He is 53, she is 32. They are in love. It sounds like a cliché, except it’s not. As soon as you enter Simon Roy and Marianne Marquis-Gravel, in Sainte-Thérèse, you know that you are dealing with an unusual love. These things feel.
” In The fall, Albert Camus said that there are only three true loves per century, launches the writer Simon Roy, on the terrace allowing you to take advantage of the first warm rays of spring. We are one, so there are only two left for the others. »
The laughter fuse non-stop between the two lovebirds. Their eyes sparkle as soon as their gazes meet. However, for fifteen months, each day has taken on the burden of mourning. Simon Roy has stage 4 glioblastoma, an incurable cancer that affects the part of the brain responsible for language. Three times he lost the use of language and had to relearn everything with the help of a speech therapist, simple poetry and children’s primers. Reading, one of his passions, is strenuous. It’s Marianne who, every day, reads a few pages to him while he lies on the sofa, his eyes closed.
Despite this tragedy, the author launched a fourth and final novel on Thursday, my end of the world, written in ten nights, a year to the day after his diagnosis. “I’m a project guy. At the moment, with the cancer that is a bit of a nuisance to me, my plans are limited to going to see shows. It’s as if I gave myself the prohibition to die because I have such show to see and that I can’t miss it. I’m probably wrong, I’m going to end up dying all the same, but a project like a book gives me a perspective for the future. »
It was Marianne, lamenting the state of torpor in which confinement and the Olympic Games had plunged Simon this winter, who had the idea of encouraging him to write. “I thought it was impossible. She went to work, and I started composing a few fragments. When she got back, I showed her, anticipating a fiasco, and she told me I had something, that everything made sense. The following nights, deprived of sleep by medication, the author wrote the first draft of his novel.
“There is the Simon before and the Simon after writing. It gave her a smile and a taste for happiness,” says Marianne. “Art saved me”, summarizes Simon. He tells this anecdote in which a European scientist made a sadistic experiment on rats, in the 1950s. He immersed them in a large glass filled with water to see what factors would influence their ability to float before abandoning themselves to the death. The most decisive of them? Desperation, which, being inhibited, could sometimes increase survival from a few minutes to several tens of hours. “When we know that there is something waiting for us, it is more difficult to let go of depression. »
The stitches of fear
After associating a family fracture with the macabre universe of the film The Shining (My Kubrick Red Life2014), and the work of a famous forger to his own reflection on the vagueness between truth and fiction (Made by another2021), Simon Roy continues to link his personal trials to those of significant works that blur the contours of reality.
my end of the world looks back at the radio adaptation of the novel War of the Worlds, by filmmaker Orson Welles. The play, presented in the form of news bulletins, would have caused, according to legend, a real popular panic, the listeners really believing in an invasion of Martians. It is fear, whether strong, feigned, fantastic or fateful, that links this anecdote to the experience of the writer, tormented by the fear of death, but also by that of spending his last days as a spectator. of his life.
Simon Roy discusses, among other things, the irrational actions or beliefs that become embedded in oneself when faced with one’s own deadline, when one is attentive to the slightest mystical or inexplicable signals that could offer hope for a after.
“For me, fear is embedded in jealousy. I find it hard to accept that the love that Marianne promised me is experienced by another. I suspect she won’t spend the next 50 years alone, I hope she’ll be happy, but I should have filled her. It’s the same with my three children. I will never teach my grandson or my granddaughter to play soccer. I’m sorry Marianne, sometimes it made me so sad that I became sadistic. »
“I understand it, because I saw something similar, answers the main interested party. I’m jealous of his past, of the trips he’s made, of the children he’s had and that we won’t have together. I get dizzy when I think about after. I feel like I’m on the edge of a cliff, and someone can push me away at any moment. At the same time, I try to be grateful to be able to fully enjoy the present moment. »
It is this lesson, in fact, that we retain from reading my end of the world : appreciate the beauty of everyday life, that of a shared laugh, of a song or a poem, that of a hand extended by a child or a word of love, to bequeath to those who will follow us this that we know of the secret of happiness.
“When I’m dead, I don’t want my loved ones to be relieved. I want them to regret the times spent with me. I say it very sincerely, the last year was the most beautiful of my life. Everything is different, precious, magnified. I appreciate all the laughs and all the raindrops. You have to enjoy every moment. »