Simon’s perfect day

The writer Simon Roy left on Saturday, October 15 at 3 p.m., surrounded by his children, Romane and Colin, as well as his spouse, Marianne Marquis-Gravel.

Suffering from incurable brain cancer, he had chosen this date for medical assistance in dying. He wanted it to happen after Marianne’s birthday, which he celebrated on a little getaway a few days ago, where he put all his strength, which was declining more and more. He was so happy, after publishing his final book in May, my end of the worldto have been able to attend the launch of his lover’s first book in September, In the light of our ignorancewhich recounts their love and this bad twist of fate.

I spent the week thinking about Simon and Marianne, because they had warned me. Thinking about their end of the world, while I remained hidden in the light of my ignorance. We cannot (and do not want) to really know anything about death when it is not on our agenda. And if I am all for medical assistance in dying, my mind is terrified by this idea of ​​knowing in advance the precise hour of the great leap into nothingness.

However, Simon told me that he felt lucky to see it coming, unlike someone who dies suddenly. As soon as he found out he was doomed, he set about orchestrating his release. And give everyone at the same time a lesson in life, supported by the unfailing love of the one he loved. “He was a teacher until the end,” remarks Marianne, also a literature teacher, who was kind enough to tell me about Simon’s last moments.

I was much more worried about her, actually, and Marianne told me she had COVID. That the project that her friends come to support her had to be postponed. Life has these ironies, sometimes, since Marianne and Simon lived for two years with the disease in the midst of a pandemic.

When Simon’s death was announced, many of his former students from Lionel-Groulx College paid tribute to him, which does not surprise me. Because from my first meeting with him, for the release of My Kubrick Red Life in 2014, I discovered a man passionate about literature. A real real one. It had to appear in class.

Dany Laferrière is right when he says no one is waiting for your first book. My Kubrick Red Life was written by a complete stranger, and it got into me to such an extent that I read it through without getting out of my bath, which I warmed up once in a while. I emerged from my deeply scarred (and shrunken) reading. This way he had to mix the film The Shining from Stanley Kubrick to his personal drama – his mother’s suicide – was incredible. I don’t know anyone who didn’t like it My Kubrick Red Lifea book full of premonitions, when I think about it.

I had to meet this author. Here’s what happened.

***

In the last days of his life, Simon was no longer able to read, but Marianne read to him four hours a day. Its program was impressive: Peter Handke, Yvon Rivard, Françoise de Luca, Dominique Fortier, Siri Hustvedt, Sophie Bienvenu, and many others. He was even able to finish the enormous sum of Karl Ove Knausgaard, since Marianne read him the last volume of approximately 1500 pages, entitled End of fight, when she had not even read the previous ones. If that isn’t love, between them and for books, I don’t know what is, I haven’t read a line by Knausgaard.

“It kept him alive,” says Marianne. As if there was magic in his relationship with literature, until the end. »

Simon Roy believed in this power to transform reality through reading and writing, to break it down and recompose it, to perhaps see in it a hyperreality. He has written about his mother’s suicide, his mythomaniac father, his illness and his death, involving Kubrick and Orson Welles, the fate of a forger of visual arts, the macabre genealogy of his family and a thousand others. business. With him, the false was true and the true was false. What a unique and strange way he had of seeing the world: deeply down-to-earth, but fragmented in his interpretation, in his reading of things.

He saw links and signs everywhere. I sometimes wonder if his brain cancer does not come from a hallucinating overload of his always boiling neurons.

Simon carefully wrote his end of life. He is a writer, after all. Every show, every outing, every encounter, every meeting he went to was a chapter in his fight against death, and he also published two books – Made by another and My end of the world – before taking his leave. He told anyone who would listen that he had never been happier in his life.

Three weeks before the fateful date, he dictated a message to Marianne, to be shared after his departure: “This afternoon, Doctor Daigle and Nurse Desbiens will come to the house to perform medical assistance in dying. I will share a last meal with Marianne and my children, drink a last cup of wine to the life I have led and listen, before taking my last breath, to a song that is dear to me. During these last minutes, the children will put a hand on my cheeks and Marianne will snuggle her head against my heart. I hope to be fully conscious, with my eyes wide open so that I can look at them one last time and smile wide at them. Before leaving, the beautiful moments of my life will certainly scroll through my head, then I will close my eyes gently, serenely, happy with this life that has given me so much. I hope to see you again one day if possible, who knows? Now let’s see if there’s something waiting for us on the other side…”

Until the end, this gratitude and this curiosity. We all want to know, if there is something after death, right? He told Marianne that if so, he would try to send signs.

But for his last day on earth, Simon had planned everything and it happened exactly as he wrote, Marianne tells me, both amazed and devastated. He had chosen his meal, his wine, and his soundtrack, because he was a music maniac. It happened in the small garage of his house that he had shaped like a teenager’s room, with his records, his posters, his board games, where he liked to receive. “It’s the kind of death we all want,” says Marianne. He was not hospitalized, he was in his garage, surrounded by the universe he had created for himself. »

Simon left on Perfect Day of Lou Reed and sent to all his friends, as a farewell message, We’ll meet again by Johnny Cash.

I was at the chalet when I learned of Simon’s death from Marianne’s account on Facebook. I went to cut vegetables for supper with a heavy heart. I put Perfect Day by Lou Reed on my iPhone, just to catch up, because I’m sure a lot of people who read the short story did the same thing. Tears were rolling down my cheeks and it wasn’t the fault of the onions.

But when Lou Reed shut up, Apple Music’s algorithm then sent me Brain Damage from Pink Floyd, the band of my adolescence, which I haven’t listened to for a very long time.

What were the chances that Brain Damage by Pink Floyd arrives just after listening to the tune chosen by Simon? He who died of brain cancer?

I was in a Simon Roy novel, while the chorus said: I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon…

Of course it was a sign, he who hoped everyone would miss him when he was gone. He insisted on this: he did not want his death to be a relief for us, but a loss.

It’s done, Simon. We’ll meet again on the dark side of the moon.