Jeanne's Clock

(Trigger warning: Death due to age)

Ten

It all happened so fast, and yet it seemed like hours. She had reviewed everything in the smallest detail, with new, clear-sighted eyes, as if she had been trapped in a different space-time, where she could see how her life was once again unfolding from an omnipotent point of view.

The electronic sounds around her bed beeped to the slow rhythm of her fading heartbeat.

Jeanne was one hundred and three years old. She had been born during the First World War, and had lived through the Second. Louis, her husband, had been held captive three times by the Germans. Three times, his ingenuity had enabled him to escape. How handsome Louis was, and how clever. She could now see him again, his piercing blue eyes and his sweet smile. He had been different from the other men Jeanne had met in her long, long life, writing poetry and singing all the time. Of the two of them, she was the one with the toughest character. God knows the War was not meant for him, maybe that's why it had spared him. In a few seconds, Jeanne could smile at him too, she knew it. She had been waiting for this moment for thirty years.

Nine

She had done many things she was proud of. She had been Mrs. Milhou, the director of a girls' college in the South of France for many years. To this day, Jeanne did not know that many of her students still remembered her, their stern on the surface but loving headmistress with a strong character. One of them had even come to meet her at the retirement home, but Jeanne did not realize it. In the last years of her life, Jeanne was no longer really there.

Eight

She drove to the college in a car without a license, and was the only woman in the village who drove at the time. And one of the only ones who had a job. She was a woman who commanded respect when she looked at others with a serious look on her face, always with a cigarette in her hand, her brown hair well combed and her clothes always well arranged. She was a proud, professional, career woman, as there weren't many of them in those days.

She felt like she was floating in a kind of cloudy cocoon, and everything seemed to soften around her as the slow, slow seconds went by.

Seven

Then, there was Jean-Louis, her eldest and Josiane, her youngest. They made her proud, although she was not the type to show them. Her son became commissioner and her daughter married a good man, she made sure about that. From mother, Jeanne became a grandmother, and she remembered feeling old even then. There had been the cat, Kenzo, who lived even longer than any cat, just like Jeanne. She was looking forward to finding her sweet furry companion, who was the last one to live with her in her way too big house after Louis left them.

Six

Her back had bent, her steps became more hesitant, and her breathing more wheezy. Her left eye, which had been behind the smoke of her cigarettes all her life, became blind and brightened from its original dark brown to a clear blue. She became a great-grandmother when she was eighty-three years old, and remained so for twenty years. She considered herself lucky to have gotten to know her great-grandchildren, to have been able to walk them slowly in her old wheelbarrow around the garden, to have been able to pick with them the wild strawberries that grew in the yard. Time had mellowed her and she would take them on her knees and sing songs to them, as Louis would have done if he had known them. Many of her friends were not so lucky. When they grew up, she continued to take a great interest in them, especially in their grades at school, in a professional deformation that she gladly recognized.

Five

She seemed to be able to see everything again, the faces of her loved ones, their reassuring presence. She could no longer hear the beeps of the machines that kept her alive around her. She felt like a ray of sunshine coming to caress her damaged and wrinkled skin with its soft warmth. She felt soothed, and nothing else mattered.

She remained discreet about her opinion on religion. When she finally agreed to return to a retirement home at the age of nighty eight years old, she recited a poem by Voltaire to her son : "The universe confounds me, I cannot imagine,

That such a clock can exist without there being a Clockmaker".

Four

So it was agreed among them that when her time came, and it was coming, she would receive a Blessing. She did not regret this reassuring decision. Although she began to forget her great-grandchildren, then her grandchildren, she never forgot the songs of her childhood, the poems she loved to read. She never forgot how to solve an equation. It's funny what time could do to memory, because now Jeanne remembered everything, she saw her full life flash before her eyes one last time, both of her eyes, because neither of them were blind now.

It was a beautiful life she had lived. She had loved very much, but at her age she had inevitably lost a lot.

Three

How sweet those seconds were. The last three years of her life were as blurry as the comfortable cocoon where Jeanne felt floating. Her years passed more quickly than for her family, driven by a torpor with a delicate taste of amnesia. She did not realize that her health was deteriorating with her memories, she was not aware of the pain that inhabited her small body whose thinness had the characteristic of old people at the end of life.

Two

She had clung to this life for a long time and it was time for her to let go. She had more people on the other side now, parents to reunite with, friends to greet, a cat to cuddle and most of all, a husband to kiss.

One

As Voltaire said, life is a clock and it was time for Jeanne's seconds to stop running on the dial. She smiled tenderly.

(I wrote this as a tribute to my great-grandmother who passed away last month. May she rest in peace <3. I also specify that I am French and that this text may contain translation errors. I hope you liked it.)