 In All Men Are Mortal the givenness of finitude and death concerns our relationship to time. Eighteen years later, writing about the dying and death of her mother in A Very Easy Death (1964); six years after that, analyzing the situation of the aged in Coming of Age (1970), and eleven years subsequent to that, chronicling Sartre’s last days in Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre (1981), it is not so much our relationship to time but more a matter of our embodiment that concerns Beauvoir. In A Very Easy Death and Adieux, Beauvoir assumes the position of the phenomenological witness. The bodies of her mother and Sartre are given to us in all their disturbing breakdowns and deteriorations. Some have found these works cold, insensitive and even cruel. They miss Beauvoir’s point. She is showing us who we are. The “I can” body revealed by other phenomenologists as a crucial mark of embodiment is the limited condition of the mature healthy body. It is but one phase of the life of the body. In its early days the body is still learning its “I can’s”. As we age, the body begins losing them. It is one thing, as with the myth of woman, to alienate an “I can” from its capacities. It is quite another to refuse to attend to the full range of embodied life and to assess the value of that life in terms of its I can possibilities.