She loses her physical and cognitive autonomy. The inconsistencies, the falls, the hallucinations. Against her will, she was placed, at the age of 87, by her sons, in a public medicalized retirement home. The nursing home is located in Fismes, 30 kilometers northwest of Reims. The old woman arrives there in tears. During the nights, she leaves messages of despair on her son’s answering machine. The four children are, each time, a time behind the situation. They then understand that it is already too late to react. Didier Eribon thus plans his future stays in Fismes for the months and years to come. He will only go there twice. His mother let herself die in a handful of weeks. Seven, exactly. The emotional shock of being uprooted was too great. In Life, old age and death of a woman of the people, the philosopher and sociologist Didier Eribon mixes personal narrative (the life of his mother) and political theory (our relationship to old age). The author of Back to Reims (2009) note everywhere the exclusion of old age. His singular and collective story tells of old age as an intimate and political shipwreck.
Judgment of a system
She will be a cleaning lady and then a factory worker. The son reconstructs the life of his mother, a child abandoned by his father and then by his mother and placed in an orphanage: the marriage in 1950, at age 20, beginning with fifty-five years of cohabitation with a hated man; the village of Muizon where the couple lived for twenty years; the husband’s Alzheimer’s disease followed by his death on December 31, 2005; the few months in social housing in Reims; settling in the suburb of Tinqueux; Fismes retirement home. The son leaves his mother, after the second day of installation in a retirement home, to return to Paris. He reassures her: ” Don’t worry. Here, they will take good care of you. You’ll see, you’ll be fine. » Neither of them believe it. Didier Eribon writes: “My mother has been unhappy all her life. » After the death of her husband, three or four years later, she will experience a fragile upturn. The widow falls in love with a married man. She discovers love at over 80 years old. But the story ends. The end of love and the entry into Ehpad will be fatal to him.
The son’s protests won’t change anything. No bed available. The old woman will go back and forth between the hospital in Reims and the retirement home in Fismes by ambulance. She will be taken back to her room, exhausted and tired, in the middle of the night. She will arrive at the nursing home at 2 a.m. Didier Eribon analyzes the clash of two worlds: families overwhelmed by their singular pain in the face of banal decisions because they are daily for the medical profession. The author judges a system. Because otherwise what about public nursing homes and underfunded public hospitals, victims of the economic logic of minimum expenditure? In the private sector, the race for maximum profit makes the situation even worse. Everywhere, the elderly are depersonalized and caregivers find themselves exhausted. In his Ehpad, everything closes and shrinks around the mother.
Sociology
The author banishes psychology for sociology. Her mother is a white woman, born in 1930 in the northeast of France, belonging to the working classes. She well represents the working class moving from the Communist Party to the right and then to the extreme right. The left becomes an object of hatred. Everything except the left. His mother was obsessively and irrationally racist. With us, with them. She felt invaded by strangers: “There is only for them and we are entitled to nothing. » But behind the collective destiny, the singular life. His mother spent whole days in front of the television with too high a sound. She loved news items and the lives of personalities. We console ourselves in the worst and the best. She had a passion for Formula 1 racing. In front of the television, she watched cars on race tracks for hours. She would have loved to be a pilot. Alain Delon was his god. “My Alan. » The world came to him through the media. From compassion to anger, affect was his domain.
Didier Eribon: “I was a son and I am no longer. » The author analyzes the frictions between chosen identity (job and friendships) and administrative identity (child of a housekeeper and a worker). The son did not go to the funerals of his father and his mother. He always chose to mourn his loved ones with his loved ones. In a restricted circle, in a collected solitude. He thus feels in phase with Michel Foucault on death: “The noisy crying around the coffin was not always exempt from a certain cynicism: the joy of the inheritance could mix with it. I prefer the gentle sadness of disappearance to this kind of ceremony. » Life, old age and death of a woman of the people is also a literary account of how everyone copes with grief. Everything rings true. The death of the mother happens, as expected, but we are stunned.
Beauvoir and Elias
The story ends with a political reflection. Why can’t older people form a political minority? From demonstration to protest, political commitment requires a valiant body. Didier Eribon relies on La Vieillesse (1970), by Simone de Beauvoir, and The Solitude of the Dying (1987), by Norbert Elias, to lay bare the way in which we view old age. It raises the question of the political fight as old age is unthinkable in our societies: who can speak for those whose voices are not heard and who can make the voices of those who no longer have a voice heard? Her story is there for her mother. Writing has the power of resurrection.
It is impossible, when reading the books of Didier Eribon, to separate intimate narrative and political theory. The text is dry, devoid of any pathos. A road without landscape to distract us. At the end, a woman. The emotion arises in front of the helplessness of any child in front of the suffering of a parent. We find ourselves having to accept the unacceptable. Didier Eribon thinks like Albert Cohen: crying for his mother is equivalent to crying for his childhood. Every year, on the occasion of Saint‑Didier or the birthday, the mother sent a check for 20 euros to her son. He cashed it so as not to hurt her and went off to buy a book with it. Life, old age and death of a woman of the people also reads between broken lines like driftwood. In Muizon’s little house, at the kitchen table, the mother is having coffee with her son. She stares out the window: the leaves are falling.
Life, old age and death of a woman of the people, Didier Eribon, Flammarion, 330 pages, 21 euros.
2023-05-10 01:11:44
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