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 Entry 1    12:03

Author David Rieff on his mother, author and public intellectual, Susan Sontag's cancer:

"But then, she, too, was surprised when the doctors in Seattle came in to tell her the bone-marrow transplant had failed and her leukemia was back. She screamed out, "But this means I'm going to die!"

I will never forget that scream, or think of it without wanting to cry out myself. And yet, even that terrible morning, in a pristine room at the University of Washington Medical Center, with its incongruously beautiful view of Lake Union and Mount Rainier in the background, I remember being surprised by her surprise. I suppose I shouldn't have been. There are those who can reconcile themselves to death and those who can't. Increasingly, I've come to think that it is one of the most important ways the world divides up. Anecdotally, after all those hours I spent in doctors' outer offices and in hospital lobbies, cafeterias and family rooms, my sense is that the loved ones of desperately ill people divide the same way."

 Sontag did die. It was her third bout with cancer, a different variety each time. If you read the article you would learn that she fought death until the end. She really believed she would live to be 100 (she missed that goal by 29 years).    

I think that Rieff is correct, for the most part, about the division existing here between those who can reconcile themselves to death and those who can't.

But those demarcations aren't  always static.  For some, like Sontag and Jenny's dad with his pancreatic cancer, they fought until the bitter end. Others come around to acceptance at some point.  But, is either qualitatively better or more appropriate? 

Why "rage, rage against the dying of the light," when the race is run, when you cannot win, when the inevitable is not waiting for anything, no matter the tenor of your fight? Or why succumb, drifting away quietly, accepting eternity's crushing grasp?

What I found helpful about Rieff's essay on his mother's death is it made me feel it normal that I am in a different place than Jenny. I was in a different place with my sisters with regard to my mother when it was time to shut down the machine. I feel strange writing this, as Jenny is downstairs entertaining 2 or 3 friends, sounding as normal and healthy as ever. 

I've been paying attention to Sontag for a few days, remembering her books in my mother's tremendous bookcase, the only thing, beside the fireplace, that I remember fondly about my childhood home. A leftist, ostensibly, who lived in a 28 million dollar mansion in Manhattan, is perhaps best well known for writing, "Illness as Metaphor" and then later "AIDS and Its Metaphors." (She is less well known as the partner of Annie Leibowitz, to whom she was just a horrible human being.)  The first book, Illness, took apart the way cancer was looked at in the 70s. Its so out of date, skimming it I knew that it held little of value for me. People no longer go to therapy because their attitude caused them to get cancer. 

We really are just barely out of the dark ages in medicine here, people. In high school, maybe in 1981 or 1982, I had to read a book for AP Lit about a middle-class kid who was schizophrenic, where the whole premise of the book is that it is the mother who "causes" schizophrenia. I really do marvel at how we haven't blown ourselves up completely yet, seemingly opting for the slow bleed of human induced climate change instead. The second book, however, did prove more interesting, especially in the way it compared the stigmatization of AIDS with that of the erstwhile stigmatization of cancer.  Also, it does give me some small modicum of hope, considering how the stigmatization of both AIDS and homosexuality have largely dissipated across the country. Not to say that the blind hatred of those perceived as different doesn't still exist. Shit, legalized racism is now illegal, and yet it doesn't stop people from suffering from job discrimination. But, we are in a much better place.