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The knowledge that because of her age my mother's life must soon come to an end did not lessen the horrible surprise: she had sarcoma. Cancer, thrombosis, pneumonia: it is as violent and unforeseen as an engine stopping in the middle of the sky.
—

I met a woman of fifty overcome with sadness because she had just lost her mother, I thought her neurotic: we are all mortal; at eighty you are quite old enough to be one of the dead But it is not true. You do not die from being born, nor from having lived, nor from old age.
You die from something.

Time vanishes behind those who leave this world, and the older I get the more my past years draw together. The Maman darling of the days when I was ten can no longer be told from the inimical woman who oppressed my adolescence; I wept for them both when I wept for my old mother.

A should so happily have broken with those habits if Maman had been cured, but I still had a nostalgia for them, since it was in losing her that I lost them.

Maman loved life as I love it and in the face of death she had the same feeling of rebellion that I have…. Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death.

Besides, Maman was not afraid of either God or the Devil: only of leaving this earth.

'The doctors said she would go out like a candle: it wasn't like that, it wasn't like that at all, said my sister, sobbing.
But, Madame, replied the nurse,
I assure you it was a very easy death.

Besides, how could she have tried to understand me since she avoided looking into her own heart? As for discovering in attitude that would not have set us apart, nothing in her life had ever prepared her for such a thing the unexpected sent her into a panic, because she had been taught never to think, act or feel except in a readymade framework.

We might still have come to an understanding if, instead of asking everybody to pray for my soul, she had given me a little confidence and sympathy. I know now what prevented her from doing so: she had stoo much to pay back, too many wounds to salve, to put herself in another's place. In actual doing she made every sacrifice, but her feelings did not take her out of herself. —

I looked at her arm, into which there was Howing a life that was no longer anything but sickness and torment, I asked myself why?

her heart and her mind had been squeezed into an ar-mour of principles and prohibitions. She had been taught to pull the laces hard and tight herself. A full-blooded, spirited woman lived on inside her, but a stranger to herself, deformed and mutilated.

Thinking against oneself often bears fruit; but with my mother it was another question again-she lived against herself. She had appetites in plenty: she spent all her strength in repressing them and she underwent this denial an anger. In her childhood her body, —

in the prime of her life, she was no longer allowed to satisfy them.
She went on sleeping beside the man whom she loved, and who almost never made love to her any more, she hoped, she waited and she pined, in vain. Complete abstinence would have been less of a trial for her pride than this promiscuity

Her case alone would be
enough to convince me that bourgeois marriage is an unnatural institution. The wedding-ring on her finger had authorized her to become acquainted with pleasure; her senses had grown demanding; at thirty-five, —

One of Maman's contradictions was that she thoroughly believed in the nobility of devotion, while at the same time she had tastes, aversions and desires that were too masterful for her not to loathe whateven went against them. She was continually rebek gagainst the restraints and the privations that she inflicted upon herself.

The sight of my mother's nakedness had jarred me. No body existed less for me: none existed more. As a child I had loved it dearly; as an adolescent it had flled me with an uneasy repulsion; all this was perfectly in the ordinary course of things and it seemed reasonable to me that her body should retain its dual nature,
that it should be both repugnant and holy — a taboo.

told my sister of a nightmare that she often had.
I am being chased: I run, I run, and I come
up against a wall; I have to jump over this wall,
and I do not know what there is behind it; it
terrifies me. She also said to her, Death itself
does not frighten me; it is the jump I am afraid of