The Violet Hour (7 page)

David has his own doubts about her continuing treatment, but he sees his role as upholding her belief in her survival. He describes what he was doing as “concocting lawyer's brief after Jesuitical argument in support of what my mother so plainly wanted to hear. Cheerleading her to her grave was the way I sometimes thought of it.” He does not doubt that she wants to continue her treatment, though he doubts whether continuing treatment is the right thing to do, and then he doubts his own doubts. But now he is buoying her when the difficulty, or the hopelessness, of the treatments threatens to overtake her. As he later wrote, “my task had to be to help her as best as I could
to go on believing that she would survive.” Also: “Never for a moment, during the course of my mother's illness, did I think she could have ‘heard' that she was dying.”

In the room, they put up a piece of paper on the wall where she can watch the number of days that have gone by since the transplant. These fresh white pieces of paper offer a seductive visual: “day 1,” “day 2,” “day 3.” These days mark her new life, her new body, her new beginning. The idea is that on day 100, if the transplant has worked, she might be able to go back to New York.

However, the optimism of the calendar is not carried into the room. The news from the doctors is not promising, and the suffering is breathtaking.

David was amazed by his mother's continuing faith in medicine and by her ability to beat the odds. At the worst moments, he thought to himself, She really does not know what is happening to her; she still believes that she is going to survive. It was part of his role, as he saw it, to mirror this belief back to her as best he could. “The truth is that I was afraid to feel anything, not least because I was so acutely aware of what my mother wanted from me—to believe that she would once more overcome the odds and recover from her disease.”

How is it possible not to accept that you are dying if everyone around you knows it and if your body itself is making that argument in as vivid and convincing a way as possible? There is of course the natural clouding of the mind that comes with the
drugs, with the pain, with the anxiety, with the sheer psychological strain of being laid out on a hospital bed for four months at a stretch, but there is, perhaps, more to it than that. David pointed out that his mother's belief in her exceptional status, in her will, could have muddied her understanding, that on some deep level she didn't believe that she would face extinction. Even if you know in a rational sense that you are mortal, you can still allow yourself to think: Not this time. You can evade the absoluteness of the death, with the idea that you might have two or ten or thirty years left, with the idea that you are not going to die of this particular illness. After all, it is entirely possible to be forty-five and feel like you are twenty-five, to have no innate connection with your chronological age, no intrinsic physical grasp of it; surely it is possible to be dying and feel like you are not dying, not yet.

Sontag was also a person who took creative liberties with the truth. Which is to say that she lied. Many of her lies were typical ones. She lied about quitting smoking; she lied about lovers; she lied to friends about other friends. But mostly she lied to protect the mythology she had constructed for herself. If she had to choose between the literal truth and her mythology, she would choose her mythology. This led her to strange, inconsequential lies; she would lie, for instance, about the price of her apartment on Riverside Drive, because she wanted to seem like she was an intellectual who drifted into a lovely apartment and did not spend a lot of money on real estate, like a more bourgeois, ordinary person. This sort of lie is interesting because it is in the service of image, of the creation of self that she was always mindful of; she would bend the outside
world, in other words, to the powerful inner picture she had of her life. Not everyone does this. Not everyone can do this. And one imagines here the greatest lie, that she was recovering, and the greatest myth she had engineered to date, that of the survivor, of the incandescent defeat of death itself. When someone lies to protect and further their mythology, do they also lie to themselves?

As he watched his mother decline, David struggled with the dissonance between her intellectual position on illness—which argued for logic, rationality, science, clear-sightedness—and the murky reality of the hospital room. The purity and charisma of the ideas Sontag laid out in
Illness as Metaphor
are irresistible, and yet this time around, for Sontag, seeing clearly and absorbing information would have led only to the certain knowledge that she would die. In this final confrontation with cancer, she needed instead consolation; she needed fantasy; she needed
not
to think clearly. In the end, Sontag couldn't live her illness without metaphor; she needed the idea of a fight even after the fight was lost. It's interesting to see the scratched-out lines of the notebook entries. In the middle of her first illness, she wrote:
“I feel like the Vietnam War. My illness is invasive, colonizing. They're using chemical warfare on me.” She scratched it out because she was determined
not
to think this way about illness, because that was the intellectual position she staked out for herself
—not
to romanticize. And yet here it is, under the pen marks, the natural tendency to think in battles, in war, the irresistible instinct to be a warrior.

The hospital masseuse's mother comes in and gives Susan a haircut, which pleases her. She can't lift her head far off the pillow, so this haircut requires unusual skill and dexterity with the scissors. But a haircut matters, even on a transplant ward.

A chaplain comes into the room. Sontag is polite, which is to say she does not laugh in his face or argue him to the ground. After he leaves she says, “He was kind of cute.”

Peter sometimes takes her outside in her wheelchair. By this point she's so weak, and her muscles so wasted from being in a hospital bed, that it is hard for her to roll over, so getting into a wheelchair is a production. But on nice days he rolls her to the lake and they see the ducks flapping around.

She loved being outside. She loved the air. The great civilized world, Rome, Paris, Kyoto, Sarajevo (“I switch countries as easily as other people change rooms,” she once wrote), had shrunk to her hospital room. At home in London Terrace, there would be the week's schedule pinned to her refrigerator, packed with operas, plays, movies, music, dinner, friends. Before she got sick, even her younger friends had trouble keeping up with her; everyone who knew her was dazzled by her energy, by her “avidity,” to use one of her words. Peter recalls researching
The Volcano Lover
and, it being three in the morning, suggesting they go to sleep and resume the next day. She turned to him and marveled, “Why? Are you tired?” In her thirties, she wrote in the notebooks, “Is being tired a spontaneous complicity with death—a beginning to let go?”

Once it gets too cold to go outside, Peter wheels her down the long hallways of the hospital. By this point it's a huge production to get her out of bed, into the wheelchair, covered in blankets, but it's good for her to leave the room. Sometimes they go to the hospital's zen café for a change of scene.

Her room looks like an operating theater. In order to protect her radically suppressed immune system, everyone who enters wears a robe, a mask, gloves. There is a layer of plastic, of paper, of rubber, between her and everyone else.

In late October, Peter brings a paperback of
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
to the hospital. He is often there for twelve, sixteen hours, and so when Susan sleeps, he sometimes reads. She asks him what he is reading, and when she hears what it is she asks him to read it aloud to her. He brought the book deliberately so that this would happen. He wants to give her an opening to talk about the vast, taboo subject of death, if she wants to, that is.

Sometime over the next couple of days he reads, “In the depths of his heart he knew he was dying but, so far from growing used to the idea, he simply did not and could not grasp it.”

Susan loves the part where Ivan Ilyich puts his feet on his young servant's shoulders to make himself feel better. She does not say anything about the part where Ivan Ilyich dies.

Forty years earlier, she had written in her notebooks: “The density of Ivan Ilyich comforts me—makes me more present to myself, stronger.”

In the hospital there are floors for people at different stages of recovery. In the ecosystem of the ward, it is very important to move to a better floor. During the five weeks Peter stays with her, he works hard to get her to sit up in bed, to get her to the point where she can get out of bed herself. He pushes her to do it, and eventually she can. Finally they're moved to another floor. Susan is elated. This is progress, this is recovery.

They also keep careful track of the blood work, which measures “the blasts” in her blood. The news in the blood work is not always good.

The transplant has only the slimmest chance of success. For one thing, Susan is seventy-one. With her exhaustive research she knew how slim her prospects would be. On the other hand, of course, she has survived against very, very shabby odds before. There is one person, at the tail end of the bell curve, who survives under the direst prognosis, and she could be that one person, the exception. She has always been the exception. So in a way the slimness of her prospects only confirmed the role she has carved out for herself: the survivor. Dr. Nimer said to David later, “She was not ready to die. As far as seeking treatment, I knew from the first time I met her that she would rather die trying.”

To an outside observer, the suffering often seemed like too much to endure. But Sontag had prided herself on not caring about suffering. In a letter to a friend in December of 1998, during her second bout of cancer, she wrote, “The chemo, plus radiation should be over in late February. However much
of an ordeal the treatment is, is irrelevant. All that matters is will the treatment work (prevent a metastasis)? We shall see….I don't dare to be optimistic, but I am hopeful. Anyway, by March, I hope to be back to writing, finishing,
In America
.” These are the words that stand out to a more ordinary person: “However much of an ordeal the treatment is, is irrelevant.”