Julien Blanc-Gras, father and author of “Comme à la guerre” (éd. Stock), gives us his sharp chronicle. Today, he tells us how he consoles his son for a great grief …
The Child ran out of school, drunk with joy, proud to show us the treasure his girlfriend had given him: little multicolored marbles swelling in contact with water. In his excitement, he knocked down some of them, who finished their run in the gutter. Farewell to marbles, absolute drama, the Child cried bitterly.
To contain this great misfortune, her mother grabbed her phone.
– Don’t worry my darling, we’ll buy some right away.
And two minutes later, the marbles were ordered. I grumbled that I didn’t really agree with this way of proceeding. Already, do we really need to acquire useless plastic trinkets on Amazon that will cross the planet to screw up the environment by exploiting the poor? And then, above all, it is not doing our son a service to make him believe that everything is immediately replaceable. The fact that things are perishable gives them value. At his age, you have to start accepting the idea of loss, I lectured, when a handler without social protection must already be wrapping my son’s marbles on the other side of the world, under the supervision of a probably sadistic foreman. But that, my son was not yet old enough to care, he was just soothed to know that his toy was going to appear in the mailbox a few days later.
The following week, the Child and I were playing football in the alley with the ball in the colors of the PSG that he loves so much (and which also was made on the other side of the world in conditions that I prefer not to to know). At the turn of a completely failed shot (by me), the ball impaled on a fence and we heard a sinister pfffiiouuuuu indicating the puncture.
My son started screaming at death.
– Why ? Why did you do that, daddy?
(Answer: because I am clumsy.)
Obviously, the fact that my crime was involuntary did not dampen the distress of my offspring who, with his little fists, drummed against my stomach and the cruelty of fate.
I started by encouraging him to pull himself together and put things into perspective.
– It’s okay, it’s only an object, it’s not very serious.
Then, without my expecting it, the situation threw me very hard and very far, on a beach from where I saw my balloon pushed by the wind moving away without my mother being able to save it. , somewhere around 7 years old. And my son’s despair merged with mine in 1983, when I discovered this irreparable feeling of sadness, because at that age, “there is no difference between your bursting balloon. and your heart breaking *. A memory which, decades later, splits the shell of a mature man suddenly finding himself inhabited by a helpless child crying on the beach.
I took out my phone and ordered a new balloon.
* Quote from Nicolas Mathieu, 2018 Goncourt Prize.