Opening the newspaper, it jumped in my face, impossible to ignore. Just below Libre Opinion, a headline called out to me bluntly: “Tired of living like this”. The signatory, Philippe Beaudoin, exposes the case of his 91-year-old mother in three columns. His text, screaming with lucidity, describes his states of uneasiness, each day eating more into a reserve of tolerance already eroded by the pitiless fangs of age.
Losses, limitations, impotence, experimentation with various treatments, changes in medication, hospital stay, travel from one place to another. The litany of an imposed longevity is endless, his voice strikes the base of a monument erected to the glory of science. I have highlighted certain sentences in pink, as if to soften the dark tint. The most striking: “But the health system being what it is, we push these poor elderly people who can no longer live to live even longer. »
Then, here and there, simple expressions could not be more eloquent and evocative of the sad reality: “overloaded staff”, “staff turnover”, “cannot guarantee anything”, “very long waiting lists”. The last one sums it all up: “My mother just wants to leave”… Here is a perfect example of what I call a shrunken life.
At the very beginning of my life in a private residence for seniors (RPA), one day, a nice 93-year-old lady, interesting and enthusiastic, with whom I was having lunch, said to me in a tone that pierced impatience: “We live too old ! Another, no doubt of the same age, told me of the death of her second husband, dating back only a few months, and expressed, with a tremolo in her voice, a desperate wish: “What I would like to leave behind the clouds, me too! »
Were these ladies the only ones with such thoughts? How many other old people refuse the continuation of their shrunken life without admitting it in order to spare those around them? Or the representatives of authority? This subject, delicate among all, floats in a harmful vacuity: it is never frankly approached. We avoid it, we circumvent it, we hide it, we hardly dare say that we have lost a loved one recently, the subject seems taboo.
We act as if we don’t know that there is very little time left in front of us and that, using their free will, it is up to everyone to express themselves openly about how they want to end up. Could we have avoided the staggering number of victims of 2020, or at least reduced it, if, before reaching their ultimate state of dependence and helplessness, these people had been able to let it be known that they loved life too much, full , free, serene, to impose on loved ones the spectacle and the burden of a life that has become too narrow in all its fibers and all its tissues?
I don’t know how old I was. My father had to attend two masses every Sunday. At the small mass at 7 a.m., where he took communion while fasting, and later at the high mass, where he sang in the choir. Between the two, he took his lunch. That morning, the door opened suddenly, one of my cousins, completely frightened, entered without knocking and announced: “Uncle, it’s over, the mother-in-law has gone to the other side!” My father, who sometimes rocked on the back legs of his chair while eating, fell backwards and found himself on the floor lying on his back. The mother-in-law in question was his sister.
That day, in my little child’s head, I knew what death was. It puts someone you love on the other side and it causes a very big surprise when you find out. Dying is not leaving, it’s just changing places.
To die is not to stop living, it is just to live elsewhere. From one side to the other love circulates as if nothing had happened.
Why do we avoid talking about it as it is?
Could we have avoided the staggering number of victims of 2020, or at least reduced it, if, before reaching their ultimate state of dependence and helplessness, these people had been able to let it be known that they loved life too much, full , free, serene, to impose on loved ones the spectacle and the burden of a life that has become too narrow in all its fibers and all its tissues?