A Very Easy Death

Part of what reconciles Beauvoir to her mother in her final days is her tenacity in the face of sickness and death. Françoise refuses to slip into the comfort of resignation, either by relinquishing her passion for living or taking consolation in the afterlife—two attitudes that deny the irreplaceable preciousness of every moment of life. In this refusal, Françoise embodies the life-affirming ethos of Beauvoir’s existential philosophy; in the first and last lines of the memoir Beauvoir asserts that every chapter of life, even the final one, has a (potential) meaning worth fighting for.

Beauvoir bookends A Very Easy Death with two assertions that death is an affront to life that should be fought until the end. For the epigraph she quotes the first stanza of Dylan Thomas’s famous poem “Do not go gentle into that good night:” “Do not go gentle into that good night. / Old age should burn and rave at close of day; / Rage, rage against the dying of the light” (3). Thomas’s poem is a call to resist death even in old age, and here Beauvoir quotes it to establish the existential importance of fighting the resigned attitude toward life that some adopt in old age.