How dramatic it is to die alone!

The Ombudsperson, Marie Rinfret, made it clear that what happened in CHSLDs in Quebec during the first wave of COVID-19 was a disaster due to a huge organizational deficit. But, beyond the death toll, it is the conditions in which many of these elders lost their lives that are even more appalling.

Imagine what it feels like to be an elderly and vulnerable person walking through this passage without any familiar face holding their hand to accompany them. We are looking everywhere for culprits. Yet the truth is that we are all guilty to varying degrees. In question, this massacre is the result of a societal choice. We have collectively decided, rightly or wrongly, to entrust the care of the vulnerable in our families and the funeral rites to third parties, because we are no longer able to deal with these stages of life. Let’s get on well, I’m not teaching anyone here. I am simply saying that before old age, death and funeral rites took place in houses.

Now the business funeral services offer us turnkey services, because death bothers us as much as the great vulnerability that accompanies advanced old age. However, dying alone is a terrible ordeal for a human being.

We must remember our history to better understand. I’m telling you. After completing the project of the animal that we are, nature told him: “I have provided you with a brain which will be the centerpiece of your domination over the rest of the living. It has nearly 100 billion neurons, and each neuron can connect to thousands of others. Which credits the average person with more nerve connections than there are stars in the Milky Way. This brain represents 2% of your body mass, but will consume up to 20% of all your energy. In your infant’s body, this brain will capture up to 70% of the energy from breast milk. But even more, at the end of the pregnancy, it is 90% of the energy supplied by the mother to the infant that will be stored in the body to fuel the only growth of this incredible engine of collective intelligence and cumulative knowledge. of humanity. That said, I must also unfortunately tell you that by giving you this big brain that allows you to remember the past, to live the present and to project yourself into the future, I also left you a big problem: anxiety about the death that you will inevitably see coming before you. This fear of death will develop your intelligence even more, because you will be scratching your head and inventing many medical sciences and ways of doing to push back your expiration date. In fact, your whole existence will be organized and punctuated according to this fateful date. ”

Obviously, at the very beginning of their existence, humans immediately thought of the possibility of escaping death. But Mother Nature quickly got us out of our dream by specifying: “Saving you from dying is not an option. In question, after a certain age, a human body is too expensive to repair. This is why, as a replacement solution, I suggest that you give birth and make your offspring into carriers of the rest of your genetic existence. I’ve always thought that investing in a new little tank this way was smarter than trying to rebuild the same old car for eternity. In other words, I have partly carefully hidden immortality in this underworld in the meeting between a sperm and an egg. I said well in part, because you can also access a form of immortality by celebrating love, generosity and kindness towards the rest of creation, which, it must be remembered, are as important as the simple transmission of genes in the highly social animals that you are. ”

Since that great day, in the contract that the parents make the newborn baby sign, there is a clause in fine print indicating that each of his breaths will be one less on the road to death. Human life, said my mother, who has just left us, is a walk on a globe. A path where the point of departure and the point of arrival merge. Also, even if we feel like we are moving away as we get older, nature inevitably brings us back to come full circle.

While birth is superimposed on death, old age brings back to childhood in all its vulnerability. It is also for this reason that accompanying the dying as one incubates a baby is so essential.

For those who still celebrate the feast of baby Jesus, the story of Balthazar offering myrrh, a resin used to embalm the dead, to parents celebrating a birth, metaphorically tells of this intimate twinning between the beginning of life. and its end.

Unfortunately, if the baby exerts a magnetism on us, death terrifies us. Arrived a little too late in Senegal, I did not have time to see my mother’s inert body, but my brothers and sisters who were present speak of the deep feeling of sadness and anguish that still squats their minds and their hearts. heart. Between the guilt of feeling a certain dread in front of the corpse of his mother whom he loved deeply and the need to take decent care of her remains, Sapiens invented these collective therapies that we call funeral rites.

In my Senegalese culture of origin, these celebrations are occasions to share the pain of the grieving family, to pray, but also to collectively remember the transience of human life and the need to sow good during our short stay. on the ground. Thus, hundreds of people entered our family home to show us their solidarity of heart and tell us what mom had done good for them. We cried in silence and calmed others who burst into tears when they saw the great void caused by the departure of my mother, this orphan from birth with still sad eyes who wanted to save all the vulnerable children around her .

All these expressions of solidarity have done us good and reminded us, as mom often said, that humans are the best medicine for their neighbors – O kin, o kin refou tékhoum, in Serer language. Funerals are also opportunities to renew the pact of solidarity and mutual aid with the extended family and the community to which they belong. It is in this way, said our elders, that death instills the desire to live in a village. It is all of these steps that help sublimate the death that many families unfortunately were unable to do because of COVID-19.

Thank you to you dear friends, parents, readers of these pages, and other virtual accomplices who sent me thousands of messages to show your solidarity of heart, but also to tell me how the disappearance of your mother, grand- mom, dad or grandpa changed your life. Our large brains allow us this ability to travel very far in time and to resuscitate the dead in our memories at will.

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