The narrator is at his mother’s bedside. It’s nighttime in a hospital. Sitting by the body that has fallen asleep, never to awaken, the narrator recalls their past life out loud. In a poetical and sensitive language, Xavier Houssin recounts his childhood – the beloved only child of a mother who gave birth to him in the absence of the father -, rue d’Avelghem, the North and Normandy. The next day is the beginning of the afterwards. Organizing the funeral. Days outside of time, during which the narrator shrouds his deceased in words. As an epigraph to his book, Xavier Houssin used an excerpt from Loti’s diary in which he announces his mother’s death: I’m downstairs, in the little dining room, writing the same dispatch to everyone: “Ma mère vient de m’ouvrir” (Mother just opened me delete the apostrophe and the v and it would be just died)… a Freudian slip that he adopts as his own throughout these moving pages. The poetical, sensitive account of an event: a mother’s death.