In January 2026, the publication of the book Is There Life After Your Death? by Thomas Stern, widower of Catherine Laborde (who died on January 28, 2025 on the Île d’Yeu), provokes a family dispute and a complaint from a nursing assistant at the center of the case. Beyond the individual case, the episode highlights three issues: end-of-life caregivers, end of life, and privacy after death.
Caregivers, The Quiet Pillar Of Keeping People At Home
France is aging, staying at home is encouraged, and care professions are short-staffed. Between these dynamics are informal caregivers: spouses, children, parents, friends. The latest available public data describe a massive reality: in 2022, 7.1 million people were informal caregivers in metropolitan France, or 11% of the population aged 5 years or older.
That figure doesn’t tell the whole story. Informal help is not just a hand to hold. It is often threefold: emotional support, everyday tasks, and sometimes financial assistance. Many caregivers combine these roles, at the cost of a gradual slide: you start by accompanying, you end up organizing, coordinating, negotiating, carrying.
The burden, most of all, is unevenly distributed. In three out of ten cases, help is provided without any backup: no other relative, no professional, no volunteer. Among spouse caregivers, this solitude is even more common: 61% of them report having no co-caregiver. Isolation thus becomes a risk factor: fatigue, social withdrawal, psychological vulnerability.
Finally, caregiving is not just a retirees’ issue. Six out of ten caregivers are working or students. In other words: caregiving is negotiated amid schedules, children, commutes, careers. And that is where the debate moves from emotion to public policy: what space does work leave for caregiving? And what is the value of a right if it is little known or hard to use?
A Still Fragile Status: Leave, Compensation, And Underuse
In recent years, the law has recognized caregivers. But it mostly recognizes them in fragments.
The caregiver leave allows suspension or adjustment of work. It is used to accompany a relative who has lost autonomy or has a disability. In the absence of a more favorable collective agreement, its maximum duration is three months, renewable, up to one year over an entire career. On paper, the framework exists. In reality, everything depends on the employer, the position, and the financial situation.
To compensate part of the lost income, the daily caregiver allowance (AJPA) can be paid (CAF or MSA) to people who reduce or temporarily stop their activity. On January 1, 2025, its reference amount is €65.80 per day (and €32.90 per half-day), limited to 22 days per month. The cap has been expanded: up to 66 days per cared-for person, for up to four people, i.e., 264 days over a career.
These figures tell a paradox: the State names caregivers, but financial aid remains calibrated for short, fragmented interruptions, often insufficient for long illnesses. Hence a regularly observed underuse: many are unaware of the measures. Others cannot afford to activate them. Some fear the professional impact of extended leave.
The core issue is therefore not only budgetary. It is social: caregiving has become a mass phenomenon, but it is still treated as an exceptional event.
End Of Life: What The Law Says And What The French Know
The controversy around an accompaniment narrative also raises a very concrete question: how is end of life regulated in France?
The reference framework remains the law known as Claeys-Leonetti (February 2, 2016), which consolidated patients’ rights: refusal of unreasonable persistence, access to palliative care, strengthening of the trusted person, and establishment of a right to deep and continuous sedation until death, combined with analgesia, in specific situations (refractory suffering with a short-term life prognosis, or cessation of a life-sustaining treatment likely to cause unbearable suffering). The procedure is collegial and recorded in the medical file.
Two tools are central.
First, advance directives are a written declaration. Any adult can thus specify their wishes for the end of life. This applies in case they can no longer express themselves. Their scope is strong: in principle, they bind the physician, except for exceptions provided by law.
Next, the trusted person: the one who testifies to the patient’s wishes when the patient can no longer speak. This testimony carries decisive weight.
The problem is less the rule than its dissemination. Public evaluations and available surveys converge: the measures remain largely unknown. One figure sums up this gap: only 18% of French people declare having written advance directives. Yet the issue touches almost all families sooner or later.
Alongside patient rights, there are also rights for those who accompany them. Family solidarity leave allows an employee to be absent to assist a relative. That relative must be in an advanced or terminal phase of a serious and incurable condition. It can give entitlement to a specific compensation, the daily allowance for accompanying a person at the end of life (AJAP), paid by Health Insurance, with amounts and durations that vary depending on full cessation or transition to part-time.
These mechanisms outline a philosophy: end of life is not only a medical matter. It is also a matter of organization, rights, anticipation. And therefore, of information.
Privacy After Death: Real Protection, But Fragmented (And Its Limits)
When a book, film, or article describes an end of life, another boundary appears: that of privacy.
Under the law, respect for privacy is a right of the living person. After death, it is not automatically “transmitted” to relatives. But that does not mean everything becomes publishable without consequence.
First, relatives can take action if they demonstrate a personal harm linked to the publication. This includes shock, humiliation, or an invasion of their own privacy. In addition, an infringement on the respect owed to the deceased that reflects on them is also considered. Case law has recalled this, notably regarding the image of a deceased person: relatives can contest its reproduction only by establishing the harm they suffer.
Next, because there is a principle that does not extinguish: the respect due to the human body “does not cease with death.” This notion primarily concerns remains, ashes, the burial. It does not settle everything, but it says something essential: society continues to demand a form of dignity.
Finally, there is a field where the post-mortem is explicitly planned: the digital. The European regulation (GDPR) does not apply to deceased persons. However, French law allows each person, during their lifetime, to set post-mortem directives. These concern the retention, deletion, and communication of their personal data. Here, protection is not moral: it is procedural.
In other words: post-mortem privacy is not a single shield. It’s a patchwork — dignity of the body, harm to relatives, digital data — that leaves a gray area. It is in this area that conflicts settle.
Telling The End Of Life: Between Public Interest And Risk Of Exposure
Accompaniment accounts can have social utility. They describe exhaustion, doubt, invisible gestures. They make audible what caregivers often live behind closed doors.
But usefulness is not enough to erase the risks.
First risk: identifiability. As soon as a patient, a caregiver, a place, or a scene becomes recognizable, the intimate becomes public. It becomes an object to be interpreted, commented on, archived.
Second risk: role confusion. Health and social care professionals work under obligations of discretion and confidentiality. Portraying them, even indirectly, can have consequences for their lives and work.
Third risk: the hierarchy of legitimacies. In a family, care is often collective: some are present daily, others handle administration, others grieve in silence. A published account can, intentionally or not, rewrite each person’s place. It doesn’t just describe: it assigns.
Celebrity complicates the equation further. A public figure generates collective affection that can turn against relatives: people demand details “to understand,” judge choices, and assign roles. Media familiarity is not consent to exposure.
The Laborde Case, A Textbook Example Without A Verdict
Thomas Stern’s book presents itself as a posthumous letter and as a caregiver’s account, an argument in favor of relatives. The text also aims to be a widower’s testimony. It recounts the end of life of Catherine Laborde, affected by Lewy body disease (Lewy body dementia), a neurodegenerative disease that can combine cognitive fluctuations, attention disorders, motor symptoms and, sometimes, hallucinations. In this kind of trajectory, those close to the patient often live a bewildering alternation: presence then absence, clarity then confusion. Memories also fluctuate.
The public contestation, brought forward by Françoise Laborde) and by Catherine’s daughters, Gabrièle and Pia, targets two points: the timing chosen for publication and the portrayal of the final months. They denounce a text they consider unworthy. Furthermore, they believe the end of life was a collective and structured provision. It is not a story focused on a single person.
To this rift is added a judicial component: a nursing assistant who accompanied Catherine Laborde filed a complaint, alleging notably moral harassment and an invasion of privacy. The procedure is ongoing, the facts are contested, and no decision has been rendered. Thomas Stern, for his part, says he is “telling his truth” and indicates he has been summoned.
This particular case actually concentrates a societal tension.
- Recognize caregivers, without confining them to a heroic posture, nor leaving them alone facing long illnesses.
- Better publicize end-of-life rights. That way, decisions are less likely to be made in urgency. It also prevents guilt or misunderstanding.
- Clarify protection of intimacy, especially when the person described can no longer respond. This is crucial when professionals are involved.
The Laborde affair does not provide a solution. It only reminds us that end of life is a moment when everything is fragile: bodies, relationships, words. And that, within this fragility, society still lacks clear tools.
What Can Be Taken Away, Beyond Emotion
The debate tends to close on a question: who is right? The public interest is elsewhere: how to prevent caregiving from becoming a zone of exhaustion and conflict?
The French blind spot is not an absence of rules. It is the gap between existing measures and their real appropriation.
Informed too late, many caregivers improvise. Poorly supported, they burn out. And when the intimate becomes public narrative, private wounds are compounded by an image battle.