FROM OUR REPORTER
PARIS In the days when France is rethinking the end of life in the face of legislative reform, the figure of the “hospital biographer” invented by Valéria Milewski comes to the fore: volunteers collecting the stories of terminally ill patients to write a book about their lives together, which is then given to the person specified by the patient. A way to ease the agony of emptiness and meaninglessness, to make every life lived something worth sharing. If the great men of history often consoled themselves with the thought of death with the thought of immortality conquered by glory, hospital biographers offer to all patients who want to leave their mark: There is no life that is not worth living, to be passed on to relatives.
Valéria Milewski, head of the association «Passeur de mots et d’histoires», trained linguist, had the idea in 2007. «I like people, ordinary stories, and I like to listen and to write». She then contacted Chartres Hospital and has been an employee of the healthcare company since 2010. He writes about 20 biographies a year, from 10 to 400 pages, which are then hand-bound by a Chartres craftsman and given to the person designated by the patient after his disappearance.
Throughout France there are about 25 “hospital biographers” who have followed Valéria Milewski’s example, from north to south of the country. Next April, the 50-year-old Frenchwoman will take part in a conference preparatory to the reform of end-of-life discipline at the Ministry of Health in Paris and propose the introduction of a university diploma.
“We live in a society where less and less is said and where transmission between generations is weakening – he told Parisien – but grief is always longer and more complicated. The hospital biography exists for this purpose: it enables the living to be repaired», as the title of Maylis de Kerangal’s beautiful novel says.
At the Chartres Hospital, Valéria Milewski or one of the biographers she has trained offer the service to patients in the Haemato-Oncology Department free of charge. “I see sick people who transform themselves when they embark on this project – says doctor Frédéric Duriez –. In this way they stay alive, they continue to exist outside of the medical record. The last few weeks or months of life make sense.” Leave a written testimony, rebuild your life so it can help those left behind, and perhaps explain actions that may have hurt someone. The hospital biography can be a way fixing the past, asking for forgiveness, reassuring family members we’re leaving peacefully, and fixing in black and white what was.
A hospital biographer can become an adult and not very young person who has experience in caring for people at the end of life and who has writing and listening skills. It’s not psychological work, it’s not about establishing facts that are unverified. The patient’s vision and memories are all that matters.
When the meeting between the patient and the biographer is mentioned in the preamble of the book, the biography is formally unsigned and the biographer is just a ‘word transmitter’. At the end, about twenty pages are left for the patient or their family to continue the story. «True death is forgetting – says Valéria Milewski -. The book creates a sense of eternity.”