I had a vision of the future of my old couple when they will be even older, in the toilets of the medical clinic. help my boyfriend to pee in a potty for a urine test, because he was too weak to do so, reminded me of disturbing scenes from the movie Love by Michael Haneke. Would he do the same for me? What will we look like at 70 or 80? Will he be able to help me when the time comes?
Posted yesterday at 11:00 a.m.
I hope you had a great vacation, the summer has been wonderful so far in Quebec. Not too much rain, not too much heat wave, no social distancing, and this end of August looks like a warm autumn, while it burns in Europe. Besides, I had a little cognitive dissonance seeing my friends’ travel photos on Facebook in France, while the Newscast sent me images of droughts and forest fires. And now floods.
For my part, I had the most failed vacation of my life, and it was not because my flight was canceled in the mess of airports. I want to tell you that, like when we had to describe our holidays in our first editorial office at the start of the school year. In exchange, I suggest you write to me to tell me about your most failed vacations, just to see if you can beat it.
I had chosen to be as relaxed as possible. A month in the countryside, hiking, picking mushrooms, reading and swimming three times a day. My cure for years, and this time my boyfriend stayed in Montreal. I still had two beautiful weeks before being struck down by food poisoning which, I will spare you the details, caused me to lose 10 lbs in three days.
I got back on my feet after a week, the holidays weren’t completely lost, but I had to come back to Montreal urgently because my stepfather Maurice, who we call Mo, was in the worst possible condition. . I had spoken to him on the phone a few days before, he was planning to have the trees in his yard pruned, but pneumonia stopped him in midair. He died the day after my return.
My boyfriendbrutally orphaned during this pandemic – his mother died two years ago – did not have time to cry.
Two days later, he had to be hospitalized for different problems which crystallized at the same time, perhaps from the shock of the loss. During this time, my mother fractured her vertebra in the hospital, falling from a table where she was to receive injections to relieve her back pain. And my poor brother thus had to move without the help of his gang of cripples.
Amazing vacation, I swear. I will remember it for a long time, in any case, as well as shortcuts to the labyrinth of Notre-Dame Hospital.
When I think that I had said to my stepfather Mo, just before leaving for the countryside, “Don’t arrange to die during my vacation, there! “. He has always refused to see any doctor and, at 78, despite his emphysema, did not want to receive a single vaccine against COVID-19. This pig’s head, with whom I loved to persist, was however such a hermit that he avoided the virus throughout the pandemic.
Cre Mo. Cre mon boyfriend, who is like his father. Two cloud shovelers who take care of themselves like in the 19th centurye century. What is it about the upbringing of these men so proud to shun modern medicine so that they can go so proudly to an early death or to the emergency room because of their neglect ? In short, it was ten days of hospitalization for my boyfriendwhile I took care of Mo’s cremation and ashes.
A great vacation, I tell you. What’s fascinating when shit comes in a heap like that is that the absurd reaches the sublime. A strange energy takes hold of us, which I don’t know if we should call it the energy of despair. But there’s a kind of awe that makes us calmly put out one fire at a time, because we realize there’s no other way to do it.
I’m doing my philosophy, like that, but I feared the worst, that the diagnosis for my boyfriend either terrible or fatal. This reduced the pain of Mo’s death, in the whirlwind of emotions, because the dead no longer suffer and we must above all take care of the living. I thought of writer Simon Roy, who is battling brain cancer, and his wife, Marianne Marquis-Gravel. She is going to publish this fall with Leméac an essay on what she is going through with her lover who is leaving quietly, and whose title is: In the light of our ignorance. I can’t wait to read it. Because it is true that we are happy ignoramuses when things are going well. Sometimes even when they’re not so good, but not so bad compared to the worst that happens to us.
On TV5 the other night, we showed the torrential rains in France, after weeks of extreme heat. “What happiness, this fleet, thank you life! “, said a Breton gentleman, very happy, who cheered me up. I have the impression that it’s only when you’re up to your neck in shreds that you love what yesterday made us moan.