Agathe's Summer

by Didier Pourquery

  “I feel like it doesn’t …”

  “I want to know why …”

  Her eyes wide open, a frown on her face, she can’t finish the sentences she launches toward us like cries for help. We have the feeling her brain is having trouble finding words.

  Her trachea is too tight, and isn’t allowing enough air to get through. The excess of carbon dioxide in her brain has a name—hypercapnia. Her arteries are too full of CO2. Marc stops by the room and says they’re going to give her oxygen so she can manage until she slips into a coma.

  Night fell a while ago. I explain what’s going on to Alex. He’s in shock.

  Around 10 p.m. I realize I’m watching my daughter die of suffocation. Her eyes are half closed, her face fallen in. There’s nothing I can do other than watch her.

  I think of her on her motor-scooter in Oléron back in 1998, eons ago.

  Alex turns on the TV. We sit Agathe up in a half-reclining position. She’s trying to catch a wisp of air, to find her breath. In the American film playing on Canal Plus, a cowboy is killed from a shot in the back.

  I watch Agathe. She is only half conscious, and is silent. From time to time a desperate look appears on her face. As the night wears on I manage to keep myself in one piece thanks to Juliette’s supportive text messages, hour after hour. I find strength in my love for her, just as I regained strength during our weekend at the beach in the Gironde.

  Sabine and Clarisse arrive from Bordeaux. Agathe is finally asleep thanks to a strong dose of morphine. They’ve pumped her up with sedatives that also affect the respiratory system. It’s double or nothing in the medical world, but it’s the only one we’ve got. Agathe drifts into a deep sleep that resembles a coma, with apnea at times. She sleeps and wakes in waves of interrupted rest.

  After twelve hours of watch, it’s as if I’m anesthetized, jet-lagged, not knowing what else to do except smile serenely, without drama or passion.

  I think of what Henri Calet said the night before he died: “Don’t shake me. I’m full of tears.” I don’t cry, or barely. Last night I let myself cry a little, in Juliette’s arms.

  I take Clarisse home around 3 a.m. and then return to Foch to doze in my armchair, across from Sabine, who sits on the other side of the bed.

  This morning when the nurse tried to wake her to check her vitals, Agathe panicked. She was unable to breathe, suffocating, and in complete distress. Around 7:30 a.m. they gave her a powerful sedative to help her … sleep.

  Sabine recounts her last real conversation with her, Sunday, August 5. That night Agathe had explained to her that in reality she was more interested in psychology for what she could get out of it than as something she could use to help others. That she actually wanted to become a reporter, to testify about the lives of others who, like her, suffer and hope.

  Sabine had talked to Agathe’s psychoanalyst, whom Agathe had also told about her wish to be cremated and that the ceremony of the scattering of the ashes be barefoot in the sand.

  This Thursday, August 9, drags on as if in a dream, the sky dark all afternoon. The clan is all gathered, Clarisse, Émilie, and Tristan, the friend, the brother, from the rue Fontaine years. We talk about childhood memories, the good times, as she sleeps in our midst. It’s as if she’s almost already gone. Her psychoanalyst also spends a few hours by her side, with us.

  Tristan is a nurse’s aide in another hospital. He massages Agathe’s feet. Tristan possesses a great beauty born of rebellion, generosity, curiosity, and tenderness. He’s the spitting image of his father when he was his age, Raoul Vaneigem. The same look of smiling determination, bright and sober at the same time. Tristan stands up for the underprivileged in this world, whether in South America or in Parisian hospitals. At the moment he is simply massaging Agathe’s feet, head down, as if he’s trying to soften her, soothe her, while she gradually fades away.

  Clarisse observes her sister with air of infinite tenderness at the same time as utter disbelief. It just cannot be. Her eyes don’t leave Agathe’s face, as if, despite it all, she were expecting something to happen. A sign, an awakening, a miracle.

  Émilie is at once a total mess and completely pulled together, all scrunched together on the inside while maintaining perfect composure on the outside.

  Alex is working on a crossword puzzle. I watch him and suddenly get it: He’s waiting, just like us, it’s just his way of waiting. He’s waiting because that what we’ve all always done with Agathe: waited for her to get better, to cheer up, to fall asleep, to stop coughing, to wake up from her nap, or from her anesthesia. We’ve been waiting for so long and that wait always ended with Agathe’s smile. So Alex continues with his crossword. And I get it.

  For my part, I’m taking notes in my notebook, as if on autopilot. I send texts to friends. I observe Agathe and I write.

  That afternoon Sabine sends out a group email:

  “Since yesterday, the time-bomb in her body has started its terrifying count-down. At brief intervals she opens her eyes wide to look through an opaque cloud. Today we continue our strange existence in this room that so many of you helped decorate with your faces on the poster, and her drawings and Chinese ink paintings. Time unfolds, surreal but perfectly real at the same time. We laugh less, and cry a lot. We’re destroyed and confounded by what is about to happen. We will forever be bound by this.”

  I look at the nightstand. There’s the soapstone Buddha, her cell phone, the little bouquet of dried immortelle flowers held together by a hair clip, photos of Oléron that Anne, the art therapist, took recently, lots of bottles of pills, and a little book about cats.

  The day goes by in deep silence. Night is falling. Agathe is on her bed, with Ratus her stuffed animal by her side. She’s with us. She’s here with her story, her passions, her ideas, her love of life, her way of immediately becoming the center of attention, ahead of us, all of her still fully here. But silence descends around her. We’re simply accompanying her, minute by minute.

  Around 1 in the morning I take Clarisse, Tristan, Émilie, and Alex back home. I don’t know why, but in that little car bursting at the seams, I pretend to be a Parisian taxi driver, hugging the wheel, to make them laugh, to laugh again.

  Sabine and I find ourselves alone in the darkness of the room with our daughter, whose breathing has become weaker and weaker, and who has slipped deeper into a coma. It is a very gentle darkness inside this quiet hospital.

  Suddenly we notice Agathe’s breathing become more irregular. There are long pauses between each breath. At 2:40 a.m. her breathing stops.

  An immense calm descends on us. We watch. We know. 2:40 is the time she was born, on August 15th, 1984. We touch her, we speak to her. We leave the room. I send Juliette a text.

  While Sabine and the nurse “prepare” Agathe by wrapping her in a kind of white gown, I go around Paris picking up her sisters, Alex, and Tristan. In the rain, the little car that Juliette’s mother lent me speeds along the highway zigzagging between the trucks. I’m going too fast. Flash. It’s quiet in the car. All four of them have blank expressions on their faces

  In the early dawn light, we spend a long time in groups or alone next to Agathe’s bed, talking to her. I’m in the room with her. She is so beautiful, so serene.

  “Don’t be afraid, my Agathe, you are going to be with people who love you, your grandparents, Bonne-Maman, Mamine …”

  I know you are no longer in this body. Where are you? Agathe, are you here? Send a sign, please …

  And then the stretcher arrives to take her off to the operating bloc for the final autopsy.

  All together, we quietly clean out the room. We put all her belongings in bags. Big black plastic bags.

  And then there we are in the hospital parking lot, next to our cars, in the light morning rain. We kiss and hug and each go our own way. I take Émilie and Tristan back to the east side of Paris. Sabine goes home with Clarisse and Alex.

  It’s 7:30 a.m., this Friday, August 10th, 2007. I go home to find Julie
tte, and to sleep a little.

  I send an email to all of my friends.

  “Friday August 10th, at 2:40 am, Agathe stopped breathing forever. After a six-month struggle following her second transplant, and twenty-three years of fighting cystic fibrosis. Her last hours were magnificent, she died in serenity, without pain. The team at Foch who’ve been following her all along was wonderful.

  We will miss terribly the light that shone from her, her laugh, her spirit, and especially her courage. Life without her will seem less … alive, that’s for certain. But we firmly believe that she will remain with us forever. She would have turned twenty-three on August 15th at 2:40 am. She had the extreme elegance to die at the exact same time she was born. It was a very Agathe thing to do … always extraordinary, down to the last detail.”

  WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 15, 2007

  You had your birthday party after all, Agathe.

  It was a lovely party.

  At 5 p.m., the little chapel of Saint-Pierre of Oléron is full of friends and family from near and far. There are many beautiful things read, including a poem by Raoul Vaneigem, and music. Bach’s Cantata BWV 21, The Left Hand of God by Charlie Haden, and two improvisations, one by Kent Carter on bass, and the other by a young saxophone player, Agathe’s cousin Mathieu. The pastor, M. Cavalié, delivers a message of hope to help us return our thoughts to living, not to stop because of Agathe’s physical disappearance. Of course not …

  And then, under the pounding rain, in the furious wind of the high tide, Sabine, her father, Émilie, Clarisse, Alex, the pastor, and I went to scatter Agathe’s ashes across a big field of immortelle flowers at the top of the dunes at Treuil. Just as she’d wished. Soaked, chilled to the bone, barefoot in the sand, as Agathe had instructed, we cried and we laughed. And cried some more.

  Agathe was surely enjoying being mixed in with all this wildness, and must have been laughing at us getting all soaked.

  And then, with the changing tide, the weather gradually cleared.

  The sun came back out.

  In the garden of the family home we enjoyed oysters, white wine-infused sausages, mussels grilled under pine needles, and Caillebotte, a local white cheese served in a basket of woven marsh grass.

  We were partying, just as we always did every August 15.

  Then, some friends who’d come from farther away started to leave. Others stayed, sitting on the grass around the dying fire, “drinking wine under the moon” as the poet Li Bai put it.

  We hit the road at nightfall. I had Émilie, Julie (Agathe’s childhood friend), and my two friends Pierre and Emmanuel in the car. We were exhausted, worn out from emotion.

  Instead of a summer vacation I spent four days in Jumièges and Honfleur with Juliette before starting my new job at Libération the following Monday. I didn’t take any other break. I had to move on.

  Agathe is with us. She is pushing us, as always, to be our best selves.

  I’ve gone over that day, August 15, 2007, hundreds of times in my mind since you left us, Agathe, most of the time in the train I take regularly to go visit my brother. In the TGV Montparnasse-La Rochelle I cry, thinking back on the dune at Treuil.

  With my headphones stuck in my ears, I listen to our playlist over and over again. Agathe’s original track. You always had music around you, and songs.

  I can picture you as a very small child. You’re just back from vacation at your maternal grandparents’ home in Nice. When people there found out you lived in Pigalle, they taught you the old ballad sung by Georges Ulmer in 1946. As soon as you got back to Paris you start singing at the top of your lungs, “A little drop of water, a station de metro, surrounded by bistros, Pigaaaaalle.”

  You always loved the crooners. From Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon” to “New York, New York.” You loved all the songs about New York, naturally.

  One spring day in 2006, at home, you pass me the headphones to your iPod.

  “Listen to this!”

  It’s “Just the Two of Us” sung by Bill Withers, the original version with the really long solo by the tenor saxophonist Grover Washington Jr. Pure smooth jazz. “Just the Two of Us.” You’re glowing.

  “Nice, right?”

  I adore it! Since you’ve been gone I’ve listened to it dozens of times. “Just the two of us, we can make it if we try.” We can make it.

  I remember the day at the Foch hospital when you told me:

  “For my memorial service I want them to play ‘The Left Hand of God’ by Charlie Haden.”

  You know that I too, have always wanted that song to be played at my memorial service. The bass solo says all there is to say about death and resurrection.

  There’s also “Another Place” by Jeff Beck. A simple, soaring, transparent guitar solo. You and Clarisse would listen to it over and over again. When was that? During your student years in Montparnasse? It was music of rebirth.

  Nigel Kennedy at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, November 21, 2004. You’re by my side, Agathe, with your full intense presence, to hear Vivaldi and the shaggy punk violinist in the midst of the members of the Chamber Music Orchestra of Poland, that he directs by stomping his feet in his Doc Martens. The virtuoso bows, one fist on his heart. You’re in seventh heaven, devouring him with your eyes. He is the very embodiment of your musical curiosity. You love all music. Mixes. Jazz. Rock, and classical pieces full of energy.

  In 2002, in Hyères, I play an excerpt from the Jun Miyake album Innocent Bossa in the Mirror for you, which has just come out. Its complicated melodies mix bossa, contemporary, and alternative rock. A challenging melody for a challenging time in your life. Just after I left the hospital there’s a text from you. “I’m listening to Jun Miyake and thinking of you.”

  “Pick Yourself Up” by Diana Krall, an oldie from a musical comedy with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, a standard in the world of jazz sung in Diana Krall’s faintly veiled voice while she plays the piano with a gentle touch is another. You listen, grab the CD box, and examine the photos.

  I explain the words to you. Will you remember the famous men who have to fall and then rise again, So take a deep breath, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again.

  It makes you smile.

  Brazilian albums, Tom Jobim especially; your sisters, mother, and you adore the sounds of Brazilian music. Our cat Luisa was named after the wife of the composer Tom Jobim …

  And the Spice Girls, and Bach, and Sabine singing songs by Lully or Charpentier.

  TUESDAY, AUGUST 28, 2007

  My Agathe,

  In the time since I left you on the beach at Treuil on August 15, I’ve started my new job at Libération. I’m writing to you from the terrace they have here. It would amuse you to stop by like you used to when I was at Metro. When you would pop in like a neighbor and see my team of young journalists. Here things are a bit more complex. It’s a large paper. Serious. But everyone is friendly to me. It’s here that I began working in journalism, two years before your birth. So it’s a sort of homecoming, in a way.

  You were proud the day my return to Libération was announced in the press. You were right to push me to return.

  Like each end of summer, you are in Oléron and I’m at work. I love working in the summer, as you know. You remember the issue I was working on when you were in Saint-Trojan? I’m just like I was then; the heat helps me focus. And I like summer in Paris. The empty streets, the slow news cycle. It makes it possible to put a paper out with less stress, to get yourself psyched for the busy fall. You know all that. We’ve talked about it dozens of times.

  Of course this year it’s different. Every night, when the paper is almost ready to be put to press, I go up on the terrace and smoke a cigarette, gazing to the west, towards Suresnes, and Foch.

  The sun is setting over Paris. It’s beautiful. I get teary. The sunsets on your beach are not bad either, I know.

  I still have an image in my mind of the photo of Treuil that you posted on your online journa
l last year. You wrote below: “I miss Oléron so much, I cannot wait to return.”

  Now you are there. The sand, the immortelle blossoms, your ashes that scattered in the wind and then came to rest on the dune flowers. You will see the ocean forever, you who have gone beyond the horizon. We cannot see you anymore, you are at once here, on the shore … and out there. You’ve gone beyond the setting sun.

  Last night on the terrace I took out my phone and called you. I wanted to tell you all about putting the next day’s issue of the paper to bed, the madness, but all I got was your voice recording. It helped me even if I cried for a long time afterwards.

  Your line will be cut off soon and I won’t even have your recording left to hear your voice, nor the messages you left me on my cell. They too will disappear from my phone. I’m anguished by this. I miss your voice so much, Agathe, even when it was faint.

  There are so many things I want to tell you tonight, my Agathe. I’ll write them down in a book. It’ll help me to tell you the stories … to tell your story.

  I love you.