More than thirty years later Some goodbyesMarie Laberge publishes a novel which could have had the same title, a text as brief as it is impactful which is entitled Ten days. The ten chapters hear a single word, that of a 77-year-old woman, suffering from cancer for two years, who is preparing to receive medical assistance in dying. “Ten days. This is what I have left. To live and to die. The last ten days of my life. »
To capture the spirit of the times, to crystallize in his fictions social issues, family dramas, to depict the eternal battle between the impulses of the heart and the voices of reason, but above all to observe mourning from all its angles, translating it in all its complexity, Marie Laberge has no equal. After divorce, murder, sudden infant death syndrome and suicide, the 73-year-old author devotes her fifteenth novel to a subject that is both timeless and extremely topical.
“I held my fate in my hands. I would not be a victim of my body. I will order him to end it. In my own way. According to my desire, my will. Without pain. » Every day until December 14, which will be the last, the narrator, whose first name we will never know, writes down in a notebook “what [l]’inhabits before being disinhabited forever’. Upsetting without being tearful, intimate without being egocentric, retrospective without being nostalgic, the ritual allows the narrator, very endearing, capable of benevolence as well as intransigence, to take a look in the rearview mirror, to take stock. It is not an examination of conscience, not a settling of scores, only a final letter addressed in complete honesty to herself, pages that she promises to burn before leaving this world.
She describes the members of her clan to us: her daughters and their spouses, her grandchildren, but also her sister-in-law, Jeanne, an extraordinarily empathetic woman, endowed with a rare intelligence of the heart. She talks about the missing, starting with her mother. She revisits important friendships, but emphasizes love stories: Benoît, her ex-husband, Hervé, a companion of seven years, but especially Rémi, a married man with whom she experienced true passion. “We had a bond stronger than time and space. We were more than an escape. We were. And we lived every moment of our relationship as we should live every moment of our existence. »
Of course, the narrator wonders about medical assistance in dying, but don’t expect an ethics treatise either. They are, first and foremost, farewells, the reflections of a remarkably intelligent woman, ferociously lucid, endowed with a rich vocabulary and an implacable sense of formula, but all the same helpless like many when faced with death. . “Why does dying always have this air of defeat? Of flight and renunciation. Although it is a common fate. How have we managed to ignore it to the point where it becomes an unpleasant surprise when it happens? Kind of a bad twist of fate. »
Some will talk about popular psychology, personal growth, Sunday philosophy, but there is no doubt that a very large number of people will find peace in these precious pages. There is certainly something there to help us live… and die.