I had spent the day with my daughter. A first full day, without session work, without reading or writing contract, without notes of files to finish. A day without any interruption based on my full desire to return to the long days of summer with my daughter, with whom I could be seven years old again all day long, look at the world through her eyes, re-taste childhood and its immense impression that all of life is launching itself ahead, stretched towards an endless horizon.
When we got home, thighs burned from cycling, full of sun and chocolate-dipped ice cream, I found it in my mailbox. My friend Félix, faithful to this precise delicacy that he always has, that of reading beneath things that are not said in words, offered it to me: the latest issue of the magazine LQ (Quebec letters), which will be officially launched on June 11, in which he directs a tribute file to Caroline Dawson.
Since she left, I hadn’t dared say anything, didn’t dare write anything about her. I had only cried and slipped on the news from my virtual walls, suddenly filled with his smile as wide as the sky where I hope. But now, she was there, in my mailbox, and her gaze seized me, adding to the sun of the day this burning of the soul, as if her eyes had become like her writing: right, precise, at the same time soft and hard, full of this love of truth which prevents us from fleeing what must be said.
I wrote: “Thank you, Felix, thank you. »
But I had to wait until evening before daring to go beyond what the blanket was already making me experience as inner waves. I put the latest issue of the magazine on my bedside table. Before reading what Alain Farah, Didier Eribon, Michel Marc Bouchard, Gérald Gaudet, Katia Belkhodja, Nicholas Dawson and Jennifer Bélanger had written for her, before looking further at the images that Lawrence Fafard had captured, I needed to slide over my hours, those that I was lucky enough to live, to remember, to honor.
I spent the end of the day just measuring the weight of my privilege, thanking Caroline, crying for the one she no longer had, while I watched my daughter live.
I had just finished my own treatments when Caroline was diagnosed with cancer. I had written to him, timidly, knowing well that the word “cancer” alone was not enough to unite our realities, this term covering such a broad spectrum of possibilities, of inevitables, of inevitabilities or of hopes. But I dared to write to her to tell her that I was upset for her and to offer her my ear if she wanted to talk about the afterlife with me. She responded to me instantly, kindly, from this strong tenderness that seemed to reside within her.
I then placed Where I hide on the program of the course that I gave in a private college: “Mental health: taboos, social issues and realities”. One day, in front of my class, I read aloud in class the chapter which describes the reality of his mother who cleaned for well-off people. And it was through the eyes of “little Caro” that these young people had grasped all the silent violence that resides in the relationships between classes. We had a very emotional exchange that day. Shame had welled up in the tears and in the voices of some who, with horror, saw themselves playing the PS4 again, while an employee cleaned their room. The encounter with otherness had just arisen, and the work of intellectual, emotional and social strengthening had begun.
Coming out of this course, I knew that some people would never again be able to discredit another human being simply because they paid them. I wrote to him to show him this impact. She replied to me, by voice message: “Oh dear, that’s the kind of message that goes straight to my heart… to know that my book allows young people to unfold their shadow to make something of more beautiful and reaching out to others, that really touches me, especially today. It was a less colorful day and now it is full of color. THANKS. »
Thanks to you, Caroline.
I also remembered the moment when, during my treatments, I had worked on creating a photo album for my children, believing that I might not exist in a future that was too near for me to accepts it. I didn’t want to fade into their early, so early memory. That day, the single hard drive that contained all the photo memories from the last ten years of our lives had disconnected from the computer during a file transfer, rendering my photo bank inaccessible. So I collapsed for hours, believing that not only might I be absent from my children’s future, but that they would no longer have images of me. I thought I had been erased, literally.
It was at that moment that I understood the unacceptable nature of death when we are parents. I could erase myself for myself, yes, I could, I understood that all the ages in me were disappearing, but, as a mother, I did not want to be erased. I found the photos, but never the peace of mind given by my illusion of living for the duration of my children’s lives.
In the evening, I read the entire file in one go. Caroline introduced her mother to literature, as she wished. And her mother gave life lessons, through her daughter’s words, to entire classes of young people. And when we ask her what she experiences when she realizes that she will have to put an end to her work, she replies that it is very sad, but that it is nothing compared to leaving her children without their mother. And I understand it so much.
On my bedside table, alongside Marie Uguay’s book that I have always had, the one where she looks down, as if she already knew how the story was going to end, I will now keep the latest issue of LQ with the gaze, this time firmly fixed on us, of Caroline Dawson. He will now remind me every day of the preciousness of my luck, of all my chances. So, with my hands almost empty, full of my embarrassment at not being able to offer him more, I will whisper to him again thank you and “you will not fade away”.