I could not bring myself to leave Swann. He had arrived at that stage of exhaustion in which a sick man's body becomes a mere retort in which to study chemical reactions. His face was mottled with tiny spots of Prussian blue, which seemed not to belong to the world of living things, and emitted the sort of odour which, at school, after "experiments," makes it so unpleasant to have to remain in a "science" classroom. I asked him if it was true that he had had a long conversation with the Prince de Guermantes and if he would tell me what it had been about.
Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 725
Swann is dying and it is so obvious that Marcel can barely bring himself to leave his side. It's more than the thought that you might never see that person again. Rather, there's almost a perverse inability to look away from the wreckage of a human form. I know at the end my mom was so frail, so almost bird-like, that you thought she would just shatter if caught in a cross wind. I know this happens to all of us; hell, it's already happening to me. On the recent trip to Iceland I found my son, sweetly, doubtless, but also undeniably reaching out to steady me if we were walking along a precarious trek. As I've said, I have such an extraordinary dread of being seen as weak, of having to ask for assistance, that my advancing age and declining physical state just fills me with something akin to terror. Maybe if I felt more securely that someone was going to be there for me I wouldn't find it so haunting. I don't know, maybe it's easier in a perverse way to ask strangers for help than to ask loved ones for the same favor. In the end I don't want to serve as that magnet for pity, that model for the cruelty of declining life, for anyone.
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