In Swimming in a Sea of Death, David Rieff recounts his mother, Susan Sontag’s final year of illness and her death from cancer.
How did you come to write this memoir of your mother’s death—admitting at the time she was dying that you refused to take notes, wanting to live in the moment only?
I owed my mother my whole attention, but I’m enough of a writer to have been tempted to write about the experience. Once she died, I felt in some way it was a kind of debt to her to write this memoir.
You write of your mother’s will to survive, despite the pessimistic odds offered by doctors, and sometimes in a condescending way.
People want to hope—should you give them hope or tell them the truth? You can’t ask doctors to be great scientists and also great psychiatrists—once in a while it happens, as I describe [my mother’s doctor] Stephen Nimer, but for the most part, they fall short. You can’t expect a patient to know what a doctor knows about the illness. That’s the reality.
Your write about the guilt of not being able to broach with your mother the subject of death. Do you imagine, in retrospect, how you might have?
It’s her death, and she doesn’t need one more paternalistic figure to tell her how to die. I thought a lot about it: she was giving me every signal that she didn’t want to discuss the possibility of extinction. It’s something I have to live with. I really had no choice but to honor her wishes.
Do you imagine how your mother would have regarded this memoir?
The writer in her would have liked it. I hope it’s a loving book—it’s a complicated book. I tried to describe her death as honestly as I could. It’s for readers to decide. I wouldn’t have done it if I thought it would have been something she would have hated. I wasn’t settling scores. The book is really about the stripping down of illusions of power over one’s own death—that we’re not going to become dust. Also, the illusion that I could help. I don’t mean to say I didn’t help, but the book is about the fact that anything I did was insufficient, and I think that’s what we survivors all feel.
