An intimate until the end

When Francois Mitterrand knew he was dying, he turned to Marie de Hennezel for consolation. Now she has distilled her thoughts about death into a remarkable book.

Marie de Hennezel is soberly dressed in grey and black, a quietly spoken person of dignity and unconscious authority, yet she has a ready smile which crinkles her eyes. She looks you in the eye, she listens and speaks carefully; she seems a person to trust.

She also represents something truly extraordinary. For dying is the ultimate taboo subject, yet her book Intimate Death, which is about de Hennezel's "precious task" of accompanying terminally ill people to the end, is a bestseller in France, has been translated into a dozen languages and looks set to make her name in the UK too.

"Caring for the old, the infirm, the sick and the dying does not have a good image or high status," she says, yet her work as a hospice psychologist in Paris attracted the admiration of President Mitterrand, who became her friend and staunch supporter during the 12 years before his own death from cancer.

Tired after a day of speaking engagements and radio interviews in London, de Hennezel is at last sitting down to a cup of tea in her hotel when her husband joins us. He suggests that Marie herself is not fully aware of the impact she has made. It has been, he says, a "social phenomenon" in France.

So is this 51-year-old mother of three and grandmother of two at risk of becoming a guru, I ask her? "No, I am not a guru," she protests gravely, her open, sweet-natured face contracting into a frown. "I have no disciples. Many other people do what I do."

But not many others have written about the great questions of life and death with such simplicity and compassion, bearing witness to what Mitterrand called "the most profound of all human experiences". Her book is a slim volume of short, descriptive passages and meditations, vivid with the insights of dying individuals who come alive on her pages, and we can't help but be moved by their deaths. This is an intimate book, moving and rich with distilled human suffering and wisdom.

And while of course the book has its sad, even horrific moments, its central message is that whatever time is left to a dying person can be, should be, lived with intensity, passion - even joy. "Death can be humane, although sad, when you are cared for with gentleness and respect," says de Hennezel. "We are so frightened of death, but if you can come close and touch someone so that you are connected, fear goes away. Suffering is there, but you discover something inside suffering which makes sense, so life has a meaning."

De Hennezel has often been midwife to what she calls "the spiritual labour that goes on inside every dying person ... in the effort to give birth to oneself completely before leaving." At times she has felt extremely sad, but not depressed: "the proximity of death makes me deeply aware of the miracle of life."

Perhaps it was the paradoxical strength of this gentle woman's nature that first attracted Mitterrand, but when they met at an official function "there was an intuitive rapport", she says. "He wrote to me, we met and we talked."

Although de Hennezel didn't tell him at the time - "because I didn't know what it meant" - she had had a dream that Mitterrand was struggling to get through an underwater tunnel: "In my dream I knew how to breathe under the water and I knew I could help you."

Their friendship grew through frequent lunches together, both at Mitterrand's house and at de Hennezel's. "He was very interested in spirituality and death," she says. "But we also talked about literature, about nature, about places in France. We had casual conversation - and we laughed."

De Hennezel admits she was "a bit intimidated" by the President at the beginning, "but he was very straightforward and we talked in a very direct way. He became a good friend. He said he liked the fact that I was not dogmatic. To have contradictory thoughts and ambivalence is acceptable to me, and he felt at ease with me because he was a very contradictory man. I could accept his contradictions - as I was relatively young it was rewarding and gave me confidence. He really encouraged me. He brought me a lot."

Mitterrand visited the palliative care unit where de Hennezel worked and in a preface to her book wrote that he would never forget the patients there, or the doctors and nurses on de Hennezel's team: "What was the secret of [their] serenity? What was the source of the peace in their eyes? Each face imprinted itself on my memory like the face of eternity itself."

This was the start of the growing hospice movement in France, which de Hennezel describes as "caring for the person before caring for the symptom, accompanying patients to the very end, respecting their dignity ... listening to their questions, their doubts, their despair, with an awareness that each room holds an entire human life imprisoned within it, not just a sick body."

After Mitterrand's operation for prostate cancer in 1992, he called de Hennezel to his bedside: "He said to me - 'This is a disease you die of. I'm soon going to need your palliative care.'

"He was quite depressed at that moment. He told me the doctors had given him six months - which they should never say because they never know. I said to him, 'You mustn't start dying before death comes.' " He lived for three more years.

"He also asked me my opinion about life after death," says de Hennezel, "and I said that I am not much interested in the after-life. It is a mystery for me; I'll never know until I die. I think he came to the same conclusion, that nobody knows and the important thing is to make the most of life, to be fully aware."

De Hennezel was brought up as a Catholic, yet is no longer religious in the conventional sense. "But I pray and meditate and have faith in another dimension. I have no intellectual certainty, but I have a deep intuition that there is more."

Mitterrand had once said to her that he would like her to be there at his death, but when the time came she was away on a training course in the West Indies. "I knew he would have liked me to come, but the last time I saw him I realised that he was saying goodbye to me. That day I remained longer than usual, for two hours. He couldn't stop our meeting, and although he was usually the one who said when he had something else to do, on that day I had to do it myself; I said I had to go.

"Also, that day he asked me whether I would think of him when he was dead and if I would put a small stone for him near the Celtic cross in the field below my house in the south of France. I used to meditate there and he visited me there twice and knew it was an important place for me. I said I would do that, and I did"

'Intimate Death' by Marie de Hennezel is published by Little Brown, price pounds 14.99.