Book Review: A Very Easy Death

• Date: 01 March 2024

Book Review: A Very Easy Death By Maggie Roberts, Georgetown Law ‘24 Caring for a parent at the end of life is an experience that, despite its near-universality, is often quite isolating. In addition to the usual grief associated with saying goodbye to a loved one, seeing the people who cared for us when we were at our youngest and most helpless become helpless themselves brings its own psychological disturbance. In her classic memoir, A Very Easy Death, Simone de Beauvoir writes of her weeks spent at the bedside of her dying mother, a woman with whom she had a fraught relationship from adolescence. Seemingly without pulling any punches, she documents the emotional messiness and medical unpleasantness of a death that, though “easy” in the grand scheme of deaths, brings with it great suffering. A Very Easy Death faces a perfectly natural, but frightening and painful all the same, process about which many people avoid speaking or thinking until they themselves must grapple with it. Though the work is by no means a self-help book, its lack of sanitization, its humaneness, and its emotional frankness help to destigmatize a topic – dying – that remains taboo for many people. The mothers of memoirists are some of liter-ature’s most exploited subjects. Their lives, having shaped those of their endlessly-introspective offspring, receive pages upon published pages of far-from-im-partial examination. No matter how private a woman may keep her life, if she happens to have given birth to a talented (or...