This was beautiful, short and yet so quotable, containing so much that I related to, as de Beauvoir recounts her mom's decline and death over a short period of time. Maman was 78 when she died, but as de Beauvoir explains at the end, age might not affect how deeply a loss is felt. Maman "clung ferociously to this world", she "had an animal dread of death"; I could see why David Rieff would exalt this book in his own memoir about his mother's death, seeing as Susan Sontag so desperately clung to life. But Maman was never aware that she was dying — it was interesting to read how de Beauvoir and her sister navigated those types of decisions, how much information to share with the patient herself, and deciding that she couldn't handle the truth. Simone struggles to make meaning of the death of her mom, writing that she "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." But more than that, she relates to her mother's struggle as a human, mourning the loneliness of the process, attempting to find meaning in the process even though her mother will not have remembered it, struggling with "a thousand piercing regrets" after she dies. In the end, de Beauvoir realizes that no person is ready for death, death is always alien to our way of life: "You do not die from being born, nor from having lived, nor from old age. You die from something ... as violent and unforeseen as an engine stopping in the middle of the sky."