In A Very Easy Death, Simone de Beauvoir chronicles her dying, bedridden mother's last few weeks, and through writing reconciles the difficulties of the relationship they shared. This doesn't feel quite like grieving; it's more like making sense of something elusive and mysterious, sketching the likeness of a stranger who passes in the dark. Sadness is a gentle undercurrent, never threatening to pull us under. Likewise, de Beauvoir's distaste for the medicalized experience of death is rather clear, but this is no polemic.
For an intellectual known
more for her political and philosophical works--topics given to lofty
abstraction--I was interested to read this very human and immediate,
emotional work.
Note:
- In her telling, de Beauvoir's mother was dying, suffering death, for weeks. At the moment of passing, there was a brief, choked struggle by the patient. After the official pronouncement of death, the nurse called it an easy death, wanting de Beauvoir to take comfort in its brevity.
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