Beauvoir maintained her atheist conviction about death even at Sartre’s passing

Evidence

Beauvoir was devastated, but her intellectual honesty forbade changing her lifelong conviction that death was the end: an intrusion and an abomination, with no part in life, and no promise of anything beyond. She wrote: ‘His death does separate us. My death will not bring us together again. That is how things are. It is in itself splendid that we were able to live our lives in harmony for so long.’ — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 978

Categorization

• XREF: Directly echoes the Existentialist commitment to living without transcendence — resonates with Camus’s Sisyphus and the rejection of bad-faith comforting afterlives from earlier chapters.
• APHORISMS: The closing line ‘It is in itself splendid that we were able to live our lives in harmony for so long’ functions as genuine wisdom about gratitude without religious consolation.