05-03-2025
The elderly need our help – this memoir lays it bare
'Syndrome de glissement' they call it in France – the destabilisation elderly people experience when they're admitted to a nursing home and their old lives, and identities, are pulled out from beneath them. French sociologist Didier Eribon hadn't heard of the phrase until he checked his 87-year-old mother into a home in Fisme, near Reims. Here the facility's doctor also warned him that the risk of a new patient's death – particularly within the first two months – was 'quite significant'.
The medic was right. Eribon's mother survived only seven weeks in an institution where she had no interest in engaging with the 'old women' around her. Nor was she really given the chance: she was only permitted to leave her bed, and its high, cage-like rails, once a week for a shower. With her three sons living in different towns, she stopped eating, drinking and speaking. She died aged 87, a day after Eribon was warned that she would struggle to survive another week.
A professor of sociology, best known for his 2009 memoir, Return to Reims, Eribon processes his guilt and grief by analysing his mother as representative of her class, gender and generation. As such, The Life, Old Age and Death of a Working Class Woman slips and slides between the tender, conversational tone of a 71-year-old man remembering his mother and that of a serious academic. More casual readers of this book may find themselves invested in the personal details which begin chapters, and yet find themselves zoning out with their more wordy, abstract conclusions. And as translator Michael Lucey does such a clear fluid job with the more colloquial passages, it seems likely these clunky tonal shifts originate with Eribon.
Take, for example, this sentence, which follows a moving passage about Eribon conciliating with his estranged brothers: 'It is surely the presence of this insurmountable contradiction between continuity and discontinuity that allows for a concrete understanding of the twists and turns of a habitus, which is a system of collective constraints that have been inscribed in an individual, and that reach into what is most individual about that individual: it also allows one to see how the reality of a rising trajectory of a split habitus unfolds from day to day.'
If you're willing to skip over such muddy puddles of language, however, Eribon tells a frank and moving story. Born in 1930, his mother – whom he never names – was abandoned as a child by a woman later accused of collaborating with Nazi occupiers. She began work as a cleaner aged 14 and married Eribon's father aged 20, a man who would prove violent, jealous and domineering for their 55 years together. Later in life, she made a political swing from the far Left to far Right, a shift Eribon makes sense of as her means of protesting against a society which kept her in her lowly place.
As in Return to Reims, Eribon holds himself to account over the way, as an adult, he shed his lowly past. He winces over the shame he felt as a teenager when his mother asked him to help her make extra money, delivering leaflets in the streets near school. That doesn't stop him here still being comically sniffy about her tastes, especially her 'cheesy' romance novels. He says he'd be interested in reading one as part of his research. But – hélas! – he cannot quite bring himself to go into the kind of supermarket that sells them.
He's more enthusiastic about her late-life love affair with a younger, married man called André. His mother turned to Eribon to share her obsession because his more socially conservative brothers disapproved. Eribon, though, believes the force of this octogenarian affair kept her alive through a traumatic bowel surgery a few years before her death. (André, however, would withdraw as she became more difficult and demanding. It seems unlikely that he visited her in the nursing home prior to what Eribon thinks was a kind of suicide.)
Didier closes his book with an urgent plea for the elderly to be treated with more respect, calling on his fellow intellectuals to speak up for those whose voices are fading. There's a certain irony here, this coming from a man who left it so late to support his ailing mother. But his own case proves his very point. Society must step us for the elderly as a whole – if only because our families so often fail us.
