MFS alerted me to an interview with...
...David Rieff, son of Susan Sontag, in which Mr. Rieff talks about [the interview will not immediately appear when you click; you have to click through a "pass" page], among other subjects, his book Swimming in a Sea of Death, a memoir of his mother's death.
    I don't know whether I'll read this book, although it fascinates me. I have so many others queued for reading or, having been read, queued for reviewing. This book will definitely remain in queue, though, primarily because of the critique, discussed in the above interview and review, of the phrase "a good death". I'm sure that my mother would say she had "a good life", but not sure she'd say she experienced "a good death", seeing as how I sense that she didn't think she was dying. Thus, I'm titillated, as well, by Sontag's insistence on fighting to live and insisting that those who accompanied her on what was her death journey lie to her about the trajectory of that journey.
    As you may know, as I accompanied my mother through her death I posed myself in serious argument with the idea that any death could be "peaceful", although I was able to say that, unlike the view propounded in the two Final books, Mom was not working hard at dying, she was working hard at living, even as she took her last breath; a circumstance which surprised me but which fit with her character and which I celebrate. After reading the above mentioned articles, though, I'm feeling freshly sad (not angst-ridden, mind you, or guilty, just sad, and only moderately so; after all, what can we do about the past once we're in the future) that I prefigured my mother's death a few hours before it happened and adapted my conversation and my presence to what I suspected was happening, including suggesting to her an optimum time to die. Frankly, I don't think I made any dent in her schedule or her direction. If my mother had had it in her to live through the crisis in which she died, she would have. I know her well enough to know this. In this one way, though, I think, I did not align myself with my mother's wishes: I think, along with Sontag, she would have wished that I ignore whatever I thought to be the obvious, honor her work to live and encourage her as though her work would be successful. Not much I can do about that, now. But, as I wrote my sister this morning after having read the interview, I admitted: "Makes me wonder if I was really the 'best' support for Mom as she was dying and refusing to acknowledge that she was dying. Ah, well, I suppose I'll never know...or, if I do find out, it won't be until after I die and Mom greets me and says, 'What the fuck were you thinking, telling me good-bye when I wasn't ready!?!'"
    The next time I encounter someone I think is dying but I also notice considers him or herself in a fight to live, despite the opinion voiced in the last sentence of the book review above, I'll remember and support what that person thinks they're doing, not what I think they're doing. Why? Because, well, I wish I had not sounded, to my mother, as though I was jumping to conclusions about the character of her last human night even though it turned out I was right. It seems right-er to honor people and their experiences as they are and as they understand them, especially when their lives are at their most vivid, which they surely are just before they die, assuming they have an inkling that they are raging against the dying of the light.
- posted by Gail Rae @ 11:11   email  this post