In this short, painful and honest book [A Very Easy Death], Simone de Beauvoir describes the death of her mother from cancer, in some clinical detail, and the changing emotions the daughters felt. She also attempts, as a rationalist—who saw with surprise her conventionally pious mother indifferent to the consolations of religion—to think again about a subject that none of us now cares to think about….

It was what is called 'an easy death'; but the death in her mother's face was joined to the violent spirit of rebellion: 'she asserted the value of each instant.' The sight made Simone de Beauvoir hate the clichés by which we defend ourselves against old age and dying. She saw 'the reassuring curtain of everyday triviality' ripped away. Her conclusion was that if we must yield, we cannot be acquiescent:

There is no such thing as a...