« Will I admit that I cried when I read Mom's letters? That I cry almost every morning thinking about my father? To probe the chasms that the dead have left in us is not mortifying. What it is, on the contrary, is to believe that one is "grieving." Stupid expression. We don't grieve, we look next door. And we're wrong. "We don't console ourselves with the death of the one we love because time passes, the wound closes and we end up forgetting. Quite the contrary: we console himself when we manage to live a kind of happy companionship with his death. I believe that there is a strange reality here, which no one dares to speak of: not only do we live with our dead, but this inner relationship that we have with them and one of the most intense and beautiful things that has fallen before us." Alexander Lacroix. »

« Bart sat in the chair and the two brothers looked at each other. The same smile unites them or tenderness mingled with mockery. "Thank you for everything," said Simeon-Thank you for the rest. Thank you for entering my life without warning. Thank you for changing the course and changing me. But all this is not admitted when one is the older brother, Bart adds nothing. »

« Dad died in hospital ... I can't remember the name. A big hospital in Paris. He was accepted into the gerontology department after a stint in the emergency room. The food was served cold and stayed on the table if no one came to help the sick to eat. As we were driving through the corridors, calls for help and urine smells were leaking from the rooms. There all was angles and spikes, discomfort, stench and misery. When I couldn't take it anymore to see my father suffer and hear him whirring, I was going to have coffee in the cafeteria. I was hanging out, eating a croque, hoping to find him asleep in my absence, floored by some drugs. His last smile was for an animal documentary, little birds on the screen near the ceiling. I read him aloud the preface to one of his books, written by a philosopher. I didn't understand much, but he seemed happy, if that word still had meaning in this universe that no longer had any. I tried to massage his shoulder, there was only bone. But something has come to life in his eyes, a newborn astonishment that feels the caress of a hand. Maybe he remembered what human contact is. One day, coming up from the cafeteria, I entered the room on tiptoe. He was the victim of a painful sleep. I could have waited a little while for him to come back to consciousness. But I sneaked my coat, my bag, avoiding his visual field if he ever woke up, thinking of my train to Orleans, my children, the warmth of my house. Flee. I told myself that I would come back the next day, that I would behave better, that I would stay longer. Then the next morning, Elvire called me to tell me that he had just died. »