Warning: it is recommended to sensitive souls who do not want to hear about death, especially not their own, not to read this text.
Posted at 9:00 a.m.
There’s something you’re not really aware of when you’re young. We know well at this age that we will all end up getting old and dying one day, but what we realize less is that it’s not just our little person who will go away, it’s is our whole era.
These institutions and these values which represented for us essential points of reference, these women and these men having enchanted our youth and of which one wonders what they became to find them, one day, damaged by time or downright gone.
Mario Roy
That’s what I thought when I learned of the death of the former journalist and columnist for The Pressthis exceptionally endearing character that was Mario Roy.
It’s not just each of us who are aging, it’s our whole gang, in fact, from Catherine Deneuve in beautiful day to the beauty of the devil by Alain Delon passing by Monique Miller in the tele-theatres of Radio-Canada.
Without forgetting those who left, the eternal teenager France Gall four years ago, the blond Demon Guy Lafleur three weeks ago.
We obviously have no choice but to adapt to the passage of time if we want to continue to enjoy this privilege that is life, but, for people of my generation, it is useless to hide that the world that we have known, loved and sometimes hated all at the same time, is disappearing at breakneck speed.
Are you still here ?
It seems to me that one of the most significant differences between young and old is that when you’re young and things go wrong – and God knows you can be unhappy when you’re young –, death is basically just a concept for the immortal animal that we feel at this age.
On the other hand, even when things are going really well when you are old, an age when you are often happier than when you were young, there is something implacably real about death, a creepy specter lurking around you and your loved ones. .
the grand age
For several baby-boomers who have lived through an enchanted parenthesis that is truly unique on the historical and generational levels, old age and death are a bit like a breach of contract to their detriment, convinced that they were entitled to live 100 years without too much of problems.
Haven’t we just invented the expression “grandiose age” to qualify those over 90?
We are a long way from the time when the oldest found it natural to sacrifice themselves for the young, as the latter saw recently when they were systematically put after their elders during the COVID-19 pandemic.
My mother, who couldn’t be fooled, would have hated the term “seniors”, just as she hated “golden age”. “Life is very badly done,” she said. At the moment when, with the help of experience, we know more how it works and we enjoy a certain serenity, the body begins to lose its gangland. »
I have a small idea of what my mother would have thought of the grandiose age…
The reality is that there is no age to die, the best often leaving the earliest. Mozart at 35, Rimbaud at 37, Oscar Wilde at 46, like all those others who bequeathed treasures to humanity that we will never leave behind.
To the readers who are still there, the present columnist confides that he is looking for a positive end to his text, perhaps a little mortuary…
In Morocco
What is striking is that, even in an ultra-privileged society like Quebec in this universe of Ukraine, Yemen and Syria, even when we are spared what is even more fearful than death, suffering, we have difficulty leaving.
Since everything, absolutely everything in nature will die one day, from the smallest dandelion to the most pretentious of humans, how is it that it is so difficult to leave even when one has enjoyed a long and beautiful life?
In Morocco, a country that I like even though it is too poor, unjust and conservative, death has kept a meaning that it no longer has in this Quebec where belief, transcendence has been thrown overboard. and spirituality. Hardly anyone commits suicide in Morocco, with ordinary people there still believing that after death they will go to heaven to join those they loved and who loved them.
I hear my anticlerical baby-boomer friends sneer at such stupidity, but I envy them, these Moroccans, I would like to be like them…