A Good Death Read Online Free PDF

Provence. It lasted right up to the time he made his diagnosis, when he decided to explain my problem to me. He should have kept his mouth shut. You, he said, are a typical Québécois son of a typical Québécois father. He would have gone on to elaborate except that I suddenly had had enough of his uncomfortable couch, reeking as it did of other people’s psychoses. If my father and I were typical, then we were neither ill nor marginalized. We were normal, and there is no cure for normalcy. Normalcy isn’t a disease, it’s a state of being. I’d been going to a shrink for five years in order to rid myself of my father. Tonight I tell myself that if I spent more time with my father I would learn a lot more than I learned in those five onerous years.
    All right, I know, I’m wandering a bit. It’s Christmas, I’m in love, I’m in a forgiving, compromising mood. Except in my father’s case. Compromise yes, but he has to earn my forgiveness. He has to ask for it.

BERNARD GIVES ME AN ANGRY LOOK BECAUSE I’M POURING WINE IN MY FATHER’S GLASS WITHOUT FIRST CHECKING THE COLOUR. My father has sat back down slowly (he seems to be moving with so much difficulty that I can’t help wondering if he’s in pain). He isn’t suffering, though, he’s giggling. He has broken through the cheese barricade. His eyes sparkle, shine, speak volumes. He sticks a finger in the Camembert and utters a groan of visceral satisfaction. Ah! ah!, two onomatopoeic syllables that I take to mean the cheese is at its peak of ripeness. My mother notes without conviction that one doesn’t stick one’s finger in cheese, but she’s talking to herself. My father hasn’t listened to her for so long it makes me wonder if he has ever in his life heard a word she’s said. There are those who go through life deaf, just as there are those who go through it blind. My father is one of the deaf ones. I take his arm. Since his stroke and his obvious human frailty I find I can touch him, and for the first time I am in physical contact with him. But when I touch his arm or his shoulder it’s to get a word from him, or to ask a question. To create a sense of security by means of a gentle gesture, as a parent might reassure a child before asking an important question, “Are you pregnant?” for example. In this way I am his superior, for once in my life. If I want to I can become my father’s father. I don’t want that, but the possibility is there, and I must confess that it pleases me, makes me feel more generous towards him. Let’s say I like myself better in the guise of a well-meaning philosopher prince.
    “Dad,” I say, “that big walleye that won first prize in the fishing contest, why did you say you were the one who caught it?”
    He coughs, or perhaps fakes a cough, I can’t tell because he’s the big boss, a real man’s man, as in those old French films. A whiz at manipulation. He takes a crust of bread, smears it with Camembert and adds a pat of butter, stuffs the whole thing in his mouth and, while chewing with his tired jaws, interrupts the operation to knock back half a glass of wine. I stand up. He grabs me by the arm as he used to when I was a child, just above the elbow, and I know he can stick his thumb and index finger right into those folds where the nerves are so sensitive that they scream out when they’re squeezed. It isn’t the fear of pain that frightens me, it’s the memory that engulfs me, and the sense I have that this little reconciliation of ours—and we have to be reconciled sometime before we die—that this small moment of tenderness between us is going to evaporate because of the question I have just put to him. How is it that as children we want to know everything, whereas at sixty we proudly proclaim that life is a mystery? Simply because children do not stop being the children of their parents. There’s another easy explanation the shrink never bothered to mention.
    He gives a small burp. Afraid that