A Very Easy Death

These pages cover the main narrative description of Françoise’s decline and Beauvoir’s increasing reflection on their fraught relationship and reconciliation. Françoise’s terminal cancer diagnosis puts Beauvoir in an ethical dilemma: She can tell her mother—who has feared cancer her entire life—that she has weeks to live, or she can withhold the diagnosis and deny Françoise the freedom to choose how she spends her remaining time. The Lie of an Easy Death happens in the context of the clinic, where the doctors push to withhold the diagnosis and, more broadly, within a medical system that objectifies the dying. Despite her  reluctance, Beauvoir sides with the doctors because she believes the diagnosis would overwhelm her mother with dread.

In denying her mother the knowledge that she’s living her final weeks, Beauvoir breaches the ethic to not impinge on the freedom of others that she outlined herself in her treatise The Ethics of Ambiguity. Beauvoir recognizes this hypocrisy in herself, however: “Because she had always been deceived, gulled, I found this ultimate deception revolting. I was making myself an accomplice of that fate which was so misusing her” (71). All her life Françoise has lived a mostly passive existence molded by her milieu because she is treated as if she isn’t free—told what to do and what to think—and then mislead about why she’s miserable and resentful. The instruments of this deception are diffuse, spread throughout Françoise’s life, and no one of them has the intent purpose of obscuring Françoise’s existential predicament; that is just their combined effect. This changes with the deception in the clinic. The doctors, Hélène, and Beauvoir become the specific instruments of Françoise’s deception. Beauvoir recognizes that she is perpetuating her mother’s lifelong ignorance of her predicament, and this is why Beauvoir’s guilt is so acute.

The core of Françoise’s time in the geriatric clinic illustrates the lie of an easy death. Beauvoir wants her mother to die painlessly but at the same time she harbors the hope that her mother doesn’t have to die so soon. The life-prolonging treatments, such as the blood transfusions and IV vitamin infusions, fuel this hope by restoring to Françoise some appearance of health. Beauvoir is thereby drawn into the doctors’ pursuit of lifespan over quality of life, swayed by this agenda into (temporarily) relinquishing her hope of a quick, painless death for her mother.

Sometimes Beauvoir is bullied into these life-extending treatments, and this is an implicit exposure of her own weakness in the face of (male) authority, like her mother’s, despite the arrogant cruelty she recognizes in the doctors. This forms part of the theme The Pain of an Inauthentic Life. When Beauvoir questions the point of these treatments, Dr. N. reprimands her that it’s possible to keep Françoise alive for quite some time. He manipulates Beauvoir in service of his own agenda of making Françoise “the subject of an interesting experiment” (62). After pumping Françoise’s stomach—a procedure Beauvoir and her sister object to—he brandishes the jar of extracted pus and brags, “[a]t dawn she had scarcely four hours left. I have brought her back to life’” (32). Dr. N.’s demeanor is a pronounced representation of the domineering way in which patients (even bourgeois ones) are treated by the medical system in mid-20th-century France. In Françoise’s treatment, the doctors’ attitude is that neither the patient nor the family knows what’s best for them.

Despite her ignorance of her true predicament and a clinic that prioritizes lifespan over quality of life, Françoise finds her first true freedom in years in the clinic and this is key to the most optimistic theme, The Affirmation of Life. Beauvoir notes that not only does Françoise’s fall finally get her to acknowledge her age, her subsequent illness “[breaks] the shell of her prejudices and pretensions” (69). In both cases what Beauvoir describes is, in existentialist terms, her mother going from living an inauthentic existence to living an authentic one. In sickness, the existential dissonance that plagued Françoise dissolves and with it her resentment. For the first time in her life her world demands that she take care of herself. There is nothing to do in the clinic but focus on getting better and enjoying what pleasures she can; her circumstance no longer dictates that she sacrifice herself for others. The resolution of this dissonance brings inner peace, the first of Françoise’s life: “Her restored beauty and her recovered smile expressed her inner harmony and, on this death-bed, a kind of happiness” (68). Though it may seem tragically ironic that only near death does Françoise come to fully appreciate life, it’s better than dying stuck in resentment. Every chapter of life—including the last—presents a unique set of circumstances to make the most of. This doesn’t guarantee happiness or freedom from suffering, as Françoise’s final weeks illustrate, but it does bring the relief of finally coming to terms with yourself. This alignment, this harmony, is what Beauvoir means by the affirmation of life: the clear-eyed acknowledgement of the constraints of mortal circumstance and the human tenacity to pursue freedom within them.