The envelope contained a funeral card. In the color photo a familiar, but long unseen face of an elderly woman in apparently good health. C. turned out to have died at the age of 91. She was one of my wife’s best friends for a long time.
The introductory sentence read: “It is with mixed feelings of sadness and relief that she has been spared further suffering, we inform you of the death of…”
That ‘relief’ is often omitted from such cards, but will be a recognizable aspect for many. I’m thinking of a passage from A gentle deatha compelling book by Simone de Beauvoir about the death of her mother. She remembers an uncle from her youth who died of stomach cancer after days of shouting: “Kill me! Give me my revolver! Have pity on me!”
Now her own mother lay dying and she said to the doctor: “Don’t torment her.” He had snubbed her “with the haughtiness of a man who knows his duty.” And so her mother had to fight her battle “in the loneliness of man.” Her daughter notes despondently: “Her stubborn will to heal, her patience, her courage, it was all a deception. None of her suffering would be rewarded.”
I took C.’s funeral card to my wife in her nursing home. They had been tennis friends for about forty years in a group of four or five women. A cheerful group that played tennis for an afternoon every week with dedication, but not too fanatically. There were also regular cordial contacts outside the track. I was there occasionally and got to know C. as a sympathetic, modest woman.
My wife kept coming, even after she moved and had to take the train. Then came the irrevocable period in which the friends only saw each other at funerals. My wife and C. disappeared into nursing homes and no longer had contact with each other.
I showed my wife the funeral card. She fell silent for a moment and looked at the photo, perplexed. She could no longer put a name to the face, but something must have seemed familiar to her. I told him who it was, but did not mention that C. had died. Earlier I had noticed that the word ‘death’ could hit her unpleasantly, like an unexpected needle in her skin.
She listened to my explanation about C.’s role in her life, but quickly turned her attention elsewhere. She walked to her bed where she had two dolls neatly nestled against the pillow next to each other: a monkey and a baby. She crouched next to it like a mother looking tenderly at her children. “Aren’t they cute?” she asked.
When I left I let her look at the photo one more time. She said: “Beautiful. Sturdy.”
On the way back I saw that group of friends from before. There were only two left alive. So much light then, so much darkness now. They died without knowing about each other.
I couldn’t help but wonder: would my wife miss me if for some reason I never came again? Would she ever ask about me again?
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