As I write this I await my mother's imminent death.
BarcelonaAs I write this, I'm awaiting my mother's imminent death, and I've just returned from a funeral. I wanted to write about another topic, but the truth is, right now I don't feel up to it. And since nothing stops in the face of death, since I'll still have to pay for groceries, rent, extracurricular activities, and the regularization of Social Security contributions in 2023, it's also necessary for me to continue producing, collecting, and invoicing. And writing articles.
In these circumstances, I inevitably think about the way we think about and remember the dead. There's a lot of literature born out of a close death, whether it's that of a child, a parent, a partner, or a close friend. If we were to make a list, we'd never finish. I was thinking of quoting someone, but I'm finding it difficult to choose: what to include and what to leave out? Reading about death, like reading about love, disappointments, or anger, helps us find companionship and comfort, to feel more human and less alone—out there is an unknown person who has sounded like us and has put words to what we don't know how to call—although it is still a variant of the well-known evil of many, cone.
Read to understand yourself and to digest reality
There are those who claim the usefulness of reading, and there are those who, driven by a furious anti-utilitarianism, do the exact opposite: claim that reading is useless, and find precisely in this the great value of literature. I am one of the former: for some people, reading is useful not only to understand reality, which means understanding oneself and others, but also to digest it, something that is not always easy. If we take into account that the principle of homeopathy is that what causes an illness can also cure it, we might end up thinking that literature is a homeopathic remedy. I think about when I got divorced and devoured with fanatical enthusiasm fictions about divorce (Geir Gulliksen and Rachel Cusk, among others). Sometimes what is necessary to cure something is to get fed up. Or to immunize oneself: perhaps reading is a vaccine.
However, the fact that it has a use—or rather, a lot of uses depending on the person, the book, and the moment—is not the reason that drives us to read. Usefulness is an extra. What I mean is that we should not read for its usefulness but because we like it. There are many useful things that, however, we don't do because we don't like doing them: I, for example, am incapable of exercising, even though I understand and know how useful it would be for my well-being. And I have no need to convince anyone that it is useless. That would be absurd. So I don't understand this attitude, sometimes even belligerent, of denying the usefulness of literature: as if usefulness were something dirty, corrupt, or blasphemous. As if something that was useful could no longer be good.
I was thinking, then, about the usefulness of literature and death. If reading about death helps us (at least some of us), writing about death does too, because it allows you to process all the contradictory thoughts: after all, death remains something difficult to understand. For me, the deaths of people I know leave me stunned, as if my brain weren't able to integrate the idea of total physical disappearance. Death is implausible.
Waiting, then, for the stupor that my mother's death will cause, I try to prepare myself. Would I want to say something at the funeral? If so, what? How can I summarize all the confusion and sadness in a five-minute text that I would have to read in fits and starts, interrupted by crying and sniffles, a text that will be, by definition, insufficient? How can I say anything that doesn't sound like something I've heard a thousand times before about forgetting, remembering, loss, grief, the feeling of unreality? Everything that can be said about death is banal, unoriginal, because death is banality with a capital B: we'll all end up here without exception, no matter how original we are.
I realize that if I have to speak on the day of the funeral, it would be best to think about it now that I can see the battering ram that's knocking me down, but that hasn't knocked me down yet. Then I think I won't be able to say anything. Would it be better to remain silent that day? Perhaps when faced with death, one can only respond with silence. I fear that if I start writing a funeral oration about my mother, I'll end up with a 400-page book: that would be the only way to say everything that needs to be said.
The agony may drag on, or perhaps it will unexpectedly rekindle. Or perhaps by the time this text is published, I'll be irrevocably orphaned. In the meantime, I might read some famous funeral orations to feel more at ease.
