The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR. Often, the shortest stories are the most resonant. In 2020, I lost my maternal grandmother.
My first words, my first steps, and the most formative milestones of my childhood and adolescence happened in her care. She bore the brunt of my insufferable teenage angst, offering a consoling embrace when life seemed to get ahead of me. When I lost her, a chapter of my life ended.
To lose such a constant in one’s early twenties is to lose a tether to one’s reality. The years after my grandmother’s death have been fraught with uncertainty. How could I possibly recover from such a loss?
How are my accomplishments meaningful if she is not present to witness them? And, perhaps most disconcerting: who will _I_ be by the time my own life begins to wane? Everyone copes with and experiences loss differently.
For me, it was acutely alienating. My relationship with my grandmother was singular, making my perspective on loss unique. I operated for what felt like ages on the assumption that no matter how much support I had, I could not possibly be _seen._ That is, until I picked up _A Very Easy Death_.
This brief, 112-page memoir by Simone de Beauvoir details her mother’s final days from an honest, compassionate perspective. Laden with recollections of a mother-daughter relationship and personal confrontations with mortality, it resonated with me in a way that no other text had. The acts of death and grief are explored in her memoir as though de Beauvoir were sitting across from me at a bistro recounting the experience.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
