No one external to me - not part of my day-to-day life - has helped me survive the illnesses, the medical trials, the near death experiences of the last fourteen years more than Susan Sontag. No ideology, no “positive attitude,” certainly no god or religion has provided more solace or strength.

During my first hospitalization in 1995 I brought along her book Illness as Metaphor. I had read it years before but I read it again while struggling to stay alive - it was near-fatal pneumonia that year - and in those pages I found courage and reason to continue fighting.

Eighteen months ago, walking the halls of 9 Long, the transplant floor of UCSF’s Moffitt Hospital, the night before my liver transplant I again had Sontag’s book with me. I didn’t read it that time - maybe because the promised outcome was so different - but it was nearby always. A slim paperback, it was even under my gurney when the too-cheerful nurses wheeled me into the operating room.

Sontag died of a hideous cancer in 2004 on December 28, a day that makes me laugh and cry and shake my head at the dark humor of the universe. December 28 is the day my father died. Exactly two years later lacking only a few hours my mother followed. More friends have lost loved ones to that dying season than I can count. And just a month ago on December 28 I begged a friend to take me to the hospital because the pain of my latest medical debacle was so bad I thought the date was calling me. I was wrong, but too much has passed on December 28 for me not to harbor superstitions about the day. And now, Sontag.

Her son, David Reiff, has published a memoir of Sontag’s last year called Swimming in a Sea of Death. It is as tough and unforgiving as was its subject. Hard to read, but like Sontag herself somehow it helps.

The title of this post is a quote from Reiff’s book (page 53). The immediate answer to his question is of course, “Power, dummy! How could it be otherwise?” That was Songtag’s position - she prided herself on being a life-long student - as it is mine and probably yours. And that attitude’s the only one to have if you want to get through life. But when the information is unremittingly horrible, without hope… what then? Do the rules change? Do you change them?

At first Sontag tackled her final cancer (she had three different types over thirty years) with all her “knowledge is power” convictions intact. But as the impossibility of her situation became apparent Reiff says she seemed to take comfort in forgetting. How unlike her! How distressing to those who knew her! Yet what else could she do? Consider another quote, one that applies to all of us:

Somehow a fundamental disconnect has now arisen between the reality of death and the reality that one has to die of something. –p61

Fundamental indeed. That disconnect is at the root of our humanity and the root of our forgetting. Even Sontag gave in to it in her last days. Medicine - science - will cure. How can it fail us? We insist on going until we cannot. Then we pretend and when our pretense gives out we lie and force ourselves into forgetting. What else can we do?

Sontag, in Metaphor, talks about moving from the “Country of the well” to the “country of the ill.” Reiff adds to her list the “country of the dying.” I have not stayed long in that final country but I admit to resting there a while. When my own December 28 does come, I think Sontag will offer solace even then.