[To change death one would have to change life.].
Suffering from lateral amyotrophic sclerosis, a degenerative disease of the muscular system, Mrs. Gabrielle Beaulieu died at her home on September lltn, 1980. Medical science was powerless to stop the progression of a still little understood disease which left an astonishingly lucid spirit at the mercy of a body made more and more useless. In spite of the expectations of the medical world and of the family, recommending hospitalization, it was within the familiar confines of their home that the family members decided to live with the progression of the disease, refusing "extraordinary measures", to the last. One year later, as part of a sociology course, one family member retraces thé social difficulties which this refusal of technology introduced, a technology which could offer but "a semblance of life". In a text which takes the form of a personal testimony, the author denounces a society which does not know how to die, and affirms that what society stimagtized as a choice in favour of death was, in fact, a choice for life.
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