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 Devil: 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.