to integrate life and death and to behave rationally in the presence of something that is not rational: each must manage as well as he can in the tumult of his feelings. I can understand all last wishes and the total absence of them: the hugging of the bones or the abandonment of the body of the one you love to the common grave.”