'Fury at Death and Its Imbecile Trick'

In the early evening of January 22, 1900, Jules Renard learns that his older brother, Maurice, who works for the State Railways, has fainted and cannot be revived. Their father had similar spells and Renard thinks, “I’ll bring him round, give him a good shake, tell him when you’re unwell you must go to bed.” A fat man “wearing his legionnaire pin” (Renard is a man for details), tells him: “‘Your poor brother is very low.’ Then, in my ear so that Marinette [Renard’s wife] will not hear: ‘Dead.’ The word means nothing.” 

My reaction while watching my brother die in hospice. You don’t forget seventy years of coexistence. As I wrote at the time: “I watched as his eyes closed and he stopped breathing. There was another sense, too, of a sudden diminishment, a departure leaving only flesh and blood.” Briefly, I waited for him to wake up, to issue another wisecrack. Renard goes to see his brother:

 

“Here he is, stretched out on a pale green sofa, mouth open, one knee raised, his head resting on a telephone directory, in the attitude of a man who is tired. He reminds me of my father. On the floor, water stains, a rag.”

 

I remember the cracks in the linoleum beside Ken’s bed, the spot where a urine stain had been mopped, sunlight after I had opened the curtains, the absence of any smell despite the presence of so much sickness and death.

 

“He is dead,” Renard writes, “but it will not sink in. Marinette cries a little, cannot breathe, asks where is the doctor. . . . He had complained several times of the heat, of stomach cramps. . . . Not a word was spoken. In two or three minutes it was all over.”

 

My brother had been unconscious for four days. Death was a shock but no surprise.

 

“I sit down,” Renard writes, “and manage a few tears. Marinette embraces me, and I read in her eyes the fear that, a couple of years hence, it will be my turn.

 

“All I feel is a kind of fury at death and its imbecile trick.”

 

My reaction was a little different. I felt as though an injustice had been committed – a child’s response. Ken was almost three years younger than me. I should have gone first.  

 

“Marinette and I sit with him until four in the morning. From time to time I lift the handkerchief. I look at his slightly open mouth. He is going to breathe in. He does not breathe in.”

 

My nephew and I sat with the body, waiting for the guy from the funeral home.

 

Jules Renard would die on this date, May 22, in 1910 – a grim year for literature. Also dead were Tolstoy, Mark Twain, William James and O. Henry.

 

[The Renard quotes come from Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]