The Death of Susan Sontag

Review of David Rieff, Swimming in a Sea of Death, A Son’s Memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008. ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-9946-6, hardcover, 180 pages, $21.00.

David Rieff, the son of Susan Sontag, bears witness to his mother’s end story. His narrative is excruciating, heartbreaking and demanding of our attention. The author forces us to ask ourselves questions regarding how to deal with terminal illness, the costs of experimental medical treatments, the denial of the dying loved one to accept not just the possibility of death but its uncompromising certainty.

Susan Sontag, survivor of both breast and uterine cancer, was diagnosed in March 2004 with MDS—myeldysplastic syndrome. This is a cancer that eventually develops into leukemia. There is no successful cure; in short, this is a death sentence. At seventy-one, Sontag confronted her third cancer with the same resolute conviction with which she had fought her previous illnesses. She sought out and collected information about the most extreme treatments in the belief that a cure was always possible. Rieff comments about his mother, “real commitment for her was always radical.”

She underwent a bone marrow transplant, knowing full well that this was a terribly painful procedure that had minimal odds for a successful outcome. In his New York Times Magazine piece, “Illness as More Than Metaphor” (December 4, 2005), Rieff reported that Medicare had refused to pay for the procedure and that his mother paid, $45,000 for a compatible donor and $256,000 in cash to the hospital. In short, if Sontag had not had the financial resources to cover the costs of this procedure, there would have been no treatments. This further underscores the harsh reality that without money one is limited in one’s access to therapies available in other countries or even in this country.

Despite weeks and months of treatments that further weakened and debilitated her, Sontag held on, as “the habits of hope survived her loss of it.” Rieff writes, “what was my mother looking for? …what the condemned always hope for a commutation of sentence, a reprieve.” Unfortunately, no reprieve came and on December 28, 2004. Susan Sontag died.

While reading this heartfelt memoir, I was reminded of my mother’s death at the age of sixty-seven from a rare form of leukemia some 24 years ago. At that time, I was in my early thirties and barely over the loss of my father to lung cancer some five years before. I can remember sitting in the doctor’s office with my mother when we were informed that she had prolymphocytic leukemia. To this day, I still don’t know how to spell the di-

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agnostic term correctly and find myself unable to Google it. This strange sounding collection of words was my mother’s death sentence. There were no cures, only palliative treatments. You went from being well to becoming very sick, no stops along the way. My mother died within six months of the diagnosis. She had no “heroic treatments,” and spent the last few months of her life seeing friends and family and preparing to die.

On the other hand, I ran around searching for possible leads to cures: guided visualization, positive thinking, tofu, macrobiotics, etc. I would present these ideas to my mother and she would look at me and say, “that’s nice,” and go back to reading her book. My mother who didn’t go to college, or dialogue with the great literary and intellectual personalities of any time, seemed to understand that death was an inevitable conclusion to life and not a personal insult.

In The Denial of Death (1973), Ernest Becker writes, “the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.” As Rieff reports, his mother never accepted the idea of her own mortality, “but survival was her goal, and that never changed from the moment of diagnosis to the hour of her death.” While still able to get about, Sontag lived in continual fear of her demise and needed to have people with her 24 hours a day. Not even the prescribed anti-anxiety medication could calm her fears. Her struggle was about living and she wanted nothing to do with dying.

While reading the memoir, I found myself asking whether or not there was any point to all this terrible suffering. The painful and debilitating medical procedures, the mental anguish, the grasping at life, and the terror of the unknown—a world of existential and metaphysical riddles and paradoxes.

Rieff, has no guide to lead him through the journey of grief and bereavement. He is the survivor of a loss and like all of us who survive we are filled with doubts about what we could have, should have or might have done differently if there was a differently. Rieff, in one of the most disparate passages of the book states, “there are times when I wish I could have died in her place. Survivor’s guilt?” Or perhaps, Rieff wishes to join her rather than face the terror of such irretrievable loss!

Rieff is still in a state of shock three years after the death of Susan Sontag, continuing to “swim in a sea of death.” For me, the saddest part of this memoir is that Sontag died in such a state of rage at the “dying of the light.” She bequeathed to her son an emotional legacy of anger and fear in the face of death. It is no wonder he feels such survivor guilt when his mother is virtually railing at the heavens, “why me?” Sadly, Sontag could offer her son no solace or teach him the wisdom of acceptance.

In the “Epilogue” to the memoir, Rieff describes his journey to bury his mother at Montparnasse cemetery in Paris. He talks of his flight from Kennedy airport, “the journey began over the Atlantic, me in my window seat, the tranquilizers having zero effect, she in the hold.” When he arrives at the cemetery, he is alone, and he does not know what to do, “I kneel, kiss the granite slab…and then I go- hurriedly, confusedly … it is not just that I have nothing intelligent to say: I am incapable of thought.”

On the day of my mother’s funeral, at the cemetery, when the casket was lowered to the ground, I found myself thinking about a day in Prospect Park—I was four years old and I found a worm—I ran with it to my mother who was sitting with other young mothers on a park bench. “Look what I found,” I yelled with total delight. She told me to put it back on the ground or it would die. My first encounter with death, with life—all so very confusing—such a mystery!

Rieff, in the final pages of his memoir, discusses “closure,” and states, “I do not believe for an instant that there is such a thing…perhaps, we become accustomed to our grief…part of the emotional landscape… it becomes a dullness…no forgetting is on offer…one mourns those one has loved who have died until one joins them.”

When receiving chemotherapy treatments for breast cancer, Sontag wrote in her journal, “be cheerful, be stoic, be tranquil.” She added, “in the valley of sorrow, spread your wings.”

One hopes that all of us will be able to make sense of our mortal lives by learning to live

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“in the valley of sorrow,” and still have the spirit to “spread our wings.”

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