The Violet Hour (10 page)

A few days later, on December 16, Sontag tells Sharon that she feels terrible and doesn't know what to do. When Sharon says that the Zarnestra is supposed to halt the progress of the disease, Susan says that if these are the side effects, she isn't sure
that she can bear them, and Sharon thinks that by “side effects” she means her deteriorating mental state.

Sharon spends many nights in the hospital. She often comes at 5:45
P.M
. and stays until midnight, or she stays later. She is in the hospital room, night after night, and somewhere in these final weeks, Sharon comes around to the view that the treatment is too much. “The nurses would come in and it was a kind of torture,” Sharon says. “They would try to give her the drugs, and she had thrush and she couldn't swallow.” One time she is wheeling Sontag through the long hallways to get an emergency MRI in the middle of the night. She's starting to think it's possible that the person who wanted to fight to the end in May could not have foreseen the suffering she would go through in December. She is starting to think it's possible that the person who made the decision in May is no longer there.

David has a different view of his mother's commitment to continuing treatment. As he later wrote in an article, “I do not regret trying to get her to swallow those Zarnestra pills even when her death was near, for I haven't the slightest doubt that had she been able to make her wishes known, my mother would have said she wanted to fight for her life to the very end.”

At this point, Susan wants drugs that will knock her out, but she is harder and harder to knock out. She starts to talk about Churchill's memoirs, and when Sharon asks what she's saying, she says she doesn't want any “conversation.” Later she says she was just “muttering.” She knows, in other words, that
what she is saying doesn't make sense. That night she dreams that Hitler is chasing her. The nurses and doctors think that she should be distracted, but Sharon writes to David, “She doesn't seem very distractible to me. Susan is a pretty fierce character, and that hasn't changed.”

Peter, David, and Sharon all think that she may be talking to the private nurses about dying. The nurses are warm, maternal, religious; they are with her in the middle of the night, holding her hand. The nurse from Guyana says that some of her patients begin to talk to her about dying, at three in the morning, in the fluorescent glow of hospital night, but Sontag never does. She talks about getting better. She talks about overcoming the disease, about remission; the closest she comes to talking about dying is when she says, “Will this work?” but she never directly raises the issue of what will happen if it doesn't. She tells the nurse that she wants to get back to her writing. She gives her some of her books.

On December 18, Sharon is surprised to see that Sontag is being extra pleasant to an excessively talkative nurse she doesn't like much. But then it turns out that Sontag has a paranoid delusion that the nurses have convened a secret meeting and decided she is mean and arrogant and they won't attend to her. In response she has decided to be overly nice to the nurse taking care of her.

Someone goes to buy the best pillow at Bed Bath & Beyond. There somehow isn't time to step back and reflect, even if one were so inclined. The larger issues vanish into the to-do list,
the million minute maneuverings to make Susan feel better, the cash to tip the nurses, the quest to obtain the right kind of wet tissues that the nurses like, the endless things to get done. There are no larger issues.

The phone rings at Peter's East Village walk-up at seven-thirty in the morning. He is asleep on the futon, but when he answers, it is Susan.

“Come up here.” “What's going on?” “Just come.”

He gets to her room by eight-thirty. She is agitated. She asks if there is anyone else in the room. He says no. She says that she wants to pray. He suggests the Our Father.

She says, “Why can't it be Our Mother?” He says, “Sure. Our Mother.”

And then she runs through it. “No…patriarchal, Judeo-Christian…Let's stick with Our Father.”

So they begin: “Our Father, Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name…” Peter considers whether this is the drugs. He is sure the others would think so. “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.”

He decides later that it was some statement of emotional need, if not belief. He thought she was saying to him that she wanted
comfort. After the Lord's Prayer, they do a Buddhist prayer called the four thoughts, which lead to renunciation. And then she seems satisfied, calmer. Very quickly, though, the natural flow of events at the hospital intrudes. A nurse comes in to check something.

Any conversation is broken off by a nurse coming in; any moment of drifting thought is cut short: Your thoughts are not your own in a hospital; your thoughts belong a little bit to the nurse who is coming to check something.

A few days later, Sookhee sits with Susan, holding her hand. She can't talk at this point, so Sookhee says, “If you want me to pray for you, squeeze my hand.”

Sookhee believes that Sontag squeezes her hand.

Sookhee says, “Lord, I am asking you to give Susan peace. She needs peace in whatever situation she is in. Touch her body, Lord, touch her mind, touch her spirit, Lord.”

Sookhee thinks that Susan wants to hear her pray. Others might think that Susan just wanted to squeeze her hand, or they might think,
Too abstract: death. Too concrete: me
.

When Susan was in Europe with Leon Wieseltier, he was shocked that she would take communion in a Catholic church. But she was up for anything, a tourist, an adventurer, a dipper of toes in strange worlds. She did not believe in the body and blood of Christ, but she wanted to see what it was all about.
She once went with Peter to a Tibetan prayer meeting. She took notes very seriously the whole time, but afterward she said, “He was very charming, but, my God, what nonsense!”

Sharon asks Dr. Nimer if there is any medical possibility of taking Susan home to Chelsea. Dr. Nimer says that if she left the hospital she would be dead before she got there.

David cancels a Christmas vacation he was planning with his girlfriend. He imagines a conversation he could have had with his mother if it were ever admitted between them that she was dying. In this conversation he would ask her questions about some of the decisions she made. By this he means some of the decisions she made about him. He would tell her he loved her. He can't tell her he loves her, as things stand, because this would mean admitting that she is dying.

But does this final conversation that everyone imagines with a dying parent exist, this moment of perfect closure, the last thing you needed to say coming out whole and entire? Or is it just a fantasy thrown up by a desperate mind, an unobtainable mirage, glittering water in the desert? If you had this conversation, would it be satisfying? Or would it be one conversation in a lifetime of words; would it be, like every interaction we have with someone who is leaving us,
not enough
?

What is not said matters, though; it accumulates and matters. In her autobiographical story, “Project for a Trip to China,” Sontag wrote an elegant line about her own mother: “After three years I am exhausted by the nonexistent literature of
unwritten letters and unmade telephone calls that passes between me and M.”

Sontag and her beautiful mother were sometimes mistaken for sisters. She remembers her mother waking up at 4:00
A.M
. in an alcoholic stupor. “I was my mother's iron lung. I was my mother's
mother
,” Sontag writes. “I despised myself for my fear of my mother's anger. For my uncontrollable cringing + crying when she raised her hand to strike me.”

David remembers his mother's mind ranging to her own parents in the last weeks. Did she think about her own mother's death? Her unhappy, withholding mother. As her mother was dying, her last words to Sontag were, “What are you doing here? Why don't you go back to the hotel?”

On Christmas Eve, Sharon emails David that Susan had been cranky and mumbling the day before. The nurse was insisting that she swallow the Zarnestra, which was very painful with the thrush in her mouth. The struggle unnerves Sharon, as its logic has begun to elude her, has begun to seem purposeless. Sharon writes that the only thing she can make out from Sontag's rambling is, “I don't want to die in the hospital.”

During her earlier treatment for breast cancer, Sontag wrote, “Being ill feels like a diminishment. I'm no longer the owner of my own body. Can I turn that into a liberation? For a moment I felt myself clad in steel. Let them do with my body what they want. I'm
here
not there. Catch me if you can.”

Time in the hospital is strange; it just hangs there, with no progression of the sun, no night, even, in all that fluorescence, in the nurses ducking in at three in the morning, in tests, and medications, and blood pressure takings. There are still typed-up schedules of her day, though; they are perhaps shadows, commentaries on those other schedules that used to mark her days, the brisk, packed schedules of dinners and talks and theater that used to be pasted to her refrigerator. Annie's office coordinates with Anne Jump, who is still running Sontag's office. These schedules are kept because she doesn't want to be alone. They are also kept to manage the wild and different forms of love that Susan elicits, to order and control the conflicting devotions.

Annie comes on Christmas afternoon with lots of gifts for Susan. But Susan doesn't respond to them, and Annie gives up trying to unwrap them for her.

The last time Susan sees Annie, she holds her sleeve and says, “Get me out of here.” Afterward, Annie flies down to Florida to see her father, who is also dying.

On December 28, at three-thirty in the morning, the nurse at the hospital calls Sharon to say that the moment has come. Sharon calls David. She tries to call Sontag's close friend Paolo Dilonardo, who is staying at Susan's apartment, but he has flown in from Italy the night before and doesn't answer the phone, so she goes over, pounds on the door until she wakes him up, and together they go to the hospital. She tries to reach
Annie. When she and Paolo arrive, David, his girlfriend, and Hasan Gluhic, Susan's driver from Sarajevo and close friend, are already there. After a couple of hours, Dr. Nimer comes in and turns the monitor off. He explains that if the monitor is on, people watch the lines on the monitor instead of focusing on the patient. Dr. Nimer holds her hand, her arm. At 7:10 he feels for her pulse.
I'm here not there. Catch me if you can
. She is gone.

They wait in the hospital for a few hours. After desperately scrambling to get back from Florida, Annie finally arrives from the airport. She sits alone with Susan in the quiet hospital room. Around noon, the men from the funeral home come to take her.

Credit 2.1

On an early September day, Freud opens the novel he is reading: “ ‘Wretched weather for drowning yourself,' said a ragged old woman, who grinned at him.” The French doors of his study give way to the garden, with its blossoming almond tree.

His study in London is an exact replica of his study in Vienna, Egyptian statues lined up like soldiers in the same order on his desk, same Persian carpet, same shawl thrown across the couch, a re-creation of the old sanctum in this more spacious, beautiful house: someone's generous refusal of change. His famous patient, the Wolf Man, talked about the “sacred peace and quiet” of the study, and now there is a new kind of peace and quiet. The patients are gone, but stacked on the desk are the midnight-blue notebooks with his notes on their sessions.

A few months earlier, during a particularly brutal radiation treatment, Freud had written to his former patient and friend Marie Bonaparte, “My world is again what it was before—a little island of pain floating in a sea of indifference.” And now
the pain is unruly, would be for most people impossible. His family and friends and doctors urge him to take painkillers, but he refuses anything stronger than aspirin and the occasional hot-water bottle. “I prefer to think in torment than not to be able to think clearly,” he says.

The decision to refuse painkillers is difficult to watch; it appears to some to be stubbornness. One of his doctors writes, “What he really requires is some psychological treatment to enable him to make a pact with some other medicament similar to that which he has with aspirin, but I dare not suggest that to him.” And it's true that the old man is not exactly suggestible. He has made up his mind about this last stretch. He wants to be able to consider and analyze what remains to be considered and analyzed.

In blooming health, he had written: “Towards the actual person who has died we adopt a special attitude—something almost like admiration for someone who has accomplished a very difficult task.” And the accomplishment here, the work, is apparent. The necrosis in his mouth has begun to give off an unpleasant smell. There is a hole in his cheek, as if a bullet has passed straight through. His elaborate prosthesis, which he and his daughter Anna privately refer to as “the Monster,” chafes in his mouth. At night, because insects are drawn to the smell, his bed is covered in mosquito netting, which gives it an exotic, transporting, colonial feel, as if he is in India or Thailand.

His dog, Lun, will not come near him; the reddish chow cowers under the table. Freud says that what he loves about dogs is
their lack of ambivalence, how they, unlike people, can love without hate, but Lun's unambivalent love has now turned into unambivalent fear. Lun, who lay on the floor of Freud's study as his patients went on with their streams of talk, who lay under his desk as he was writing, who had become, through her presence, almost a part of his work, part, almost, of his thinking, is now out of reach.

This rejection is terrifying, because it is the rejection of the living world, of nature itself. The dog will act on knowledge that the people who love Freud will not act on; they will suppress, overcome, but the dog will not. This is the evidence that death is already in the room. The smell is of rotting, of corpses; it would more decently have waited, but it does not wait.

On nice days, Freud still lies on a chaise longue in the garden. There is a breeze, so he is covered in a wool blanket and wears a hat and vest. He looks distinguished even swaddled in the blanket, somehow manages even now to project some of his famous authority, to impose. He wears his round-frame black glasses, his face bone white. In his novel he reads, “For him the universe existed no longer; the whole world had come to be within himself. For the sick, the world begins at their pillow and ends at the foot of the bed.” But this is exactly what Freud will not allow. He will not allow the world to begin and end at the foot of his bed. He will not allow that shrinking, or will allow it only up to a point. He listens to the radio reports of the war. He reads the newspaper and follows the march of the Germans through Europe. He reads letters from his friends and from strangers. Letters find their way to his door at
Maresfield Gardens, in London, addressed only “Dr. Freud, London,” which amazes him. There is something magical in this, something enchanted; after the elaborate and petty persecutions of the Nazis, this is part of the way England has welcomed him in.

The novel he is reading, Balzac's dark, hallucinatory
La Peau de Chagrin
, lies folded on his lap. “This is just the book for me,” he tells his personal physician, Max Schur. “It deals with shrinking and starvation.”

In his head, Freud had been working for many decades on ideas of how to die. When his friend and disciple Anton von Freund died of abdominal cancer, he wrote in a letter, “He bore his hopelessness with heroic clarity, did not disgrace analysis.” This is, of course, a telling formulation: It means there are ways of dying that Freud felt
would
disgrace analysis. These ways would include not facing scientific facts, denying, suppressing at the end. To engage in fantasies of immortality or to enter into a drugged, woolly state, or to otherwise look away, would be shameful, would be in some way a betrayal of both the poetry and the science of their shared venture.

The ideal Freud set out in this description of Anton von Freund's “heroic clarity” is to see clearly. To be rational. To allow oneself to apprehend, fully and with all the senses. Which is, of course, even harder and rarer at the very end than at other points in life. One can read in Freud's near-constant
descriptions of his own upcoming death, in his elaborate set pieces of impossibly comic, wry acceptance, an exercise of this heroic clarity, a gearing up.

He wrote, for instance, in the early years of his struggle with throat cancer: “About my operation and affliction there is nothing to say that you yourselves couldn't know or expect. The uncertainty that hovers over a man of sixty-seven has now found its material expression. I don't take it very hard; one will defend oneself for a while with the help of modern medicine and then remember Bernard Shaw's warning: ‘Don't try to live forever, you will not succeed.' ” His tone here is light, perfectly calibrated, and his correspondence is filled with statements of a similar tenor. He was determined to play, at least on paper, the role of the cool, unruffled man of science, the rational, bemused intellectual; in the course of his many correspondences, he offered up sixteen different kinds of dry resignation; he was, in his studied, eloquent, playful way, unfazed by death. In the weeks after her father died, Anna would speak of this elegant resignation of his as his ability “to reduce every occurrence to its right proportions.”

Throughout his life, even when faced with the most breathtaking losses, he would not allow himself the luxury of rage, or the loosening of control; he would not allow himself any kind of outspoken rebellion against the hard facts of mortality. He reined in his anguish, though his terse, intelligent sentences crackle with it. In 1920, when his pretty daughter Sophie died, pregnant, in her mid-twenties, of influenza, leaving behind two small sons, he wrote to a friend, “For us there is little to
say. After all, we know that death belongs to life, that it is unavoidable and comes when it wants.” From another point of view, of course, there is
much
to say. But Freud would not say it.

In a letter that same year to his good friend and colleague Sandor Ferenczi, he wrote, “Please don't worry about me. Apart from feeling rather more tired I am the same. The death, painful as it is, does not affect my attitude toward life. For years I was prepared for the loss of our sons; now it is our daughter.” What he means here is that he had thought his sons would die in the war and had readied himself for the loss. His faith in preparation is central: Freud's barely submerged premise is that death is something to be mastered, something that one prepares for or practices. “If you would endure life,” he wrote in one of his essays, “be prepared for death.”

It could certainly be argued that this vigorous and energetic man may have been a bit overprepared for his own death. He began making declarations that he was close to death, or resigned to death, long before he was anywhere near dying. In his thirties, he suffered from various ailments, including what he called a “sudden cardiac oppression,” a heart palpitation, which bolstered this belief that he was near death. This heart problem was, for him, “accompanied by a depression of spirits which expressed itself in visions of death and departure in place of the normal frenzy of activity.” To his closest confidant of this period, Wilhelm Fliess, he talked openly about his fear of dying, which he referred to as his “death deliria.” So the idea
that he was dying, or near death, long predated his cancer or seriously failing health. He had, by the time he was diagnosed, thoroughly considered and studied from every angle the prospect of his premature death. His devoted translator, biographer, and friend, Ernest Jones, later wrote a letter attributing this early obsession to a “neurotic horror of old age and death.”

Over the years, Freud was very often convinced that he was dying. He wrote to Karl Abraham, “The idea that my sixty-eighth birthday the day after tomorrow might be my last must have occurred to others too.” He also wrote, “Though apparently on the way to recovery, there is deep inside me a pessimistic conviction of the closeness of the end of my life, nourished by the never-ceasing petty torments of the scar, a kind of senile depression centered around the conflict between irrational pleasure in life and sensible resignation.” Why is resignation sensible? Why is pleasure in life irrational? Freud is so eager to rise above, to conspicuously see and take in the facts of mortality, that he can only classify an ebullient attachment to life as “irrational.” Rationality seems to be an expansive, overarching code word here for something altogether stranger and more rare: moderation in one's attachment to life. As if one is supposed to be only
a little bit
attached to life.