Sometimes, though very rarely, it happens that love, friendship or comradely feeling overcomes the loneliness of death: in spite of appearances, even when I was holding Maman’s hand, I was not with her – I was lying to her. Because she had always been deceived, gulled, I found this ultimate deception revolting. I was making myself an accomplice of that fate which was so misusing her. Yet at the same time in every cell of my body I joined in her refusal, in her rebellion: and it was also because of that that her defeat overwhelmed me. Although I was not with Maman when she died, and although I had been with three people when they were actually dying, it was when I was at her bedside that I saw Death, the Death of the dance of death, with its bantering grin, the Death of fireside tales that knocks on the door, a scythe in its hand, the Death that comes from elsewhere, strange and inhuman: it had the very face of Maman when she showed her gums in a wide smile of unknowingness.
‘He is certainly of an age to die.’ The sadness of the old; their banishment: most of them do not think that this age has yet come for them. I too made use of this cliché, and that when I was referring to my mother. I did not understand that one might sincerely weep for a relative, a grandfather aged seventy and more. If I met a woman of fifty overcome with sadness because she had just lost her mother, I thought her neurotic: 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 unforeseen as an engine 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 curtain of everyday triviality. There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens 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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in Paris in 1908, Simone de Beauvoir is a legendary figure. A lifelong companion of Jean-Paul Sartre and a pioneering feminist, she wrote books that have become famous throughout the world. Her works of fiction include The Mandarins, All Men Are Mortal, The Blood of Others, When Things of the Spirit Come First, and The Woman Destroyed. Her nonfiction includes The Second Sex, A Very Easy Death, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Force of Circumstance, The Prime of Life, The Coming of Age, and Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre.
Simone de Beauvoir died in 1986.
OTHER BOOKS BY SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR IN THE PANTHEON MODERN WRITERS SERIES:
Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre
The Blood of Others
When Things of the Spirit Come First: Five Early Tales
The Woman Destroyed
Copyright
English translation Copyright © 1965 by André Deutsch Ltd., George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd., and G. P. Putnam’s Sons
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in France as Une Mort Très Douce by Librairie Gallimard. Copyright © 1964 by Librairie Gallimard.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Beauvoir, Simone de, 1908–1986
A very easy death.
(Pantheon Modern Writers)
Translation of: Une mort très douce.
1. Beauvoir, Simone de, 1908—Biography. 2. Authors, French—20th century—Biography.
PQ2603.E362Z4713 1985 848’.91409[B]
84–18920
eISBN: 978-0-307-83219-1
Cover design by Peter Mendelsund
v3.1