Carte blanche to David Goudreault | Literary aid in dying

With their unique pen and their own sensitivity, artists present to us, in turn, their vision of the world around us. This week, we are giving carte blanche to David Goudreault.

Simon Roy can no longer read. Rather painful for a writer, a literature teacher having reading at the heart of his life since childhood. It is moreover by reading a brick of Knausgaard, As it rains over the town, page 446, that the first symptoms struck. Strange, the words became opaque. Their meaning, impassable. He leaned towards Marianne, his girlfriend, also a teacher. “Is there a typography problem? The problem was not there. A few minutes later, he couldn’t speak.

In the hospital, on a stretcher, in a spoon, they cried, apprehended the bereavements to come, succumbed to vertigo. “No more than half an hour,” he assures me. Brain cancer, stage 4 glioblastoma, was not going to make him a burden for his loved ones, he was not going to miss out on the joys to come, he wanted to live the few months, a few years granted by the prognosis. Despite the cruel irony of an incurable tumor installed in the area of ​​language, while he built his existence around words, live!

Unlike the small canapes, slices of fruit and pieces of brie in front of us, it’s hard to swallow.

“Before you arrived, I cut some pallet wood. I made myself a fire, I had the sun in my face, I was peaceful. Before, I would have experienced it like any moment, today it’s precious. Everything becomes important. The moment we live, there, it is precious. And so are his words. Especially when we know that he has lost the use of speech three times in the last year, that this literary man used to correcting long works was struggling to finish dictations, that he had to read primers for children, submit to speech therapy classes to reclaim words, reconnect neurons.

Made by another, his most recent book eluded him. Chiselled and searched, written over five years, it is the work of a writer in full possession of his means. Yet he could not read the proofs of his own manuscript. Marianne was there, again, to read to him. Between them, a great love.

And the dead. Every three months, Simon receives a call from the doctor, also nicknamed, with a smirk, the executioner. This verifies whether dementia sets in, whether the distress and suffering prove to be irreversible. When that time comes, Simon will be taken to his last breath, which he hopes will be gentle, at home, lying in bed with his children and his lover. “With the injection, it lasts four minutes, the time of a song. He has already chosen the piece, and the last bottle of wine to share.

In the meantime, books.

Marianne will publish a story with an evocative title, In the light of our ignorance, at Leméac, in September. The result of his writing therapy, hours spent putting his anxieties and hopes on paper, while Simon slept, stunned by the treatments. When he went down to join her, exhausted, he would ask her: “Read me what you wrote. After a few months, he told her, “Do you know you’re holding a book? And he is good! He affirms it to me bluntly. “I read and I corrected some texts, his story is excellent. His eyes shine with pride. I believe him.

He too, ultimate grace, was able to write. Under the saving effect of the Decadron, he found the energy and the inspiration to snatch a last tome from his sick brain.

Ten days of frenzy, a dozen hours of work each day. A flash to offer us a beautiful hybrid of which he has the secret, on the border between the essay, the intimate chronicle and the autofiction. He will publish my end of the world at Boréal, in May. “The last two chapters my editor says are the best I’ve ever written. » The art of leaving in style.

Simon wants to go in the fall, to attend the launch of Marianne’s story. Everything hangs by a thread, but the narrative thread of its story has already proven to be full of surprises, both hard and beautiful. It may live until winter. Who knows, as the other said.

We greet each other, hug each other. Simon offers to take me a piece of cake for the road, cantaloupe or bread. Instead, I leave with his laughter, his frank gaze, and the desire to reread his words, including these, taken from his very first book: “The only happy outcome consists in advancing stubbornly towards the light. Learning to walk with my scars open. I have no choice: I must let the rays of the sun rain down on me like verses from a sky radiating a beautiful Kubrick red. »