Extract – What dies in us | Forget that death exists

Inspired by the pandemic, the author offers a reflection on death, on the distance between words and things, between the body and the spirit, between the dead and the living, between the past and the present, a distance that over the years has become a ditch, not to say a mass grave.

I lived the years of the pandemic like everyone else: in the fog. I had the impression of an almost total loss of control. An invisible evil spread like wildfire and managed to mutate each time we thought we had mastered it: a little more and we would have thought that the virus was laughing at us. More than ever, we didn’t know where we were going, not to mention that history, varying by varying and wave by wave, had an unfortunate tendency to repeat itself, as if it were seized with a fit of stuttering. Each time everything had to be started over. It was something like the materialization of the absurd as Camus had told it: we were Sisyphus, condemned to push our stone to the top of the mountain to see it come down immediately.

One thing seemed clear to me, from the beginning of this story: the crisis revealed deep flaws not only in our way of managing health and illness, but in our relationship to old age and death. For a moment I felt like we were mentioning each other, that we didn’t want to see things as they were. I’m not sure that the managers themselves wanted to see what was going on, whether they wanted or knew how to see everything (I’m thinking of the total bankruptcy that the management of the CHSLDs constituted during the first months of the pandemic, responsible for thousands of deaths). And if I hesitate to reproach them for it, it is not out of complacency. I know too well that this refusal, this incapacity were also ours, that they were due to a reflex of avoidance, revealed a fear inscribed in each of us, that of not surviving.

Everyone preferred to look elsewhere, not see death in the face; the fate that awaited us and that had just befall these poor old people who had reached the end of their lives, no one wanted to hear about it.

Because in truth, if the appearance of this new virus frightened us so much, it is because it reminded us of the existence in us of another evil, fatal this one. In a society obsessed with youth and the present moment, the pandemic reminded us that we were potential dead, “future corpses”, to put it with Albert Cohen. But who wanted to hear about that?

This is the greatest discovery I have made during this pandemic: we do not know how to talk about death, we are unable to represent it to ourselves, to understand what it can mean, to grasp what with it both ends and begins. “We are of a race that does not know how to die”, can we read in the Maria Chapdelaine by Louis Hemon. I sometimes have the impression that this famous phrase is less a tribute to the resilience of a people than the expression of a brutal and irrevocable observation, which signals an incapacity of a metaphysical nature: no, indeed, we don’t know how to die, and that’s the whole problem. It is the strange paradox of our aging societies (and Quebec is one of the oldest in the world, with Japan and Korea) not to know how to think about death, to have nothing to say about it , if not in the disembodied mode of law. The right to die with dignity is essential, that is not the question – even if the fact of having to enshrine this requirement of dignity in law already signals a problem: is this not always the way we should to die ? But one can nevertheless wonder whether the vocabulary of the law has not reduced this capital event to a clinical act, or even to a simple administrative formality.

Dying, however, must mean something beyond law books and medical notebooks, otherwise what dies in us is perhaps death itself, as a test and a moment of revelation, even negative. I am not claiming that we are the first to want to ignore the existence of death, to act as if it were not going to reach us. Already in the middle of the XVII^and century, Bossuet noted in his sermon on death that “mortals take no less care to bury the thoughts of death than to bury the dead themselves.” What I claim, on the other hand, is that everything in the current social, economic and political order, in this tyranny of unlimited consumption and growth, conspires to make us forget that death exists, that no discourse does not allow us to consider it as a mystery.

What dies in us

Mathieu Belisle

Lemeac

144 pages