He left in the night from Saturday to Sunday. My brother wrote me to tell me about his death. At the moment, I think I did not realize. He was a father, a good father, one of my best friends and the gentlest, kindest, most human person I have ever met. He was old, so old that I believed him eternal as if death had forgotten that he still existed.
I had not seen him for some time, I had news from his son but his memory remained intact in my memory. I had known him as a child and since then, at every stage of my life, in one way or another, he had been present. I believe that I loved him as a son, as a brother, as a father, as a friend, as a companion of life.
He embodied all that can be found in human destiny: tenderness, love of the other, caring for one’s loved ones, generosity of heart and soul that forced respect. I never saw him angry, never did I surprise him to the point of not giving us a few minutes of his time, I never heard him raise his voice. He smiled all the time and in that smile streamed the warm sun of the Mediterranean, his native Algeria, which treats the most ferocious sadnesses.
Today he is gone and I would be hard to say where he is. The only thing I know is that alive, I will never see him again. What a strange phrase to write: I will not see it again. Only yesterday did I realize he was dead, really dead; I spent the day in a terrible chagrin. Although I had not seen him for years now, I already missed him.
And as his life was mingled with mine, had always been, always would be, his death reminded me of my father’s. As if the dead had the power to hold each other by the hand of our common memories, chained to the very root of our lives. That they would communicate together to ask us not to forget them while ordering us to continue living despite the scandal of their absences.
We are not really in the world. A whole part of us bathes among the memory of our disappeared, ours and all the others, in the twilight of their memories whose reminiscences haunt us like so many regrets, sighs of eternity which come to chant the chaotic course of our existences. They are what we will be someday. We are what remains of them and together, we sail in these uncertain lands, illuminated by the soft heat of the sun which from time to time throws on this earth the modest look of the mourning.
Without them, we are nothing. They have abandoned us, they have gone elsewhere, they are our destiny and our future when, in our turn, death will delight us in this beloved land. We do not know how to live without them but we live anyway. Without illusions but with the fierce desire not to be confessed. We are strong, so strong. We resist everything. Nothing can defeat us and if sometimes we bend, it is to better get up again.
We are indestructible.
Incredibles.
