The subtle art of not dying
A trip down memory lane on my grandmother’s 98th birthday
When I try to invoke memories of my maternal grandmother, who turns 98 this Thursday June 24, what comes up are a handful of childhood pictures. Her kneeling next to me as I take my first steps on her balcony rue du Général Delestraint. Another with her arm over my shoulders in “Le Hamelet”, a compound of three small oak beamed farmhouses in Normandy where I spent my childhood’s spring and summer breaks. A photo in my early twenties at my brother’s wedding, dressed in a morning suit seating next to her.
Those are not real souvenirs though but moments in four decades of conversation. Perhaps because childhood memories are the most dangerous. There is a song by Barbara, “Mon enfance”, which warns: “We must never go back to the hidden times of memories/From the blessed time of our childhood/Because of all the memories, those of childhood are the worst/Those of childhood rip us apart”
Only a few true memories are left. The red plaid robe-de-chambre she wore over her nightgown, pink Comtesse de Ségur books in our night tables, some chipped lead toy soldiers kept over several generations, the fruit cake she served for teatime in the garden which I never had anywhere else, a gravure representing an 1804 costume ball at the Opera which still hangs in her room today and some ugly knife holders featuring garden vegetables. The fresh summer nights in Normandy and the Aigle rubber boots — manufactured next door — we would wear to deal with the constant rain. And her hand as she would always squeeze ours when we would seat next to her repeating “mes bons enfants” with a warm smile. I would stare at the green stone on her finger, surrounded by small diamonds. I remember her telling me many times the turquoise was dead but today I am not even sure stones do die. When we would play together with the handful of playmobils in Le Hamelet, she would make up funny stories inspired by the Sylvain et Sylvette books my older brother loved. In her kitchen, if my cousin was visiting, she would laugh listening to his impersonations. Every day she would take her breakfast in bed, seating up in her nightgown in the pale blue bedroom.
During my childhood’s summers, Manou would spend hours seating with me going through the alleyway gravel — river gravel molded by the water — to find oddly shaped stones we would put in boxes. She would also make for us shoeboxes with mesh tops to keep the butterflies we would catch in nets constantly repaired. My parents would always dispose of us rue du Général Delestraint on New Year’s Eve so they could go celebrate. There would be Rhum Raisin ice cream with Russian cigarette cookies and a Cousteau documentary. I remember it felt like a party even though I imagine we were in bed by 9:30. Today my own sons refuse to watch any animal documentary: I am told Cousteau was a reckless monster anyway. And the following day, we would all go to present our respects to her mother, my great grandmother, Simone Benjamin [1897–1994], a joyful somewhat eccentric old lady that would regularly dress up as if for the Opera only to seat down from the building on the rue Molitor’s benches with homeless people. The actress Odette Talazac [1883–1948], her aunt had contributed to raise her as her mother Marie Louise Aucoc [1874–1940] had a truly tragic life and her father, Andre LaFerte, Director of the Creusot, died at 46 in 1912. As a result, Simone was both traumatized and well versed in theatrics.
These memories are so old, they feel almost disembodied. Today I spoke to Manou to wish her a happy birthday and she repeated with a sigh “c’est si loin tout ca” as I mentioned the alleyway gravel. “Le Hamelet” was sold long ago — more than twenty-five years ago. I never returned to les Baux de Breteuil, l’Aigle, la Neuve Lyre — names that had been so familiar at some point and now have just become points on a map of Normandy I never consult. My beloved grandfather died of cancer in 1994 at 72, putting an abrupt end to my grandmother’s hopes for twilight in Normandy with the man that had adored her for so long. The following year in 1995, my uncle died of a vicious cancer at 45 years old. Manou’s brother — she loved — and his wife had also died prematurely. She buried everybody in the Saint Prix cemetery and moved to Caen in a modern apartment that had beautiful views of the Abbaye aux Hommes on one side and the docks on the other. She spent 24 years there gently mourning the deaths of the men she loved until she moved to a retirement home overlooking the ocean in Granville. Once one of my ex-boyfriends, a boy from Ohio obsessed with Saint Therese de Lisieux who did not speak a word of French, had lunch with her in the castle of William the Conqueror. My grandmother always smiles when remembering that strange meal. A dog had endeavored to pee in the boy’s bag in “Le Mancel”, a restaurant that thankfully still exists.
Our grandparents play an important role to remind us that everything we love will be taken away. Everything. The houses we live in will be sold and reshaped by strangers that will not ever know we once lived there. We will watch the people we love, leave, move on, or die. The objects we cherish will too be dispersed by young people avid of modernity. And perhaps more tragically, life as we know it will also disappear: the fashion, the music, the books, and even our customs will be forgotten and replaced by some we will never fully understand. I remember Manou refusing to have a wireless phone in her apartment despite the insistence of her son-in-law, my father: that was the limit. Insignificant lives engulfed one after another. Our new desperate attempt at leaving a digital trace will not save us as our data will get drowned into centuries of data. And one day, we will become the old people we lightly left to fend for ourselves during Covid times.
That is the reason I like to keep visible altars of the past in all the houses I live in. As if maintaining some memories present could palliate the pain of our gradual disappearance. At home, I have pictures of Manou everywhere. As a little girl, with her great grandfather the Art Nouveau jeweler Louis Aucoc [1850–1932], who had been a Paris municipal councilman, with his long white beard. With my grandfather right after her marriage on the small stone walls of the Tregastel property. With her brother as a child smiling.
And her ancestors also line my walls. Her father, Jean Benjamin [1888–1976], an architect who had been a second lieutenant in artillery during WWI and decorated with the Croix de Guerre, was known for his bad temper. Her grandfather was Ernest Benjamin [1854–1901], a novelist who died young and was a member of the executive committee of the Société des Gens de Lettres. His brother was the eminent veterinarian, Henri Benjamin [1850–1919], a member of the Académie de Medicine. Manou descended from the painter Alexandre Lacauchie [1814–1886], the gem-engraver Ernest Hue [1828–1915]. She shared an ancestor with my grandfather, which made them distant cousins: Grégoire Louis Jean Saint André [1784–1866]. She was the niece and goddaughter of the very controversial (“furiously anti-republican, odiously anti-Semitic, hysterically anti-academics” in the words of my aunt) writer and Goncourt Academician René Benjamin [1885–1948] who had delivered such a strange and depressing speech at her wedding just after the war.
I still have Manou’s letters: hundreds of letters exchanged with her over the years — including from the US — to which she would respond diligently until she could not. The ones I wrote to her were returned to me recently in a little bundle: on each envelope she had written the exact date at which she had responded, and sometimes a little drawing and notes on tracks she had heard on the radio and liked: Dvořák’s Serenade for Strings in Si (sic) major Op. 22, Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2 in C minor, Op 18. She was the first person I came out to in 2001. She responded with kindness, as I expected, recommending I not get AIDS and never to tell my parents as “it would kill them”. Later, in life, my grandmother would always offer me books — many about Africa because I worked there and was convinced the continent fascinated me. Once, I asked her to get me books by Hervé Guibert for Christmas. I left them on her coffee table that night: she read them, and I was a bit embarrassed.
I am 43 and already exhausted, so it is hard to think one could be so sharp at 98. We chatted today, and we joked about Sylvain and Sylvette, Cousteau, and the beard of the grandfather Aucoc. I told her I would visit her this summer and she said she would love that. Granted, my grandmother never worked, and she benefited from the services of a legendary cook/nanny named Juliette. Before the rue du General Delestraint, she lived in a monumental apartment on Avenue Bugeaud which had belonged to her insufferable mother-in-law, Gabrielle Gadala, the irate daughter of Senator Paul Fleury. She told me today a story of my grandfather Jacques Gadala, who having forgotten the keys to the apartment, climbed the façade to the second floor. My mother was always nostalgic of their 3,000 sqft Haussmannian apartment — which was next to our much smaller Copernic apartment — and of Ker-Ar-Vir the mythical Tregastel property, in the same ways I now hang to the memories of the General Delestraint or “Le Hamelet.” We often hope that stones will survive us, but they don’t. We are indeed nothing but passengers.
Manou is in good health even though she broke her hip during the Covid disaster and cannot walk any longer. Her mother, my great-grandmother, who died at 98, was also in good shape until the end. My grandmother’s great-grandmother, the jeweler's wife, Micheline Louise Isaïe Rondeleux died at 87 in 1940. In the words of a family member: “My maternal grandparents were the precursors of this behavior now common among very old people [in our family]: the lack of dying skills (le manque de savoir-mourir).” Manou told me today as she has for the past 15 years or so that she wishes she could go. I feel lucky she has been with us so long — a cherished sign of our past like the polished river gravel of “Le Hamelet.”