Mari’s death is the end of a year of illness and the most bitter loss René Sel can understand. As Mari’s memory and awareness fail, Renardette cares for her; one May morning, Mari answers the call of her long-dead sisters and dies within hours. Her absence leaves René unable to accept the loss and reshapes the household around him.

Illness and Care

One spring, Mari becomes ill and too confused to manage the household. She grows thin, sees visions, and forgets what has been said to her, eventually forgetting both her children and René. Because she is at risk of going to the river, she has to be restrained in a chair. Renardette cares for her for a year, making Mari’s decline a sustained period of dependence rather than a sudden event.

Her Death

On a bright morning in May, Mari answers her long-dead sisters, whose call the narration likens to owls. She says, “Those sister say ‘come.’” Within two hours she has joined them. The brief interval between her words and death gives the scene its decisive turn: after a year in which her awareness has steadily receded, she speaks of the dead as calling her and is gone soon afterward.

René’s Grief and the Household Aftermath

René cannot understand why Mari has died. He believes Mi’kmaq people live long lives and remain strong until their final days, and Mari is not old; against that expectation, her death is “the bitterest loss.” A week later, Renardette proposes that she and René marry. René shakes his head, takes up his ax, and walks out to the woodlot. The refusal and his departure show the immediate distance between Renardette’s proposal and René’s grief, while the ax leads him back into the labor that occupies his life after Mari is gone.

Narrative Significance

The scene gives Mari’s death a double weight: it is an intimate family bereavement and a disruption of the household René had shared with her. Elsewhere, the forest’s expansion and René’s work as a woodcutter frame his life as one increasingly surrounded by change he cannot master. Mari’s death is distinct from that landscape pressure, but its quiet, compressed sequence—from a year of confusion to her final words and death—places personal loss at the center of the wider story.