We cannot write about death without writing about life. Stories that start at the end of life often take us back to the past, to the beginning—or to some beginning—to unearth what there was before, what will be missed, what will be lost. Whether we love or hate them, the people dying on the page must somehow reveal themselves to us. We must be invested in their fate, whether we want them to live or die.
The final moment of death, especially when a prolonged illness is involved, is one of many deaths, anyway. Smaller deaths precede it, including, among other things, possibly one’s loss of autonomy and dignity. When faced with their own death, writers—and, in fiction, characters—develop their own lingua franca to describe their dying. That language sometimes changes as death nears, but it might also remain the same.
In Mortality, Hitchens never seems to waver, on the page at least, in his steadfast determination not to feel sorry for himself. Even while describing the indignities he suffered as a cancer patient, he skillfully adds some levity and humor.
“I heard a soothing and capable voice saying, ‘Now you might feel just a little prick,”’ Hitchens writes.
“(Be assured,” he adds: “Male patients have exhausted all the possibilities of this feeble joke within the first few days of hearing it.)”
I can almost see him smirking as he writes this. Dying is not taking everything away from him. The core of his personality is still intact: his intelligence, his sarcasm, his sense of humor. Though this is not true of everyone who is dying, at least it is for him and he wants us to know it. He wants his readers to realize that he’s still hanging on, that he’s still there.
Both in lifestyle and tastes, my mother was the complete opposite of Hitchens. He was an atheist and she was deeply religious. “God is good” was her mantra. God Is Not Great was the title of one of his most popular books. Everyone who came to visit my mother while she was sick, including her minister of forty years, who traveled from New York to Miami to see her, was told, “God sent you.” The one thing Hitchens and my mother did have in common, though, was that neither one seemed too interested in what Joan Didion, in The Year of Magical Thinking, calls “the question of self-pity,” or in asking themselves, “Why me?”
Hitchens in Mortality
To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?
Mom after a chemo session
I am almost eighty years old. I don’t have small children.
Why not me, instead of some young woman with babies?
“I don’t have a body, I am a body,” Hitchens writes.
A body that, in my mother’s case, shortly before she died, had to have feces extracted from it by hand, and blood-tainted fluid pumped out of it via her belly, every few weeks.
“There is a river inside me,” my mother would say half-jokingly, “and it never stops flowing.”
We are all bodies, but the dying body starts decaying right before our eyes. And those narratives that tell us what it’s like to live, and die, inside those bodies are helpful to all of us, because no matter how old we are, our bodies never stop being mysterious to us. Many of us don’t pay much attention to our well bodies. Our sick bodies and the sick bodies of our loved ones become our obsessions. We have no idea how one part—the brain, for example—might be functioning so well, while the rest of the body is failing. How can one lung or kidney be diseased and the other one be perfectly fine? It is perhaps the act of defending separate parts of the body that eventually kills the entire organism.
In her 1989 book, AIDS and Its Metaphors, Susan Sontag writes of that book’s 1978 predecessor, Illness as Metaphor, that she didn’t think it would be useful to write “yet one more story in the first person of how someone learned that she or he had cancer, wept, struggled, was comforted, suffered, took courage … though mine was also that story.”
She did not want to share deeply personal experiences that because of their common occurrence had become hackneyed, as even death can become a cliché. So Sontag drew on stories that had already been written, including Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and she wrote her own book, “spurred by evangelical zeal as well as anxiety about how much time I had left to do any living or writing in.”
That zeal goes along with a chronicler’s persistent desire to share, and a sense of gratitude for that blessed chance to talk.
In The Cancer Journals, poet and activist Audre Lorde sees many parallels between the fourteen years she spent battling breast cancer and the other struggles she’d had throughout her life as a black feminist, lesbian, mother, and “warrior poet.”
Even while comparing her mastectomy to the way the Amazons of Dahomey chopped off their right breasts to become better archers, she still mourns her intact body.
I want to write of the pain I am feeling right now, of the lukewarm tears that will not stop coming into my eyes—for what? For my lost breast? … For the death I don’t know how to postpone? Or how to meet elegantly?
Both Lorde and Sontag set out goals for their “living dyingly” texts. Maybe this has something to do with the urgency of their mission. There’s no time for exposition or warm-up, just a vital task to be completed.
How does one prepare to meet death elegantly? And what if there’s no elegance to be had, especially if one is being ravaged by pain, or is losing control of one’s limbs or bowels? Is our job as writers the same as that of caretakers? As writers, we might seek the least elegant death possible for our characters, while we would want our loved ones to die “soft as cream,” as Toni Morrison writes in Beloved. That tension has been most elaborately explored by dying writers who, like Hitchens, Sontag, and Lorde, have had that blessed chance to write.
After her mastectomy, when she couldn’t write, Audre Lorde recorded on cassette tapes her thoughts on mortality and other issues.
In playing back the tapes of those last days in the hospital, I found only the voice of a very weakened woman saying with the greatest difficulty and almost unrecognizable: … I don’t want this to be a record of grieving only. I don’t want this to be a record only of tears.
Lorde is admonishing herself, even in her weakest state. Though she has become both a writer and a recorder of a dying body, she does not want to write only of loss and grief. She doesn’t want to make dying the central story.
Four months after my mother died, I realized while rereading The Cancer Journals that I was the same age that Audre Lorde was when she had her first mastectomy.
“I am 46 years living today and very pleased to be alive, very glad and very happy,” she writes on that birthday.
Reading this somehow reassured me that one could indeed “live dyingly.” Or die livingly. At least on the page. After all, to die, to echo Peter Pan, can be “an awfully big adventure.” As the father of the essay, Michel de Montaigne, writes, “Dying … is the greatest work we have to do,” yet we can’t get good at it by practicing, since we experience it only once. Death also cannot exist in isolation, even when someone dies alone. Death announces itself in the middle of a life being lived, in medias res.
“There is no such thing as a natural death,” Simone de Beauvoir writes in A Very Easy Death, her account of the final weeks of her mother’s life, “You do not die from being born, nor from having lived, nor from old age. You die from something. … Cancer, thrombosis, pneumonia: it is as violent and unforeseen as an engine stopping in the middle of the sky.…” Or we die of death, as Gabriel García Márquez has written: death, which he once referred to as “the only important thing that happens in a lifetime.” Dying, especially prolonged dying, is rarely passive or monotonous. Dying people are engaged in the most significant battle of their lives. Dying is not, as Tolstoy puts it in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, “a case of the appendix or the kidney, but of life … and death.”
The act of writing, or talking about one’s death, makes one an active participant in one’s life. Those who write, or make cassettes, about dying are not dying passiv
ely, so we should not write about them that way. Even their final surrender, if it ever comes, is a hard-won process. Whether young or old, dying people are not usually expected to submit but to fight.
It is not surprising that Dylan Thomas’s almost century-old poem “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” is so often invoked when we talk about the dying. We might be tempted to whisper a few lines from that poem into the ears of our loved ones as they lie comatose in intensive care or spend their final days in hospice.
And you, my father, there on that sad height,
curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my mother, there on that sad height …
Did you rage enough?
We like to think that our loved ones didn’t surrender too quickly. It might comfort us to know they at least tried to put up a fight, if not for their own sake but for ours, just to have one more hour, one more day, one more week, one more month, a few more years with us.
On my mother’s cassette, I heard some ambivalence. She did not want to die (“I’m not necessarily dying either today or tomorrow”). But she eventually came to terms with the fact that she might (“But we all must die someday”). Still, she was not willing to rage, to fight until her final breath. Otherwise she would have chosen the second, harder course of chemotherapy.
While we, her children, generally respected her wishes, one of my brothers disagreed with her about stopping the chemotherapy. My mother had taken care of our father when he was terminally ill, and our father would have jumped at any opportunity to live a few more years. She was not going to live a few more years, my mother countered; she had only a few more weeks of prolonged suffering. Rather than fighting it, my mother embraced the dying of the light.
One of the sympathy cards I received after my mother died had a Lucille Clifton poem pasted inside it. The mother of the friend who’d sent me the poem had also recently died. The poem was called “oh antic God.”
oh antic God
return to me
my mother in her thirties
The hymnlike, staccato, pleading start to this poem immediately brought tears to my eyes. “Oh antic God,” I wanted to scream, “return to me my mother from the day she was born. Give her another beginning and not an ending.”
My mother at thirty-four was giving birth to me in Haiti. Then two years later she gave birth to my brother Bob. My mother at thirty-eight stayed behind in Port-au-Prince with my brother and me after my father moved to New York to look for work. Then she left us with my uncle Joseph and his wife, Tante Denise, to join my father in New York, when I was four. My mother in her late thirties was an undocumented immigrant living in Brooklyn, away from her two small children. She was a factory worker who made handbags for pennies on the dollar. My mother in her early forties had two more children, my brothers Kelly and Karl.
In Haitian Creole, when someone is said to be lòt bò dlo, “on the other side of the water,” it can either mean that they’ve traveled abroad or that they have died. My mother at forty was already lòt bò dlo, on the other side of the water.
Ars Moriendi
When my father’s youngest sister, my aunt Rezia, died, in Haiti, she had outlived my father by seven years, something she marveled at each time I saw her after his death.
“I can’t believe I’m still here and your father’s not,” she would say in the same pained voice in which she recounted burying her two oldest sons, a few years back.
The day Tante Rezia had a massive stroke, she had just closed the stall in downtown Port-au-Prince where she’d been selling books and school supplies for over thirty years. She was on her way home when she stumbled and fell. The last two words she uttered were to a fellow vendor: “Tèt mwen.” “My head.”
I heard about Tante Rezia’s fall and eventual coma the following morning at 3 a.m., after she was hospitalized in a trauma facility near the Port-au-Prince airport. My cousin Agathe, who was one of many family members keeping vigil, called to ask if I would speak to the visiting American doctor on call.
The doctor was a youthful-sounding woman from Philadelphia. Tante Rezia had been unconscious since her fall. She’d suffered a hemorrhagic stroke due to her high blood pressure. Tante Rezia’s prognosis, the doctor said, was very poor. Agathe had been warned by another doctor that Tante Rezia might not live through the night. The visiting doctor would neither confirm nor contradict this during our conversation.
“Sometimes the body takes its time,” the doctor said.
Tante Rezia’s body did take its time. Though she never regained consciousness, she remained in the coma for another week before she died.
If Tante Rezia’s death had been fictionalized, there probably would have been a deathbed scene. Being in Miami, over seven hundred miles away, I tried to imagine one.
Before my mother died, I had only “witnessed” deathbed scenes in literature and film. Other ideas about a person’s final moments had come from stories I’d been told about death, including my father’s.
Were Tante Rezia’s final moments like Sula’s in Toni Morrison’s eponymous 1973 novel of female friendship? What kind of pictures drifted through Tante Rezia’s mind before she took her final breath? Did she feel tired, an exhaustion so profound that it “barely let her open her lips, let alone take the deep breath necessary to scream”? Did she think that on the other side of her death would be an endless sleep, a much-needed rest? Was she amazed that dying didn’t hurt as much as she thought it might?
While in this state of weary anticipation, she [Sula] noticed that she was not breathing, that her heart had stopped completely. A crease of fear touched her breast, for any second there was sure to be a violent explosion in her brain, a gasping for breath. Then she realized, or rather she sensed, that there was not going to be any pain. She was not breathing because she didn’t have to. Her body did not need oxygen. She was dead.
Notice the precise use of the limited third-person point of view here. We are inside Sula’s head, one might even say her heart. She’s stopped breathing, but the definitive moment, at least for me, is not the death itself, which is stated simply enough (“She was dead”), but the “crease of fear” that touches her breast, then eventually goes away.
The crease precedes the grand terror that Sula has been expecting, “a violent explosion in her brain.” Both the crease and the potential explosion capture the extremes of Sula’s unpredictable personality, which Morrison evokes one final time through Sula’s forward thinking. Sula’s realization that her body no longer needs oxygen is not sad but triumphant, as if needing oxygen were one more weakness she’s shed by dying. We also get to experience a few moments past Sula’s last breath, to the threshold of whatever might come next.
“Sula felt her face smiling. ‘Well, I’ll be dammed,’ she thought, ‘it didn’t even hurt. Wait’ll I tell Nell.”’
As this eternally smiling face indicates, death is neither the end of Sula’s story, nor the end of her complicated friendship with Nell. “Wait’ll I tell Nell” shows that those two will never be done with one another. They’re still going to be in touch, even though one of them is no longer on this earth.
For many of us who have watched loved ones die, it is a matter of both deep curiosity and concern as to when they will finally accept that they’re dying. I have tried to pinpoint that moment on my mother’s trajectory. Was it when she started making the cassette? Or was it during that final weekend, when one of my brothers, the one who thought she should continue the chemo, was visiting her from New York? She told him she was thirsty, but each time she tried to swallow a mouthful of water, she choked on it, so my brother got her an orange Popsicle, which the hospice nurse had recommended. My mother looked blissful as she licked half the Popsicle, and while handing the rest to my brother she said, “I feel like I’m slipping away.” “M santi m prale.” Then she motioned toward h
im with her hands and made the gesture of a bird flying away.
It is, I learned over the course of my mother’s gradual decline, impossible to watch someone you love die and not feel the encroaching brush of death upon yourself. It’s as if death had entered the room, paused, then moved past you before laying its hands on your loved one. So it’s true, you realize: we’re all eventually going to die, though some of us might die sooner than others.
In Confession, a short memoir, Leo Tolstoy writes about some of the deaths that affected him. He saw fellow soldiers die in the Crimean War. He witnessed a beheading at an execution in Paris. He watched his brother die of tuberculosis. Five of his thirteen children died. His mother died when he was two years old and his father when he was nine. All of which might have led him to conclude that “one day sickness and death will come (and have come) to my loved ones, to myself, and nothing will remain but stink and worms.”
Perhaps Tolstoy needed to be in that particular state of mind to write so vividly and consistently about death. In Confession, he recalls a fable about a traveler who jumps into a well to escape a wild beast. At the bottom of the well is a dragon waiting to tear the traveler to bits. Trapped between the wild beast and the dragon, both of which will kill him in an instant, the traveler grabs a shrub growing in the crevices of the well and holds on for dear life. The traveler then realizes that two mice are nibbling away at the stem of his shrub. Death, the traveler concludes, is inevitable. Then he notices two drops of honey on the shrub’s leaves and begins to lick them. Trapped between the beasts of life and death, that honey is all we have at any particular moment, Tolstoy seems to be saying. And toward the end of one’s life, there might not be pleasure even in licking a few drops. (Or, in my mother’s case, an orange Popsicle.)
“Those two drops of honey … my love for the family and for writing which I called art—are sweet for me no more,” Tolstoy writes.