In A Very Easy Death, Simone De Beauvoir said, “She (her mother) had a very easy death; an upper class death.” But it wasn’t an easy death. In this frank account of her mother’s struggle with intestinal cancer, Beauvoir not only reveals the struggle to release our loved ones but also the lies that we sometime perpetrate to spare them of suffering. The process of dying was gruesome, even for her mother, who wanted to keep a stiff upper lip. Worse were the doctors whose only goal was to keep the p...

I read this book in French: "Une morte très douce." That means I chewed it over a bit more than I would have in English, since I still read French rather slowly. It is a brilliant book, and I want to reread it in English to see if the English translation would be suitable to pair with something like Phillip Roth's account of the death of his father ("Patrimony") in a class on death and dying. Simone de Beauvoir had a troubled relationship with her mother, but she was at her mother's side for the...

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. ... When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets. One of my favorite reads of 2018.

Brief, poignant account of her mother's death.

I encountered A Very Easy Death twice before actually reading it. The two encounters amounted to radically different readings of the same text. My first encounter with A Very Easy Death was not exactly a reading but an abridgment of the book that appeared in an anthology entitled Mothers: Memories, Dreams and Reflections by Literary Daughters edited by Susan Cahill. The collection aims to present an array of well-known women writers’ memories of their mothers depicted in “positive tones and vivi...

She had appetites in plenty: she spent all her strength in repressing them and she underwent this denial in anger.

Une Mort Tres Douce = A Very Easy Death, Simone de BeauvoirA retrospective and reflective review of the last weeks in the life of the author's aging mother. Threaded throughout the chronicle of the progressive downhill course of the patient dying of cancer are flashbacks to the earlier relationships among the author, her sister, and their mother. The course of the illness enables the reader to view many of the common problems that inform the doctor-patient, nurse-patient, and parent-child relati...

" I was watching her, she was here, present, aware, but totally unaware of the story she was living. Her eyes had become huge, on her dry face ; she stared at me with a dramatic fixation, as if she had just invented the look. With this gaze she clings to life, as her nails clung to the sheet, so as not to perish...To live.. " We have fears in ourselves, but also unusual forms of courage. Sometimes it becomes the mission of writers to dig deep for us as well, those who still stand on the sidelin...

Without emotion, but not love, the detailed and naturalistic account of the illness and the agony of a mother. When the talent of Simone de Beauvoir sublimates suffering and gives meaning to death, it makes it a work of art.

Early September, I got a call from the hospital about a close friend's health status. That call said she was crashing. I met her in the ICU just a day before. It had been more than a year of realization any moment could be the last, any second could be the end. It was expected, yet, it hit me hard. In late September, I was half-awake in my bed at 4 am because of the conversation just outside my door. I was craving silence. After 20 minutes, the conversation died down. My door opened. I got up an...

Audiobook... ....read by Hillary Huber 3 hours and 4 minutes “Wow”, I said to myself....’another book about death?/!.....Joyce Carol Oats’ book “Breathe”....should’ve been enough to last me at least another six months. Plus, I just finished a newly published book, “Inseparable”, by Simone de Beauvoir, associated with with death of a close friend. I have no idea why I grabbed another ‘death’ book...other than I wanted to read another book by Simone de Beauvoir. This was a short three hour investm...

“When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets.”Brutal Honesty. Simone de Beauvoir recounts the last thirty days of her mother’s life. The fall. The hospitalization. The medications. The misdiagnosis. The diagnosis. The cancer.If you’ve ever had the experience of watching someone you love slowly die then you will almost certainly feel an empathetic kinship with Simone. I know I did. I found her misgivings eerily familiar. When propriety dictates...

This should be compulsory reading for anyone that has suffered from or has a family member that suffers from or has suffered from cancer in the past; ipso facto it should be compulsory reading for practically everyone. The short book is a real life account of the last 30 days of Simone De B’s mother and how she died of stomach cancer – intestinal cancer to be precise. The book was really really moving in places and yet the way Simone writes has a magic about it even in this morbid topic of death...

Have you ever spent the last days of your mother's life by her side? I have. This memoir of that experience by my much read and much admired Simone de Beauvoir hit me hard but not unpleasantly. In the first volume of de Beauvoir's memoirs, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, written when she was in her forties, covered the first 23 years of her life. Her experiences and insights helped me understand my relationship with my mother. We both fought against our mothers' protective and restraining method

“Il n’y a pas de mort naturelle,” writes Simone de Beauvoir: “There is no such thing as a natural death”. “All men are mortal, but for each man, his own death is an accident and, even if he is aware of it and consents to it, an undue violence” (p. 123-124). First published in 1964, Une mort très douce chronicles the last days of her mother, Françoise de Beauvoir, who passed away just one year earlier. Part memoir or journal and part notebook for her treatise La vieillesse, which would be publish...

For all fictitious books that I've read and felt my life was eerily similar to, there've been even fewer non-fiction books that I've felt the same way about.  But A Very Easy Death catapulted me back two years ago, when there was so much suffering in a hospital bed that I was all too privy to.  Simone de Beauvoir raises the same questions that I did those two years ago.  When do you stop viewing your loved ones as living and more as a corpse?  When does their suffering outweigh their living?  Ca...

An excellent way to remember Mlle de Beauvoir’s precision as well as how an excellent psychologist she is. For my part, having read her works has so far ameliorated, altered and at times recuperated my womanhood, adolescence and, inarguably, my relationship with selves. Now, with this book, she happens to have contributed to the relationship with my mother, to my understanding of it, and a great deal as well. *sighs* Seriously, Simone, I don’t know where this is going. It started to feel as if m...

Certainly more impactful than Handke’s; of too-different a timbre than Roth’s; toward a completely different end than Knausgård’s; etc…de Beauvoir’s memoir and meditation upon a parent’s death is, unsurprisingly, unflinchingly honest. But that’s why one reads de Beauvoir, no? Sartre might be mentioned a few times, but that bastard’s entire corpus doesn’t touch this:“There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into q...

“Religion could do no more for my mother than the hope of posthumous success could do for me. Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death.”An honest, intimate account of watching a close relative whither away through constant pain, constant suffering. In being confronted with death, we understand our desire to live and the meaning in our lives.I wish I had read this earlier.