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The analysis of Noëlle Châtelet’s literary work The Final Lesson, invites us, with the support of psychoanalytic theory, to develop some reflections on the function of writing in this text. In the context of the announcement of her mother’s voluntary and planned death, the text’s address to the latter allows us to consider the role of the writing as contributing to the close relationship between the mother and her daughter, and to maintaining a primary narcissistic link. The text also shows her grief and her activism, mirroring that of her mother. Through the lens of the literary narrative as a retrospective construction, we consider how to accommodate unconscious death wishes and ambivalence, in order to present them to the social body. Present in all kinds of bereavement, they seem, due to the particular type of death in question—resulting from a decision to die—to be a source of an intense feeling of guilt and an intense desire for reparation and forgiveness that finds its fulfillment in the exercise of writing. In closing, beyond the situation recounted in the literary work, writing may be the place to search for meaning, in relation to events in the mother’s past.