My father is omnipresent. He continues even now to do his work as an educator within me. My father was a simple and profound man. He had the most beautiful kind of intelligence, the kind that comes from instinct and heart. He worked with his hands. The essential part, I would have trouble expressing it, but it's an unreasonable and wonderful confidence in life that he transmitted to me, not through words but simply because I watched him do it. My father gave me everything: blood, dreams, strength. He gave me the sun to contemplate and the right orientation to never lose sight of it. My father made his life a poetic work. What I mean by poetic is to fully exercise one's work as a human being, to clear the path of life and the ground of language so that the child won't hurt their little bare feet.
It's a desperate and successful attempt to show the majesty of a person whom aging and indifference have stripped of their beauty, intelligence, freedom, future, past - everything that makes a person. Love is there facing the worst, confronted with its own mystery: what do we love in those we love? Their strength, but when they have none left? Their charm, but when it has deserted them? Their words, but when they are destroyed? What is a person? What is love? Do we love those we think we love? It's like watching roses fall asleep and their petals drop at irregular intervals, like seconds of a strange time. They weren't dying but passing into me who had contemplated them for so long.
Death will place its hand on our shoulder in the secrecy of a room or slap us in the light of the world. The best we can do is make its task lighter: that it should have almost nothing to take because we would have already given almost everything. That it should have nothing to hold in its fingers but the 21 grams of our soul.
What's adorable about elderly people is that they're alive despite everything, despite themselves, and the most ravaged among them are the most royal. Each of these elderly people is immense and doesn't know it, and would laugh if told so. We will all end up in pieces, more abandoned than wild daffodils in woods where no walker goes.