Antoine Bédard was walking down Parc Avenue near Jeanne-Mance Park when he learned of his father’s death. I remembered this trivial detail because I take the same path when I visit my parents. Put death on the agenda“end-of-life stories” that Bédard has just published with Atelier 10, begins with the moving account of the last hour of Denis Bédard’s life.
The Dr Bédard, a palliative care physician, was one of the first Quebecers to request medical assistance in dying. His son, who is a musician, songwriter and sound designer, decided not to stay with his brother, sister and mother-in-law in the living room of the family home where Denis Bédard chose to die in 2016. He l later regretted.
Antoine had attended, 16 years earlier, the last breath of his mother, “captive of the nightmare of his death to come” for weeks, he writes. He wanted to keep the memory of his father alive.
I thought of a friend who evoked this week the last breath of his own mother with an emotion that I interpreted as a warning: this is not necessarily the image that we want to keep of the one who gave birth to us. I am convinced, that said, that he does not regret having been present.
Antoine Bédard’s mother was not ready to die. She was not even 50 years old when she died of cancer. Antoine’s father, on the other hand, had long wanted to free himself from the suffering associated with his incurable blood disease. He was only 66 years old and Antoine found it difficult to accept his decision.
“Knowing exactly when it would occur did not make the shock of its disappearance any less brutal,” he wrote. “How did my father, who firmly believed in the ability of palliative care to ensure a painless death, come to want to shorten his life in this way? »
Put death on the agenda bears witness to the journey of a son faced with his father’s ultimate choice. It is an “inside” reflection on the Act respecting end-of-life care and on the importance of palliative care, which is not well known.
The Dr Bédard, writes his son, may not have saved the lives of his patients, but “he saved their death”. Antoine Bédard finally understood why his father had suggested to those he loved, at the very moment of his death, to “prepare to die”.
I thought back to this sentence while reading the excellent report by my colleague Dominic Tardif on our difficult relationship with death. My own relationship to death is not very complex: it is non-existent. To quote a line from Dominic’s file, I live in death denial. I hardly ever think about death. Not out of care. By choice. And it’s a choice I made a long time ago, during an Easter break.
When I was a child, like many people of my generation, I religiously watched the miniseries jesus of nazareth by Franco Zeffirelli over the Easter weekend. The grand scenes, the miraculous turnarounds, the betrayals of loved ones, the despicable Roman rulers.
I was both fascinated and terrified by the character of Jesus. The angelic face of actor Robert Powell, his apparent indolence, his agony on the cross. It is through Jesus, I believe, that I became aware of my own finitude. Of death which would be my destiny, like that of all those I love.
This thought haunted me, paralyzed me, made me anxious at night, alone in my room. I was not afraid that a monster would hide in my wardrobe, but that Jesus would emerge from it as from his tomb, announcing to me at Easter my last hour, without the possibility of resurrecting. I never told my atheist parents about it. We never talked about religion at home. In short, it is not the loss of religious landmarks that caused my rejection without appeal of the very concept of death. Quite the contrary.
I resolved, from the age of 10, for my own good, never to think about death again. And I’ve stuck to it for 40 years, with rare exceptions. I haven’t seen any more adventures jesus of nazareththe traumatic equivalent for me of the exorcist for others.
This voluntary avoidance – of death, not of Zeffirelli’s film – may have served me well, but today I am ill-equipped to deal with death. If she appeared before me with an irrepressible urge to play chess, as in The seventh seal of Bergman, I would be caught off guard.
I’m one of those who jogs through the graveyard with no thought for death. It’s not just my own disappearance that I don’t pay the slightest attention to. I hear around me the stories of friends who have recently had to mourn their parents and I refuse to imagine myself in their place.
A friend told me this week that she was recently on vacation in Europe when her father, who had been ill for a long time and to whom she was very close, died. She who has seen too many children die at Sainte-Justine hospital could not go to his bedside. “I wonder if he didn’t want to spare me that,” she told me, philosophically.
Another friend said on Facebook last weekend that her father, a fan of the Nordiques before the Eternal, left serene because he had just learned of the official elimination of the Canadian. I smiled. My cousin Stéphane made many tearful friends laugh last month at my uncle Fernand’s funeral, during his tribute to his father.
I hope that, like them, I will have the courage to use humor and wisdom when it comes time to say goodbye to my parents. My father is not 75, my maternal grandmother died at 105; I am counting on family genetics to postpone this inevitable deadline as long as possible. Because if I am very frank, despite the advice of Dr Bédard, I don’t have the slightest desire to prepare for it.
Put death on the agenda
Antoine Bedard
Documents – Workshop 10
84 pages