Maurice “Momo” Bolduc’s death, in Touladi in the winter of 1953, turns a childhood companion into Loïc’s first experience of death at close range. Momo’s illness removes him from their games before taking his life; the wake then leaves Loïc trying to reconcile the brother he knew with the still body in the coffin. Recalled through Loïc’s childhood experience, the episode also binds grief to a strange sense of shared perception, religious fear, and the lasting question of what death means.

Illness and the Brothers’ Bond

Momo, Loïc’s brother, was being raised by the Bolduc grandparents when a grave illness called hydropisie struck him. Loïc was about six and a half. The boys had slid and played hockey together, and Momo had taught Loïc to skate when Loïc was six. Their bond was made in the everyday freedoms of play, so the first changes in Momo’s health registered as a break in their shared life: he grew too weak to play and tired quickly.

As Momo weakened, cousins and other playmates began to mock him and even tried to hurt him. Loïc took his brother’s side. The illness therefore changed more than Momo’s physical capacity; it altered the children’s relationships around him and gave Loïc an early role as his defender. The account does not dwell on treatment or offer a more precise medical explanation for hydropisie. Instead, it follows what Loïc could see: his brother’s rapid decline and the growing distance between Momo and the ordinary world of their games.

Loïc also sensed in Momo an understanding that the younger boy could not share. As the disease progressed, Momo seemed increasingly absent, but he did not complain. Loïc sometimes found him gazing at falling snow or at the mauve light of a winter evening, motionless and calm, with a faint smile. In retrospect, these scenes give Momo’s illness an inward dimension: to Loïc, his brother appeared to be turning toward a world beyond the one they had inhabited together.

A Moment Outside Ordinary Time

One memory of Momo survives not as a scene of sickness but as a summer evening. At Momo’s urging, the boys lay in cut grass and watched the clouds change color at dusk. Momo gently placed his hand on Loïc’s fist. Loïc felt time stop, and the sky and clouds seemed to acquire a presence that entered him even as he entered them. The colors multiplied into an experience of beauty and joy he could not put into words.

The episode remained deeply marked in Loïc, though it disappeared from his conscious memory for years before returning with exceptional force. Its place beside Momo’s death complicates the loss: the brother who would soon be fixed in the cold stillness of a coffin had also given Loïc an experience of extraordinary connectedness, one that seemed to exceed the boundaries between self and world. The remembered touch becomes a counterpoint to the later touch of Momo’s cold body, but it does not resolve the mystery that death presents to the child.

The Wake and Loïc’s First Encounter with Death

Momo’s small body lay in state for three days in the Bolduc grandparents’ parlor, while relatives and neighbors kept vigil. Loïc had never before been in the presence of a dead person. He was fascinated by the stillness, yet the face in the coffin seemed unlike his brother: very pale and waxen, sunken into white satin, with flattened hair. He wondered whether there had been a mistake, whether this could really be Momo, and expected him to wake, open his eyes, and speak. The joined hands holding a rosary made the body’s stillness look final, but Loïc could not yet accept that finality.

A sudden impulse led him to touch Momo’s hands. The coldness of the flesh startled him and brought on horrible thoughts. His question about death took the form of a child’s attempt to understand temperature and permanence: was death an endless winter, a cold from which Momo would never emerge? That image immediately collided with the religious teaching Loïc had received about the fires of hell. Momo could not, he felt, be in hell; unable to settle the contradiction, he stopped questioning and went back to the women gathered nearby.

There he heard his grandmother Élise interpret the death as Momo’s father coming to fetch him. The remark frightened Loïc. The night before, as he lay in bed, he had imagined himself beside Momo in Alcide Bolduc’s airplane, with their father coming for him too so the two boys could fly together forever. The fantasy became terror: Loïc feared losing his breath or feeling his heart stop, a recurring phobia he associated with the confrontation between the fathers. Momo’s death thus made the possibility of his own death immediate, not abstract.

Aftermath and Narrative Significance

During the wake, a fair-haired girl named Solange caught Loïc’s attention. Later, alone in a darkened room with her asleep nearby, he dwelt on her name and imagined her through the warmth and sweetness of oranges and the airy hair he associated with Christmas angels. That night, the image of Solange returned as he struggled to sleep, displacing his fear and carrying him into fantasies in which he rescued her from danger. The contrast gives the aftermath its childhood scale: fear of death and the pull of life, affection, and imagined adventure occupy the same restless mind.

The following day, Aunt Georgette arrived from New Brunswick with Florence, Alcide Bolduc’s other child, who had been adopted by Georgette and was a year older than Loïc. Marie-Louise had offered them hospitality so that the two orphaned children could get to know each other. Loïc was shy around this sister he had scarcely spent time with; Florence kissed him on the cheek and then the mouth, making the adults laugh. Her arrival does not lessen Momo’s loss, but it places the death within a wider family shaped by bereavement, adoption, and children being raised across households.

The episode’s force lies in the way the narrative lets a child encounter death through concrete sensations and incomplete explanations: Momo’s face in white satin, the cold hands, the rosary, the winter image, and the remembered pressure of his hand on Loïc’s fist. Loïc cannot make religious teaching, his grandmother’s explanation, and what he sees fit together. What remains is not an answer but a lasting memory: Momo’s death introduces him to irreversibility, while the earlier moment beneath the changing sky preserves a sense of connection that death cannot simply erase.