The Violet Hour by Katie Roiphe Read Free Book Online Page B

leave the room. Sometimes they go to the hospital’s zen café for a change of scene.
    Her room looks like an operating theater. In order to protect her radically suppressed immune system, everyone who enters wears a robe, a mask, gloves. There is a layer of plastic, of paper, of rubber, between her and everyone else.
    In late October, Peter brings a paperback of
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
to the hospital. He is often there for twelve, sixteen hours, and so when Susan sleeps, he sometimes reads. She asks him what he is reading, and when she hears what it is she asks him to read it aloud to her. He brought the book deliberately so that this would happen. He wants to give her an opening to talk about the vast, taboo subject of death, if she wants to, that is.
    Sometime over the next couple of days he reads, “In the depths of his heart he knew he was dying but, so far from growing used to the idea, he simply did not and could not grasp it.”
    Susan loves the part where Ivan Ilyich puts his feet on his young servant’s shoulders to make himself feel better. She does not say anything about the part where Ivan Ilyich dies.
    Forty years earlier, she had written in her notebooks: “The density of Ivan Ilyich comforts me—makes me more present to myself, stronger.”
    In the hospital there are floors for people at different stages of recovery. In the ecosystem of the ward, it is very important to move to a better floor. During the five weeks Peter stays with her, he works hard to get her to sit up in bed, to get her to the point where she can get out of bed herself. He pushes her to do it, and eventually she can. Finally they’re moved to another floor. Susan is elated. This is progress, this is recovery.
    They also keep careful track of the blood work, which measures “the blasts” in her blood. The news in the blood work is not always good.
    The transplant has only the slimmest chance of success. For one thing, Susan is seventy-one. With her exhaustive research she knew how slim her prospects would be. On the other hand, of course, she has survived against very, very shabby odds before. There is one person, at the tail end of the bell curve, who survives under the direst prognosis, and she could be that one person, the exception. She has always been the exception. So in a way the slimness of her prospects only confirmed the role she has carved out for herself: the survivor. Dr. Nimer said to David later, “She was not ready to die. As far as seeking treatment, I knew from the first time I met her that she would rather die trying.”
    To an outside observer, the suffering often seemed like too much to endure. But Sontag had prided herself on not caring about suffering. In a letter to a friend in December of 1998, during her second bout of cancer, she wrote, “The chemo, plus radiation should be over in late February. However muchof an ordeal the treatment is, is irrelevant. All that matters is will the treatment work (prevent a metastasis)? We shall see….I don’t dare to be optimistic, but I am hopeful. Anyway, by March, I hope to be back to writing, finishing,
In America
.” These are the words that stand out to a more ordinary person: “However much of an ordeal the treatment is, is irrelevant.”

    As it begins to seem like the transplant has failed despite its spectacular hardship, some of the people around her are having conversations that open with “what if.” For instance, Sharon and David discuss what if someone had talked Susan out of going to Seattle in the first place. Sharon writes in an email: “Even if that had been possible, which I don’t think it would have, it would have ended up in guilt about not having given her the big chance. She would never have written off the hope that Seattle seemed to offer.”
    Slowly, the knowledge seems to come into focus: The transplant is not working. Those around her have on some level absorbed this fact before the official announcement, though she herself has not.