Osame Osayande’s Reviews > A Very Easy Death > Status Update

My mother encouraged one to be optimistic when, crippled with arthritis and dying, she asserted the infinite value of each instant; but her vain tenaciousness also ripped and tore the reassuring curtain of everyday triviality.

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.
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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. —