“There was tomorrow and now there is no more tomorrow, no more just now. » Balanced between the desire to live and the desire not to live, Johanna will not die of her own free will, her daughter Eve would not tolerate it. ” I breathe. Not very well, but I’m breathing. » Her husband, Louis, died of cancer five years ago. Her dressing gown is still in the bathroom, where it belongs. Because he is always there, everywhere, Louis, Johanna doesn’t want to leave their Parisian apartment and curls up there many times, in the dressing gown of the love of her life.
The sadness of the past five years casts the shadow of mourning in the blue eyes of this 88-year-old woman. Memories don’t fade, and some are due in part to the disenchantment that age can bring. “Bernard Pivot said: ‘Old age is boring'”quotes Johanna, who does not feel old but “attacked”since 1er September 2017, by the absence of the one with whom she lived. “Since that day, I cry, I pray, I love you”, she wrote to him in a letter to heaven in April 2018. “’Tomorrow’ is to join him; but tomorrow is far away. In the meantime, I live. I survive. » The melancholy of her smile at the slightest mention of Louis reveals the emotional deficiency that Johanna suffers from in her aging body, which cannot bring itself to no longer be touched with love.
“It’s difficult when you know that you won’t have any more physical love. Every evening, he came home, he opened his arms, I ran towards him, and he closed them. We have a void in front of us, and that is terribly hard. Maybe because I have integrated it throughout my body. “It’s not a political question old age, they can put a lot of money, the important thing is to take care of your old people”says Johanna, seated in an armchair whose age (“we have the same”, she specifies) gives the leather thing a certain class. So much pride in this old skin in the eyes of its owner. But as soon as the interest shifts to what she feels, thinks, or experiences now, a hint of astonishment appears. She who sometimes wonders if she is “still useful, except for loving others”.
“It’s a question of mentality, old age”
Johanna was born in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat (Alpes-Maritimes) in 1934. She recognizes today that the blouses she wears suit her well, that her hair is pretty white, her back is still straight and his body quite flexible. She has golden slippers, likes her black coffee, the little Picard dishes, and doesn’t close her shutters at night. So many seconds of lost light, if we had to wait to reassemble them each morning! This is indeed his only routine: to look at the sky at sunrise, “even if it’s gray”.
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