I was sitting cross-legged on the blue velvet sofa, turned towards my lover who was facing me, leaning on the back, his head as if a little stranded in the palm of his hand. I talked to him about the aftermath with “ifs” and “maybes” that had never been so close. A little earlier that day, other emphatic words had been spoken: thrombosis, auricle of the heart, risk of sudden death, etc. Cancer treatments can become a crash course in anatomy as well as existential philosophy, as they can kill us trying to save ourselves.
That time, I had just learned about pulmonary embolisms, waking up on the bathroom floor, seconds, hours, maybe a thousand years, spent in an elsewhere without consciousness, literally thrown to the floor, in the middle of a life that I thought should have stood upright for so much longer.
The ends of the world, when they begin, tend to follow one another, as if fate were not moving for nothing.
The oncologist, after clapping his hands and arms in the air, talking to receptionists on other floors, asking for tests, said to me, “I’ll just call you back if it’s serious.” I hadn’t arrived at my car, in the parking lot of the big CHUS, ordering the evening meal in one of my favorite restaurants (I deserved it, I thought) that he reminded me. The brain, almost accustomed to traumatic functioning, had registered the words, but not their meaning.
I had hung up.
And I had called the restaurant, right away: “An apple pudding, yes, like the one my grandmother used to make. Cool, thanks, Julian. »
After the meal, I sat cross-legged on this blue velvet sofa, made a little ridiculous under the circumstances. Through the window, I watched the street throwing itself towards the Champ-de-Mars park, wondering how far my fall would go.
And I started talking about last wishes, not realizing that’s what they’re called, those things you ask for when there’s a good chance you won’t be there, sooner than we didn’t believe it.
I spoke of dead letters then.
In the wardrobe in the bedroom, there was the little wooden box, the one with my initials embroidered in golden beads: NP-G under the lid.
Yes, that one, with in it all the letters ever sent, the ones that had allowed me to survive without the other all those times when the water, the wind or both had capsized the relational boat, without the two protagonists go back in afterwards. All the silences, misunderstandings, confinements and other reductions which had made mutual understanding impossible had found in these letters a form of temporary resolution, a balm, but above all an opportunity to shed consciousness what, it had to be recognized, was repeated from relationship to relationship.
The famous question “Who am I for this to happen to me?” by Jung, when stripped of its accusatory tenor, has always served as a guide for me to identify tensions, conflicts and other ruptures in my life, opportunities to enlarge the field of vision on my problems. Once the anger, the sadness, the feeling of betrayal and “useless pride” (title of an exhibition by visual artist Chantal Bonneville) had passed, there remained a word to be released, the one that would never come back. to another, but which would allow a little of the indigestible to be digested.
The little box was full of them. I had asked my lover to get rid of them in a way that would never reach the people to whom these letters were addressed. Basically, it was not to them that I was writing, but much more to these characters that we take from our original psychic theaters and that we endlessly project onto all these new stage companions.
The anticoagulants took effect, the clots melted away in four weeks. There was neither last meal nor sudden death, only a slow death with which I have come to terms since I knew I was “tending towards death”, simply human among all the others bearing the same destiny, but without any possibility of cover the whole thing with an infantile illusion. The little box therefore remained in place with its precious contents, awaiting the continuation.
This week, I read you carefully about your sorrows. And I replied to each of you, so that these magnificent impulses do not remain a dead letter. In addition to the great tragedies of existence: death, loss, incidents that deprive us of an essential part of ourselves, there were also, in your stories, all those relationships which, without you seeing it coming, you escaped, like that, leaving you alone with, in your hand, a soft rope, the one which, just before, was well stretched, held at its other end by this loved one, whom you still love, a little, in a small instead of you.
This week, I invite you to write this letter that you will never send.
And I prefer not to burn them, but to consign them in a precious little box, because basically, can we really get rid of all the lessons delivered by each of them?
No, I prefer that we die at the same time, them and me.