Juliette was also preparing Patrice for life without her. At first he refused to have those conversations, finding them morbid, but once he realized they actually did them both some good, he began almost to look forward to them: they relieved the tension, and Juliette was calmer afterward. There was a kind of conjugal intimacy involved in sitting down at the table to talk about such things, a closeness that sometimes seemed completely unreal to him. In their marriage, she was the one who went off to work while he managed at home, so he didn’t need instructions for domestic things, but she still wanted to go over everything, like a slightly obsessive landlord explaining to a new tenant where everything goes in the house, what days to take the garbage out, and when the boiler needs its annual maintenance inspection. The worst was the day she brought up the question of summer vacation, which she’d already figured out, with the girls staying for a few weeks with each of their two families. She thought it would be good for Patrice to have some time on his own, to rest, because the summer would be difficult for him. When he realized she meant the coming summer, Patrice felt dizzy for a moment, which she noticed. Taking his hand, she said she was saying this just in case, but neither of them was fooled.
When Patrice told me that, I thought about that summer, which had already passed. Hélène and I had taken Clara and Amélie for a week, as Juliette had planned, and we’d done our best to entertain them. Clara had clung to Hélène. In a bound notebook, in her lovely neat handwriting, Amélie had begun a novel in which the heroine was a princess, naturally, and I remember the opening line: Once upon a time there was a mother who had three daughters. And suddenly the images that were memories for me became Juliette’s visions of a future yet to be: a few months earlier, Juliette had imagined those bike rides, those trips to the beach, those hugs and caresses steeped in grief, and she’d thought, I won’t be there anymore. It will be my girls’ first summer without me.
During the “internship” I spent at the tribunal d’instance, Mme Dupraz, the court clerk with whom Juliette had gotten along best, spoke to me about the guardianship of minors, which the two of them had dealt with every Tuesday. When one parent in a family dies leaving an inheritance to his or her children, the judge supervising a guardianship looks after the children’s interests, monitoring the surviving parent’s use of the capital. This must be explained to the remaining parent a month or two after the death of the spouse, and some don’t appreciate what they see as an intrusion into their family life. The reality is that the widow or widower may not touch even a centime in the child’s account without the judge’s permission, and the banks are all the more strict on this provision because if they neglect it they may be responsible for reimbursing the account. Most requests to the judge are no problem, and Juliette soon became accustomed to signing whole stacks of payment orders in June, for the summer vacation, and December, for Christmas presents. There are cases, however, when the boundary between the child’s interest and that of the parent is not clear. One can authorize the repair of a roof because the child is better off having a sound roof over his or her head. But isn’t it also better for the child to have a father who isn’t hounded by debt collectors? Does that mean the child’s capital may serve to pay off paternal debts? This sort of thing depends on the judgment of the court, and great tact is required to make such arbitration as unintrusive as possible. Mme Dupraz told me that Juliette excelled in this very human form of justice, to which Patrice had just recently been introduced. Thinking about Patrice, Mme Dupraz remembered with some emotion the case of a young man who came before the tribunal. He had just lost his wife, had two little children, and the way he spoke about her and them, the simplicity and nobility of his grief, had deeply affected Juliette and Mme Dupraz. And he’d been handsome, too, so good-looking that it became a running joke with them to say, That guy, you know, we need to summon him more often. I wonder if Juliette, before she died, ever thought back to that episode, remembering that handsome, gentle widower so much at a loss. I wonder whether she imagined the interview Patrice would have in the office that had once been hers, and the impression he would make on the judge supervising his children’s guardianship, two or three months after her death … Quite probably.
Philippe, who usually jogs early in the morning two or three times a week, persuaded Patrice to join him, to take his mind off his troubles for an hour or so. They ran on the country roads around Rosier, taking it easy, both because Patrice wasn’t used to jogging and so that they could talk. Patrice confided in Philippe things he didn’t dare say to Juliette. He reproached himself for not supporting her better, for even avoiding her at moments. It was hard for both of them to stay home all the time, Juliette collapsed on the sofa with her oxygen tank, trying to read, dozing, in pain, and not demanding that he be there, actually, while he hid in his basement workroom, vaguely pretending to be busy while he was really frantically playing video games. Martin, the thirteen-year-old son of Laurent and Christine, sometimes joined him down there, where they spent hours flying planes or mowing down enemy hordes with bazookas. Juliette didn’t like him to waste time like that but understood that he sometimes needed to anesthetize himself. As soon as he stopped, the merry-go-round in his head would start up again: fear, pity, shame, infinite love, and questions without answers. No longer Will she die? but When will she die? Could they have done anything to save her? If they’d found the tumor earlier, would that have made a difference? Did the first cancer have anything to do with Chernobyl, and the second with the high-tension line fifty yards from the house they used to live in? He’d read a truly alarming study about power lines in an antinuclear magazine to which he subscribed. This kind of pointless nonsense, as they put it, drove Juliette’s parents crazy. Patrice had learned to keep quiet on that score but he still thought about such things, and they ate away at him.
Listening to him, Philippe became worried, fearing Patrice would break down after Juliette’s death. Philippe himself admits that he might do the same after a shock like that: if Anne-Cécile died, his world would collapse, leaving him not just miserable but lost, unable to cope. And today Philippe is all the more impressed to see that Patrice didn’t break down, he weathered the shock and is coping. When others remark on this, Patrice replies, I take life as it comes. I have three daughters to raise, and that’s what I’m doing. He hardly ever seems depressed. He’s bearing up. Good for him, says Philippe.
As for Juliette, outside of the tasks she assigned to her friends, she hardly ever confided in them, if by that one means saying things it’s useless to say and about which the other person can’t do anything. Juliette would have called that complaining, and she didn’t want to complain. When Anne-Cécile or Christine dropped by in the afternoon for a chat and a cup of tea, she’d say the days were passing slowly, between the sofa and the armchair, in a constant state of drowsy nausea, and that she didn’t have the strength to read, could barely watch a film, that life was shrinking and it wasn’t funny, but more than that she would not say. What was the point? She was suffering, and said so, from not being able to take more care of her girls. How could she go see Amélie dance in the theater in Vienne when she was so exhausted she couldn’t even read them bedtime stories anymore? Just when she should have been taking advantage of what were doubtless the last moments of their life together, she wanted only one thing every evening: for Patrice to put them to bed so that she could go to sleep. She could have just wept. And then Juliette, who never repeated her instructions, would return again to her overwhelming concern: You’ll talk to them about me, right? You’ll tell them I tried hard? That I did everything I could not to leave them?
She worried about her parents, too. If it had been up to them, they’d have moved to Rosier to hover over her, to at least be near her in the dreadful helplessness to which they had been reduced, but after they’d been there a few days Juliette wanted them to go. They’d tried hard, but the way they looked at Patrice wounded her, his uneasiness humiliated her, and besides, they didn’t belon
g there. Their presence would have turned her back into the little girl she did not wish to be again, the one they’d protected from her first cancer seventeen years before. When Juliette said “my family,” she meant the one she’d made with Patrice, not the one into which she was born. Time and energy were running out; she wanted to devote the little she had left to the life she had chosen, not the one she’d inherited. And yet she loved her parents. She knew how much it hurt them to be kept at a distance from her death and wished she could help them face it, but she didn’t know how to comfort them. Neither Christine nor Anne-Cécile could do anything for her there.
Her girlfriends would willingly have had a heart-to-heart, as they put it, but whenever they made any veiled reference to her presumed anguish over her illness, she fended them off, saying, No, I’m okay. For that stuff I have Étienne.
One day I said to Étienne, I didn’t know Juliette, I have no place mourning her, nothing authorizes me to write about this. His reply was, That’s what gives you the authority, and in a way it’s the same for me. Her illness wasn’t my illness. When she told me about her cancer, I thought, Phew! It’s her and not me, and perhaps because I thought that, and because I wasn’t ashamed of thinking that, I was able to do her a little good. At one point, to be more present to her, I tried to remember my second cancer, my fear of death, the frightening loneliness—and it didn’t work. I could remember it, of course, but not feel it. I thought, so much the better. She’s the one who’s going to die, not me. Her death devastated me as few things have in my life, but it did not invade me. I was facing her, near her, but in my place.
She was always the one who phoned, not him. He never said anything comforting to her but she, she could say everything, without fear of hurting him. Everything, meaning the horror. The moral horror of imagining the world without her, of knowing she would never see her girls grow up, but also the physical horror, which was increasing. The horror of a body in revolt because it senses the approach of annihilation. The horror of learning at each checkup that the situation has changed, always for the worse: you try to think there can’t be only bad news, but, yes, there can. The horror of treatments, of endless futile pain, with no hope of getting better, only of taking longer to die. In April she told Étienne, I can’t go on; it’s too hard, I’m stopping. You have the right, he told her. You’ve done all you can, no one can ask you to keep going. Stop, if you want.
Étienne’s permission helped her. She kept it in reserve, like a cyanide capsule in case of torture, and she decided to keep going a little further. She’d expected to be relieved the day the doctors told her, Listen, there’s nothing else we can do, we’re going to let you alone now, so she was surprised to feel so stricken when that day came, in May. They told her they were stopping the Herceptin, which was giving her heart problems without the slightest benefit in return. They didn’t deliver the news as bluntly as she’d anticipated, but it boiled down to them giving up, and Juliette, who was no longer thinking in terms of years of reprieve but of months, now understood it was a question of weeks, perhaps of days.
25
Right after the Herceptin was stopped in May 2005, Patrice and Juliette had a violent argument over the referendum on the European Constitution. Patrice was so strongly against approval that he abandoned his video games to post messages on Web forums. It was his new drug. He’d come upstairs from the basement with marked-up printouts of documents he’d found on Attac, a site opposed to the constitution. One could and should, he argued, resist the absolute rule of free market ideology, which it was immoral to consider as inevitable. Juliette let him talk on without expressing her opinion, and that reminded him of her silence at the outbreak of the first Gulf War, when they had just met. He’d been against intervention, denouncing the manipulations of the media, and since she’d kept quiet, he’d thought she agreed with him until, forced to take a stand, she’d admitted she didn’t. Without being really in favor of the war, she wasn’t as against it as he was—not as sure, in any case, of what she thought. He was stunned. Why hadn’t she said so? Why hadn’t she argued? Because she knew he would never change his mind and she saw no point in shouting at each other for nothing, that’s all. But this time, they did end up shouting, each one attacking the other’s family and Patrice, not without reason, tossing in Étienne for good measure. Once Juliette even told Patrice that after her death she hoped he would meet a cute alter-globalist who’d be hipper and nicer than a cancer-riddled right-leaning bitch of a wife. In the end, she had him cast her “yes” vote by proxy, which he did the week before she died.
What led Patrice to tell me about that last quarrel, with more tenderness than regret, was my asking him if he imagined himself having a love life again one day. The question didn’t shock him but left him thoughtful. Perhaps Juliette was right; perhaps he’d remake his life with a hip, nice alter-globalist, why not? That’s what he deserved. But one of the things he’d loved in Juliette was that she wasn’t the woman with whom he would ordinarily have wound up. She had jolted him out of his rut. She was different, the unexpected, the miracle that arrives just once in a lifetime—and only if you’re lucky. That’s why I don’t complain, concluded Patrice. I was lucky.
On Wednesday, June 8, he brought home a video of a film by Agnès Jaoui, Comme une image (Look at Me). After the girls were asleep, he and Juliette sat on the living room sofa watching the movie on a computer set up in front of them on a footstool. Juliette was wearing her oxygen mask but didn’t feel too bad. She fell asleep before the end, on his shoulder, the way she almost always did those days when they watched a film or he read to her. He stayed there without moving, afraid to wake her. He sat listening to her breathe and had the feeling, simply by being there, that he was protecting her. In return for these peaceful moments, he would have been ready to have this life of theirs—however terrible—go on for a long time. Forever, even. With infinite care, he carried her to their room and put her to bed. Then he fell asleep, holding her hand. At four in the morning, she suddenly began to cough uncontrollably. She couldn’t breathe: the oxygen at top flow brought no relief; it was as if she were drowning. As in December, he called an ambulance, then Christine, so she could stay with the girls. Christine wanted to come into the bedroom while they waited for the ambulance but Juliette, through the door, said, No, no, and today Christine is sorry she didn’t move out of the hall when Juliette was carried past her to the ambulance. She feels she didn’t respect the wishes of her friend, who hadn’t wanted to be seen in such a state. But she told Patrice she’d take care of everything, that he could stay all day and even the next night at the hospital, which he did. In the intensive care unit, Juliette’s blood oxygen level returned to normal, yet she continued to struggle for breath. She was given morphine, which brought her some relief. Two liters of liquid were drained from the pleura around her right lung, but in vain. That was on Thursday. On Friday morning, the chief of oncology came to tell her that they could do no more for her, that her body had reached the end of its defenses and she would die within days, perhaps within hours. Juliette replied that she was ready. She asked for her parents, brother, and sisters to be called; if they arrived that afternoon or evening, she would be able to say good-bye to them. As for her daughters, Juliette did not want to spoil the older girls’ participation in their school festival, and she asked the doctor if he could make sure she’d be able to see them in twenty-four hours. He told her that yes, they would administer the morphine in such a way that she would be neither in too much pain nor too knocked out by sedation. Then Juliette had the entire medical team that had treated her since February come to her room, where she thanked each person, one by one. She was not upset with them because the treatments had failed; she was sure they had done everything in their power, as humanely as they could. After that, she sent Patrice home to take care of the girls and talk to them. While he was gone, she would see Étienne.
Étienne: I was ahead of her in my legal career, and also where cancer was concern
ed. We were on the same path, and it was clear to both of us that I had gone before her. But that Friday afternoon, she went on ahead of me. She told me, Étienne, you are one of the few people who have given meaning to my life and thanks to whom I have really lived it. I think that despite my illness, it’s been a good life. I look at my life, and I’m content with it. And I, continues Étienne, I who never stop talking, I didn’t know what to say. She had come to a place where I could no longer follow her. So I said—The letter, have you written it? That was something we’d talked a great deal about, that letter she wanted to leave to her girls. She’d started lots of drafts but thrown them out each time because she was overwhelmed, there was too much to say, or almost nothing: I love you, I loved you, be happy. No, she told me sadly, I haven’t written it, so I said we should do it. Right now? Yes, now, why not? Let’s start with—what would you say to your girls about Patrice? She was having more and more trouble speaking, but she answered immediately: He was my all. He carried me. She paused, then added, He’s the father I chose for you. You, too: choose in life. You can ask everything of him; he will give you everything you ask for while you’re little, and when you’re grown up, you will choose. She thought a moment, then said, That’s it.
I took no notes; when I got home I wrote the letter in two minutes: it was done. I gave it to her sister Cécile, who read it to her and told me Juliette had nodded to show it was good. But before I left her room that afternoon, I sat on the edge of her bed and held her hand for a few moments. I’d shaken her hand when she’d first entered my office six years before, but after that, and until that Friday afternoon, we’d never touched again.
Other Lives But Mine Page 20