‘We must keep back the desk?’
‘No,’ said Maman. ‘Death.’ Stressing the word death very strongly. She added, ‘I don’t want to die.’
‘But you are better now!’
After that she wandered a little. ‘I should have liked to have the time to bring out my book … She must be allowed to nurse whoever she likes.’
My sister dressed herself: Maman had almost lost consciousness. Suddenly she cried, ‘I can’t breathe!’ Her mouth opened, her eyes stared wide, huge in that wasted, ravaged face: with a spasm she entered into coma.
‘Go and telephone,’ said Mademoiselle Cournot.
Poupette rang me up: I did not answer. The operator went on ringing for half an hour before I woke. Meanwhile Poupette went back to Maman: already she was no longer there – her heart was beating and she breathed, sitting there with glassy eyes that saw nothing. And then it was over. ‘The doctors said she would go out like a candle: it wasn’t like that, it wasn’t like that at all,’ said my sister, sobbing.
‘But, Madame,’ replied the nurse, ‘I assure you it was a very easy death.’
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MAMAN had dreaded cancer all her life, and perhaps she was still afraid of it at the nursing-home, when they X-rayed her. After the operation she never thought of it for a single moment. There were some days when she was afraid that at her age, the shock might have been too great for her to survive it. But doubt never even touched her mind: she had been operated on for peritonitis – a grave condition, but curable.
What surprised us even more was that she never asked for a priest, not even on the day when she was so reduced and she said, ‘I shall not see Simone again!’ Marthe had brought her a missal, a crucifix and a rosary: she did not take them out of her drawer. One morning Jeanne said, ‘It’s Sunday today, Aunt Françoise: wouldn’t you like to take Communion?’ ‘Oh, my dear, I am too tired to pray: God is kind!’ Madame Tardieu asked her more pressingly, when Poupette was there, whether she would not like to see her confessor: Maman’s expression hardened – ‘Too tired,’ and she closed her eyes to put an end to the conversation. After the visit of another old friend she said to Jeanne, ‘Poor dear Louise, she asks me such foolish questions: she wanted to know whether there was a chaplain in the nursing-home. Much I care whether there is or not!’
Madame de Saint-Ange harried us. ‘Since she is in such a state of anxiety, she must surely want the comforts of religion.’
‘But she doesn’t.’
‘She made me and some other friends promise to help her make a good end.’
‘What she wants just now is to be helped to make a good recovery.’
We were blamed. To be sure we did not prevent Maman from receiving the last sacraments; but we did not oblige her to take them. We ought to have told her, ‘You have cancer. You are going to die.’ Some devout women would have done so, I am sure, if we had left them alone with her. (In their place I should have been afraid of provoking the sin of rebellion in Maman, which would have earned her centuries of purgatory.) Maman did not want these intimate conversations. What she wanted to see round her bed was young smiling faces. ‘I shall have plenty of time to see other old women like me when I am in a rest-home,’ she said to her grandnieces. She felt herself safe with Jeanne, Marthe and two or three religious but understanding friends who approved of our deception. She mistrusted the others and she spoke of some of them with a certain amount of ill-feeling – it was as though a surprising instinct enabled her to detect those people whose presence might disturb her peace of mind. ‘As for those women at the club, I shall not go to see them again. I shall not go back there.’
People may think, ‘Her faith was only on the surface, a matter of words, since it did not hold out in the face of suffering and death.’ I do not know what faith is. But her whole life turned upon religion; religion was its very substance: papers that we found in her desk confirm this. If she had looked upon prayer as nothing but a mechanical droning, telling her beads would not have tired her any more than doing the crossword. The fact that she did not pray convinces me that on the contrary she found it an exercise that called for concentration, thought and a certain condition of soul. She knew what she ought to have said to God – ‘Heal me. But Thy will be done: I acquiesce in death.’ She did not acquiesce. In this moment of truth she did not choose to utter insincere words. But at the same time she did not grant herself the right to rebel. She remained silent: ‘God is kind.’
‘I can’t understand,’ said the bewildered Mademoiselle Vauthier. ‘Your mother is so religious and so pious, and yet she is so afraid of death!’ Did she not know that saints have died convulsed and shrieking? Besides, Maman was not afraid of either God or the Deviclass="underline" only of leaving this earth. My grandmother had known perfectly well that she was dying. Contentedly she said, ‘I am going to eat one last little boiled egg, and then I am going to join Gustave again.’ She had never put much passion into living; at eighty-four she was gloomily vegetating; dying did not disturb or vex her. My father showed no less courage. ‘Ask your mother not to get a priest to come,’ he said to me, ‘I don’t want to act a part.’ And he gave instructions on certain practical matters. Ruined, embittered, he accepted the void with the same serenity that Grandmama accepted Paradise. Maman loved life as I love it and in the face of death she had the same feeling of rebellion that I have. During her last days I received many letters with remarks on my most recent book: ‘If you had not lost your faith death would not terrify you so,’ wrote the devout, with rancorous commiseration. Well-intentioned readers urged, ‘Disappearing is not of the least importance: your works will remain.’ And inwardly I told them all that they were wrong. Religion could do no more for my mother than the hope of posthumous success could do for me. Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death.
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WHAT WOULD have happened if Maman’s doctor had detected the cancer as early as the first symptoms? No doubt it would have been treated with rays and Maman would have lived two or three years longer. But she would have known or at least suspected the nature of her disease, and she would have passed the end of her life in a state of dread. What we bitterly regretted was that the doctor’s mistake had deceived us; otherwise Maman’s happiness would have become our chief concern. The difficulties that prevented Jeanne and Poupette from having her in the summer would not have counted. I should have seen more of her: I should have invented things to please her.
And is one to be sorry that the doctors brought her back to life and operated, or not? She, who did not want to lose a single day, ‘won’ thirty: they brought her joys; but they also brought her anxiety and suffering. Since she did escape from the martyrdom that I sometimes thought was hanging over her, I cannot decide for her. For my sister, losing Maman the very day she saw her again would have been a shock from which she would scarcely have recovered. And as for me? Those four weeks have left me pictures, nightmares, sadnesses that I should never have known if Maman had died that Wednesday morning. But I cannot measure the disturbance that I should have felt since my sorrow broke out in a way that I had not foreseen. We did derive an undoubted good from this respite: it saved us, or almost saved us, from remorse. 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. With regard to Maman we were above all guilty, these last years, of carelessness, omission and abstention. We felt that we atoned for this by the days that we gave up to her, by the peace that our being there gave her, and by the victories gained over fear and pain. Without our obstinate watchfulness she would have suffered far more.