4 ideas
In late 1963, Françoise de Beauvoir fell in her Paris bathroom and broke her femur, and in the clinic doctors found an intestinal cancer and operated. By Beauvoir's account, the treatment gained her about thirty days. Her daughters Simone and Hélène told her she had peritonitis and watched her body fail while she went on planning her recovery.
Everyone knows in the abstract that they will die, but each actual death still arrives as an accident and an unjustifiable violation. Knowing mortality as a general fact does nothing to prepare you for the particular person dying in front of you. Calling a death natural hides that it is always an outrage to the person it happens to.
The nurse's verdict that Françoise had 'a very easy death' holds only in comparison with worse deaths. Her dying still included real suffering and resistance to giving her morphine, despite private care and daughters who stayed with her. Beauvoir registers the advantages she had without letting them turn the death into a gentle one.
Keeping the diagnosis from Françoise left her deceived about her own death and left her daughters alone with the secret. Beauvoir describes herself as complicit with the death she was hiding from her mother, and the lie weighs on her as a betrayal even as it spares her mother.