July 31 Thomas is dying. Thomas accepts that he is dying. It is here, in the house at Saint-Clement, our childhood home, that he has chosen to wait for death. I am by his side. It is summer, still. I did not know that it was possible to die in summer. I had thought death always struck in winter, that it needed the cold, the grey, a sort of desolation; that only then could death truly feel on home ground. Now I discover that it can just as easily go about its business in the sunshine, in the clear light of day.

I think Thomas will receive it in the clear light of day. I used to think it began with a numbing of the extremities, a spasm, and then suddenly an urgency, a headlong rush, a violence. But no: it is casual, a sort of holiday, an indolence, a surrender in the heat. A yellow, pulsing heat. There can be no doubt that this inevitable, this long awaited death will be a catastrophe nonetheless. It will spew out over our whole lives. It will change them, send them in unexpected directions. It will cause an upheaval which none of us will be able to check.

This death will be the greatest of events. The wave of pain will ripple down the years. It will haunt us, overwhelm us. My brother is dying. Saint-Clement-des-Baleines is the most remote village, one perched on the westerly tip of the "le de Re, at its farthest edge, the village which most looks out towards the Americas. After that, there is nothing, no islands, no land, nothing but the ocean for as far as the eye can see, nothing but the boundless Atlantic. The lighthouse's shaft of light points the way. Saint-Clement is the end of the world, just as Cape Horn once was in my imagination as a child.

It is the point beyond which the waters prevail, beyond which men must lay down their arms. They say boats have been lost here in these treacherous waters, off the coast, in spite of the lighthouse; that sailors have drowned and their bodies been carried by the tides, carried back to shore. They tell extraordinary stories. Here, it is easy to feel a sense of abandonment, like being the last man on earth, as if it were enough now to simply let oneself drift, to lose one's grip on everything. The feeling is as much a respite as a sacrifice, as much an imposed solitude as it is a conscious exile. One's gaze is lost in the distance. I know that there are paths behind me, pine trees, marshes, churches, cemeteries. But in front of me: nothing, nothing but the ocean.

Everything. The essence of childhood is here. The house is white, a whiteness that on certain afternoons is almost unbearable and makes one turn away, the walls are painted with whitewash as the island tradition requires, the shutters are green. It is a simple house as summer houses so often are, more functional than charming. On the first floor, my bedroom and my brother's, though separated by a corridor, are identical. The wallpaper is blue, probably because we were boys. Beams hug the slope of the mansard roof. Windows open between the beams, letting light flood through the mansard as they breach it.

The furniture is perfunctory. You could guess the people here are only passing through. How could we have known that Thomas would come to die in this place? From these bedrooms, you can see the sea. The blue of the sea draws one's gaze far out. But first, the garden: a few trees I still can't put a name to after all these years, and a copse or two, a table and some chairs of rusted cast-iron, flowers my mother planted and our neighbour tends in the off-season (three of the four calendar seasons), a garden which was enormous when I was five, and which, as I grew, seemed slowly to shrink to what are its true dimensions, a garden which smells sweet and slopes gently towards the beach. From the house, it's barely possible to make out the sandbank, the curve of a dune on the left: it almost seems as.