Nathalie Collard : What interested you in the idea of death, what stimulated your thinking?
Alain Vadeboncoeur : First, we’re all going to die one day… We can decide to be in denial, but from my point of view, it’s more difficult. Death is still quite frequent in my reality. [de médecin urgentologue]. It is a deeply human event that has challenged me through my profession. We are all entitled to make it an important subject. It is rare to find subjects that universally concern us.
Mathieu Belisle : There is a large part of literature that is inhabited by this question, of the need to give meaning to death. From a personal point of view, it is an awareness that has always inhabited me. I don’t know how to explain it, it is not something macabre, it is an awareness that things will end. I don’t think I am the only one like that. More concretely, I must say that the pandemic has been a huge eye-opener. I find that we have difficulty talking about death. And our title goes a little in this direction: someone must talk about what surrounds this experience.
NC : Mathieu, you write that we have lost the rituals surrounding death. However, it seems to me that people are increasingly reinventing secular rituals, not religious ones.
MB : I wanted to talk about this need for ritual. To make sure, basically, that the minimum service is given to everyone. Because there are beautiful funerals, just as there are disappointing funerals. I especially wanted to talk about this moment, during the pandemic, when many people were deprived of any form of ritual. I found that very serious. As if there was something left unfinished.
PHOTO ALAIN ROBERGE, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
The Dr Alain Vadeboncoeur
AV : We have ritualized all the important events of life, but the rituals of death come AFTER death. And so, they concern the living, and very little the person who is no longer there. Whether the person dies unexpectedly or at the end of a long illness – and then they gradually move away and are no longer in contact with those around them – there is no exchange, no dialogue about death. The arrival of medical assistance in dying has changed that. I don’t practice it, but I have friends who have told me about it. There is a ritualization that includes the person. And that is new in human history. We will have to talk about it more in our volume 2. [rires].
NC : Should we prepare for death as we prepare for marriage or birth?
MB : To philosophize is to learn to die, said Montaigne. What if we lived better with our limits, what if we lived better with the idea of our own end? In the sense that we can’t be everywhere, that we can’t live all lives, that we can’t be efficient all the time, productive all the time? That sometimes, it has to stop, that there is something mortal in us? It’s not easy because we are in an economic and social regime that is quite allergic to that. Life as we live it today, the way we value ourselves socially, is to say that we work too much, that we have a lot of it, that it doesn’t stop. Accepting the limits of others is a way of reconnecting with the mortal part of ourselves.
NC : Can we learn from the deaths of others? I ask the Dr Vadeboncœur, who is confronted with it in his daily life.
AV : I learned a lot in the moment that comes immediately after death, with the family and the people around you. It is a moment full of humanity. What struck me the most is that we always talk about cultures, each with their ritual. However, when you lose someone, most people are the same. It becomes extremely simple. It is a difficult event, obviously, and upsetting for those who have experienced it. But culture does not matter that much. It is a human event, profound, which destabilizes and fragments people, pushes them to their own limits. And that is universal. Then, in the days and weeks that follow, culture and religion will recover all that, and try to give it meaning.
NC : What do you think about our relationship with mourning? I feel like we don’t give ourselves the time and space to fully experience it.
AV : I think that’s one of the elements that are still taboo. We can’t do much with mourning, it’s the somewhat long and laborious part associated with death. There is an instinct for life in us that leads us to flee from it, but the beauty of human societies is that they are often built against instincts. And I think it’s a bad instinct that we have to want to flee from mourning. When we hear the word “death”, we go to the other side, but in reality, it has the opposite effect, it makes us more anxious, even more fearful…
NC : Did this dialogue help you move forward? Did your ideas change or evolve over the course of your discussions?
MB : A real dialogue is to run the risk of being disturbed by the other, in the good sense of the word. If we are not affected by the other, it is because deep down, we will dialogue less and we will be content to defend our point of view. There is something very beautiful in what Alain says, something precious that must be told.
I would add that no matter the subject, the differences of views or the cultures, when two people talk or try to talk, they always have more in common than they disagree. People are much closer to each other than they think.
What do you think? Join the dialogue
Someone’s Got to Talk: A Dialogue on Death and Other Insoluble Problems
With the participation of Catherine Mavrikakis
Lux
216 pages