Maurice (Momo) Dies of Illness

Maurice Bolduc’s death from hydropisie, an illness that rapidly left him too weak to play, is Loïc’s first direct encounter with death and a lasting source of memory. The loss breaks up a childhood companionship built around skating and hockey; it also leaves Loïc with an intense recollection of Momo’s stillness, his apparent inwardness, and the cold body in the coffin. The episode connects grief to a brief, wordless experience of shared perception that Loïc forgets for years before recovering it with unusual force.

Illness and a Changing Brotherhood

In Touladi in the winter of 1953, hydropisie struck Momo, Loïc’s brother, who was being raised by the Bolduc grandparents. Loïc remembered being six and a half when Momo became ill. Their relationship had been active and affectionate: they slid and played hockey together, and Momo had taught Loïc to skate when Loïc was six. The loss therefore begins not as an abstract awareness of illness but as the sudden disappearance of shared play.

As Momo weakened, he could no longer keep up. He tired quickly and was unable to take part in the games that had defined their companionship. Their cousins and playmates began mocking him and even trying to hurt him, and Loïc took his brother’s side. Momo’s growing physical vulnerability changes the boys’ relationship: Loïc, once the younger child learning to skate, now has to defend the brother who taught him. The account makes this protection part of the illness’s social consequences, rather than treating Momo’s decline as something confined to his body.

Momo’s Attentiveness and Loïc’s Recovered Memory

Loïc sensed that Momo understood something beyond what he himself could grasp. The account presents this as the child’s impression, not as knowledge that Momo explicitly explained. As the illness progressed quickly, Momo did not complain. Loïc remembered finding him absorbed in falling snow or in the mauve dusk of a winter evening: motionless, absent-seeming, with a calm face and a faint smile. The contrast between the speed of his physical decline and this composed, almost transfigured appearance gives Loïc’s memory of him a quality of quiet mystery.

A separate remembered scene gives that impression a bodily form. The brothers lay in cut grass and watched clouds change color at sunset, at Momo’s suggestion. Momo gently rested his hand on Loïc’s fist. Loïc felt that time had stopped and that the sky and clouds had acquired a presence unlike anything he had known: they seemed to enter him as he entered them. He experienced an extraordinary range of colors and an inexpressible joy. The scene is not presented as an explanation for Momo’s illness or as proof of what Momo knew. Instead, it preserves an intimate moment of attention between the brothers, one in which a touch and a shared gaze briefly make the world feel newly alive.

Loïc says that this experience marked him deeply but disappeared from his conscious memory for years. When it returned, it did so with exceptional force. Its delayed recovery makes the loss more than a sequence ending at the deathbed: an experience associated with Momo survives in memory without remaining continuously available to Loïc. The account gives that recovered scene a distinct place beside the more immediate and disturbing memories of illness and death.

The Wake and Loïc’s First Encounter with Death

Momo’s small body lay in state for three days in the Bolduc grandparents’ living room, where relatives and neighbors kept vigil. It was the first time Loïc had been in the presence of a dead person. The child was fascinated by the corpse’s stone-like immobility, yet the body in the coffin did not look like the brother he knew. Momo’s face was pale and waxen, sunk into white satin, his hair flattened against his head. Loïc wondered whether this could really be Momo, or whether a mistake had been made; he expected his brother to wake, open his eyes, and speak.

That expectation collided with the evidence of the body. Loïc felt an abrupt urge to touch Momo’s joined hands, which rested on a rosary against his chest. The cold flesh startled him and brought on horrible thoughts. The scene marks a sharp passage from disbelief to physical recognition: death is no longer only the absence of games or the sight of an ill brother, but a coldness Loïc can feel for himself. His fascination and revulsion belong to the same first encounter, as the child tries to make the motionless body fit the living brother he remembers.

Cold, Religious Teaching, and Fear

Loïc understood Momo’s body as fixed in a cold from which he would never emerge. He wondered whether death meant an eternal winter, but that idea immediately conflicted with the religious teaching he had received about the fires of hell. He could not imagine Momo being in hell, and the contradiction left him without an answer. The child’s reflections do not resolve what death means; they reveal how bodily observation, religious instruction, and love for his brother pull against one another.

Loïc eventually left the coffin and rejoined Marie-Louise, who was talking with her mother, Germaine Bolduc, and other relatives. There he overheard his grandmother say that Momo’s father had come to fetch him. The remark frightened him. After the cold body and the impossible question of what happens after death, this family explanation gives Momo’s departure an active, personal cause—but for Loïc it offers no reassurance. The episode closes not with a settled belief, but with a child confronted by death’s physical fact and by adult language that makes it more frightening.