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)