It’s the story of a big sensitive girl who has just lost her dad (me).
Death appeared as a deliverance at the end of a dazzling cancer. I discovered that it is not always black or opaque, that it can knock out and relieve with the same impulse. This text will be sensitive, but not heavy — I assure you.
My father and I have in common that we have always sought, often found, refuge in literature. In January, during a first hospitalization, in the interlude before the diagnosis of an advanced glioblastoma, he asked me what I thought of the last Houellebecq.
In Annihilate, the French writer stages a family confronted with the disease of the father. As much as I was eager to dive into this novel, it made me anxious and gave me nightmares… I dropped it on page 322, almost in the middle, with the intention of coming back to it during the summer holidays. summer. I don’t know if I will have the strength.
In moments of great vulnerability, it is difficult to find the works to accompany oneself. A book did my father a lot of good during this first hospital stay: It’s getting lateby Gilles Archambault.
The music-loving writer entrusts to it his desire to be alone at the moment of his departure. “When I enter nothingness, I would like to see women’s gestures again in a flash, yours, Lise, and hear children’s voices. It would be an almost proper death. But I would be alone. Don’t show me off. »
My father quoted me this passage, precisely. This novel allowed him to catch his breath in the heart of a merciless winter, before medication and illness plunged him into confusion from which he would no longer emerge.
At the beginning of spring, we learned that the planned treatments could not take place. Two very small Murakami had just been published by Belfond and because my father was a great admirer of the Japanese master, I had the reflex to cling to them like a buoy.
One is a collection of short stories titled first person singular and the second, an illustrated story of 80 pages (Abandon a cat), in which the writer recounts his relationship to his father.
Mine claimed the two Murakami, but the tumors had taken hold and by this stage he no longer had the ability to concentrate to read and did not want me to read to him.
What can literature do in the face of the imminence of death? The question fell on me with heaviness, began to inhabit me, to follow me. For me too, reading had become difficult. Even Connelly’s thrillers, the direct and reassuring presence of Harry Bosch, his investigator, could no longer distract me.
One day in April, in another hospital room, after another hospitalization, among his personal belongings on the portable table — glass of water, glasses, palette of dark chocolate, lemon drops and box of tissues —, the two plates with saffron covers
On Murakami’s Book
That you can no longer read
Small doses of Decadron
Lined up in a tight row
That day, that’s it
What will we use
Literature
In May, I found a nugget of comfort in kaleidoscope my heart, a collection by North Shore poet Kristina Gauthier-Landry, met at the Salon du livre in Sept-Îles. On page 124, there is talk of a “huge rope / full of knots / the rope holds a boat / heavy and it burns / my hands” […] / they whisper to me / to let go / to float / the boat on the water / but I don’t want to / I can’t / what if it crashes / what if it overturns / what if it gets lost / and if / and if / and if”.
Support found in a poem. Words like a mirror, a still lake, a reflection to say that the moment when the rope must be let go will be shared by others, will be perfect and that this moment has arrived. The boat sails gently towards a golden horizon and my pops at the helm wears his captain’s cap.