A Very Easy Death

Content Warning: This section of the guide and the source material refer to terminal illness and death, bereavement, addiction, and suicide.

Françoise’s health fluctuates in the weeks following her surgery. For a period, she is reenergized, and Hélène plans to move her to her and her husband’s new farmhouse in Alsace, raising Françoise’s hopes for the future. Françoise also takes new delight in everyday pleasures like the cool touch of fresh bedsheets.

However, new pain threatens Françoise’s comfort, and death looms every day—at least in her daughters’ minds. Hélène and Simone alternate accompanying their mother at the clinic. There, Simone preoccupies herself with helping the nurses care for Françoise, who can do nothing for herself. In the course of this care, Françoise is less recognizable as Simone’s mother and increasingly an unfamiliar, dying body. Françoise’s acceptance of the intimate humiliations of sickness surprises Simone.

At home, undistracted by the banalities of her mother’s care, Simone is overwhelmed by guilt and dread. She agonizes over lying to her mother and every time the phone rings she thinks Françoise has died. Simone condemns herself for agreeing to the doctors’ demand to operate but realizes there was no good alternative: Euthanasia wasn’t an option, and Françoise likely would have lived for days even if they hadn’t operated, the intestinal blockage causing increasingly excruciating pain in her final days.