The Violet Hour by Katie Roiphe Read Free Book Online

cheerful where before they were morose. But even if that’s the case, I was not able to become one of them.” His way of helping, of entering the situation, is to talk to the doctors. He gives his mother confidence in the treatment. He renews her sense of intelligent, rational, informed people being on her side in the fight against the cancer. She does not expect him to be one of the caretakers, one of the people attending intimately to her physical needs, and he is not.
    David has his own doubts about her continuing treatment, but he sees his role as upholding her belief in her survival. He describes what he was doing as “concocting lawyer’s brief after Jesuitical argument in support of what my mother so plainly wanted to hear. Cheerleading her to her grave was the way I sometimes thought of it.” He does not doubt that she wants to continue her treatment, though he doubts whether continuing treatment is the right thing to do, and then he doubts his own doubts. But now he is buoying her when the difficulty, or the hopelessness, of the treatments threatens to overtake her. As he later wrote, “my task had to be to help her as best as I couldto go on believing that she would survive.” Also: “Never for a moment, during the course of my mother’s illness, did I think she could have ‘heard’ that she was dying.”
    In the room, they put up a piece of paper on the wall where she can watch the number of days that have gone by since the transplant. These fresh white pieces of paper offer a seductive visual: “day 1,” “day 2,” “day 3.” These days mark her new life, her new body, her new beginning. The idea is that on day 100, if the transplant has worked, she might be able to go back to New York.
    However, the optimism of the calendar is not carried into the room. The news from the doctors is not promising, and the suffering is breathtaking.
    David was amazed by his mother’s continuing faith in medicine and by her ability to beat the odds. At the worst moments, he thought to himself, She really does not know what is happening to her; she still believes that she is going to survive. It was part of his role, as he saw it, to mirror this belief back to her as best he could. “The truth is that I was afraid to feel anything, not least because I was so acutely aware of what my mother wanted from me—to believe that she would once more overcome the odds and recover from her disease.”
    How is it possible not to accept that you are dying if everyone around you knows it and if your body itself is making that argument in as vivid and convincing a way as possible? There is of course the natural clouding of the mind that comes with thedrugs, with the pain, with the anxiety, with the sheer psychological strain of being laid out on a hospital bed for four months at a stretch, but there is, perhaps, more to it than that. David pointed out that his mother’s belief in her exceptional status, in her will, could have muddied her understanding, that on some deep level she didn’t believe that she would face extinction. Even if you know in a rational sense that you are mortal, you can still allow yourself to think: Not this time. You can evade the absoluteness of the death, with the idea that you might have two or ten or thirty years left, with the idea that you are not going to die of this particular illness. After all, it is entirely possible to be forty-five and feel like you are twenty-five, to have no innate connection with your chronological age, no intrinsic physical grasp of it; surely it is possible to be dying and feel like you are not dying, not yet.
    Sontag was also a person who took creative liberties with the truth. Which is to say that she lied. Many of her lies were typical ones. She lied about quitting smoking; she lied about lovers; she lied to friends about other friends. But mostly she lied to protect the mythology she had constructed for herself. If she had to choose between the literal truth and