Hey, Death

Translated from French to English with AI. Aujourd’hui, le roman Coucou la mort est disponible en français, mais également dans une version avec les pages en vis-à-vis dans les deux langues. Il est également disponible en version Kindle en anglais ou en français.

Hello Death is the moving story of Jean Lefranc, an ordinary man who, over the course of sixty years, learns to live with death without ever ceasing to love life. From the loss of his grandmother at the age of ten to the deeper griefs of adulthood, he goes through each stage of life with the sincerity of someone who seeks to understand rather than judge.

But this novel is not just about death: it is mostly about what death reveals. Family, silence, tender gestures, the clumsy way men often handle grief, love as a source of support, fatherhood as a giver of life, the impossibility of escaping regret while trying to avoid remorse, and the strength one must find within to carry on.

Alongside Jean, a figure moves through the ages without ever being named: his wife, or perhaps his conscience, or maybe the invisible part of himself that believes, prays, and searches for meaning. She opens the doors to spirituality, discreetly guides acts of compassion, and whispers a sense of transcendence and a path toward God, where Jean remains rooted, like many of us, in an earthly rationality. She is the one who connects memory to the soul, and forgetting to forgiveness.
The unnamed woman, wife of the protagonist or perhaps his inner conscience, is not a secondary character. She allows the author to embody a constant spiritual presence—subtle but active—in a narrative dominated by loss, silence, and successive griefs. This character transforms guilt into understanding. She teaches us that forgiving what we forget is also forgiving ourselves for continuing to live, for continuing to deserve happiness.

With delicacy, emotion, and humor, Hello Death questions our relationship to absence, to religion, to legacy, and above all, to what remains when others leave us.

This novel shifts between sadness and joy, tears and laughter, and in the end, when everything seems to collapse, it is an embrace, a breath, a suspended moment that reveals what death most preciously has to offer: a heightened awareness of life. A powerful, organic, and unexpected ending, where the body responds to the soul, where hope shines in the darkness. Because death does not exist: it is merely the absence of life, and the cycle of life has no end.anity.