A Very Easy Death

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1964

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Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Pages 8-51

Pages 52-109

Pages 110-132

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Symbols & Motifs

Lying

Simone, Hélène, and the doctors lie to Françoise out of fear that knowing she’s dying will hasten her death and poison her final days with dread. In 1960s France, it was common to withhold a terminal diagnosis from a patient for this reason, As Simone’s guilt indicates, however, the choice to do so was still fraught with difficult consequences. Beauvoir’s interest in lying as an ethical quandary is shown in her 1947 book The Ethics of Ambiguity which explores the morality of prevarication. In withholding Françoise’s diagnosis, Simone acts against her stated belief in the ethical responsibility not to infringe on others’ freedom of choice: Simone denies her mother the informed freedom to choose how she will spend her final days because she doesn’t know that they’re her final days.

Although this is a single lie in reality, in the narrative it has the resonance of a recurrent motif: the lie is a choice that Simone makes day after day and her unsparing and exhaustive account of this ethical interrogation creates a sense of layered up deceit. The main lie also creates other dependent lies or misleading behaviors, such as the lie about peritonitis, or that Simone going to Prague indicates her belief in Françoise’s recovery. This layering adds to the momentum of the narrative toward Françoise’s death, and the building of guilt and loss as this moment approaches. It also creates an inherent conflict in the narrative between the inevitability of Françoise’s death and the denial of it; the one thing that everyone is focused on is the thing that can’t be acknowledged.

The “Race Between Pain and Death”

Françoise’s cancer diagnosis starts, in Beauvoir’s words, a “race between death and torture” (70). Later she states, “In this race between pain and death we most earnestly hoped that death would come first” (92). Beauvoir hopes her mother will die the “sweet,” “gentle” death of the title, either one that’s natural, eased by narcotics, or accomplished by euthanasia; however, the resuscitation expert Dr. N. prolongs Françoise’s suffering with life-extending procedures which gratify his medical power and fulfil the impersonal medical-religious mission to preserve life at any cost. The symbol of Françoise’s race between death and pain explores the medicalization of dying: the priority of lifespan over quality of life, the objectification of the patient, and the obsession with technique as an end in itself.

Dr. N. epitomizes the medicalized approach to dying. He objectifies Françoise with his treatment and wields his authority to dismiss Beauvoir and Hélène’s objections to his agenda of lifespan over quality of life. Beauvoir writes that “[h]e was smart, athletic, energetic, infatuated with technique, and he had resuscitated Maman with great zeal; but for him she was the subject of an interesting experiment and not a person” (62). Dr. N. treats Françoise as a machine-like organism to be kept running, not a person to be cared for. He dismisses Beauvoir’s questions about the purpose of the often painful life-extending treatments, citing a self-serving perspective of duty: “‘I am doing what has to be done’” (31, 62). The narrative therefore makes Dr. N. the antagonist in the race between pain and death; he comes to represent the pain that is inflicted on Françoise in order to delay her death. Part of the memoir’s sadness is in the sisters’ early expressed wish that death will come before pain, given that this wish is not fulfilled.

Physical alienation

Beauvoir documents how sickness alienates Françoise from her own body, and how this physical deterioration gradually depersonalizes Françoise in Beauvoir’s mind. As her illness progresses, Françoise grows distant from her body. When she catches sight of herself in a mirror, she doesn’t recognize herself: “Maman fixed an unbelieving, severe and haughty gaze upon the mirror. ‘Is that me?’” (67). Her expression conveys her anger over her body’s disobedience: It has diverged from her image of herself. Later, Françoise entirely loses control of her body as it deteriorates, her surgical wound oozing malodorous pus, her pores leaking uric acid, her skin turning blue (87).

In sickness Françoise’s body stops obeying her, starting a split between self and body. No longer an instrument of her will, Françoise’s body is appropriated by cancer in a process of depersonalization. Beauvoir is terrified by “the work of those mysterious colonies between her skin and her bones that were devouring her cells” (49) because they aren’t just making Françoise sick; they’re corroding Beauvoir’s image of her, her very identity as her mother. Conversely, before her deterioration becomes severe, Françoise is able to reconcile with herself and embrace a sense of freedom despite being more physically constrained (by her body) than she’s ever been before. This sense of freedom may prefigure the release of bodily pain that death brings, especially in the context of Françoise’s religious belief that death is the separation of the soul from the body.

Beauvoir uses medical language to convey alienation. She writes that the intestinal tumor is an “extremely virulent sarcoma which had begun to disseminate throughout the organism” (70). Françoise is no longer her mother but an “organism.” In existentialist terms, Françoise loses the ability to live meaningfully and is reduced to existence. With Françoise’s sickness, Beauvoir describes how physical reality, though always a constraint on freedom, can nearly extinguish it in sickness. The idea that Françoise’s body is betraying her creates a sense of alienation for Beauvoir that prefigures the death of her mother, separating them at the moment when Françoise will become simply a “body” rather than herself. No one has the power to prevent this and the body is therefore shown as separate from the will, ultimately implacable and frightening. Beauvoir’s atheism makes this sense of personal powerlessness devoid of religious hopefulness or consolation.