What Simon Pova taught me: We women are born daughters but not necessarily mothers

Three or four months ago, my grandmother, who had always been optimistic and cheerful, suddenly told my aunt that she had only two years left in her life. She even said that her farewell ceremony should not be held in the church. "A simple ceremony in the funeral home is fine." It doesn’t surprise us that my grandmother thinks of death at her age, but a person who has a strong faith in God takes the initiative to mention death. Grandma and aunt moved in together, and three generations of five women lived together.

On the one hand, my grandmother has just passed the five-year treatment period for breast cancer. Now she only needs to go back to follow up in three months, and she can leave the city where she lived. I heard that my grandmother always looks at the pedestrians or vehicles on the road alone during the day. It should be very lonely, and we can't bear her to live like this. These days, when I go to her room to read, she is always afraid that I will be out of sight. When we go out to work and come home, she will grab my hand and say, "I haven't seen you all day, Mamma misses you so much! "My previous grandmother was a distant person like me, she would never grab my hand.

Speaking of which, she is a good-natured old man and never complains about her illness, but it is also a lot of pressure to pass the responsibility of taking care of her grandmother to her aunt to face alone, and we all love my grandmother, and we hope to be able to accompany her well out of selfishness. She, no matter how long it is. But I didn’t expect that within two or three weeks, I would also have cancer myself, and I was afraid that it would increase the pressure on my aunt and mother, who could have left me alone.

It was during this period that I read Simon Beauvoir's accompanying notes "A Very Peaceful Death", and I couldn't help comparing my grandmother of the same age with Beauvoir's mother. Both are devout believers, born into a middle-class family, well-bred but also stubborn, and feel a little hopeless because of their dependence due to their illness or old age, but also because this transformation makes them more human- - Beauvoir said "animality" in the book.

In 1963, Beauvoir received a phone call from her mother in Paris who had an accident in Rome. Madame Beauvoir, 78, fell at her home in Paris (78 years ago should be very old nearly 60 years ago), and it took half a day to recover. Before crawling to the phone, call your buddies to help. As a result, he was hospitalized for examination. Later, he took an X-ray to find out that he had cancer.

Beauvoir first started out as a writer and then became a "feminist," and I think her identity in this book is "a woman." She mentioned that her mother had let go of many constraints in her last days because of her illness, - religious, social - she had been imprisoned in the body of a woman, wife, mother, and gradually accepted during the hospitalization Her own needs; Beauvoir, as an ordinary person, wrote her own worries and guesses, and most sincerely recalled her past love and hatred with her mother.

In addition, she also wrote that her mother actively started a new life after becoming a widow in the 1940s. Her husband was a submissive wife before her death, but after her husband died, she was eager to get rid of her husband's shadow, and only re-learned to work in the library at the age of 56. Even learn Italian and German. Even if this process happened today, it seems that it can be written into the "50+" website, not to mention the old woman 80 years ago?

Before reading this book, I also had a lot of curiosity about Beauvoir's mother and her friendship. As a little Beauvoir fan, she knew that she was educated in a Catholic school when she was a child, and her mother was also a devout Catholic, but she decided to give up her faith when she was a teenager, and she also chose a cohabiting partner that was unacceptable in society at that time. Relationships... How can such a rebellious woman get along with a godly mother?

The book says that her mother has always made her too smart and feared her, but her mother always praised her talent and ignored her sister - she guessed that this may be because her sister is more like her aunt, and her grandfather is more fond of her aunt, so her mother is used to it. The annihilation of the younger sister - the mother also forbade her to see her alone when she lost her faith, and was jealous of the friendship between the two, but when her mother was old, she was closer to her sister and more comfortable with her.

But when I read her interviews in the 1960s, I was surprised to find that even if everyone regarded it as a feminist, the philosopher Beauvoir, who was at the forefront of the times, talked about things in two or three sentences, as if they were based on the words of Saud . Based on this, I thought at the time that even without the constraints of marriage, a woman's love for a man is an eternal law (I call it a curse), and she mentioned that a mother's love for a father is also stated in the same way.

But reading her thoughts on her last journey with her mother is indeed in line with modern thinking, "Why should I intubate my mother to suffer?" This made me believe again that she is the philosopher we think. However, her love and concern for her mother is so purely a daughter's idea. After reading "A Very Peaceful Death", I think that we women are born as daughters but not necessarily mothers.