Swimming in a Sea of Death by David Rieff

Author:David Rieff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2008-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

MY MOTHER had always thought of herself as someone whose hunger for truth was absolute. After her diagnosis, the hunger remained, but it was life and not truth that she was desperate for. I hope I did the right thing in trying to give it to her, but I will never be sure. But she was clear about what she wanted and to the extent that I am consolable about the role I played, this is what consoles me:

She was entitled to die her own death.

VI

DURING THE MONTHS I watched my mother die, I was increasingly at a loss as to how I could behave toward her in ways that actually would be helpful. Mostly, I felt at sea. Of course, this had much to do with some of my own grave failings as a person (above all, I think, my clumsiness and coldness). Had I been a better person, doubtless I would have had at least a somewhat more intelligent apprehension about what I should have done. But even to put my own failings at the center of this is a species of vanity. The crux of the matter was that my mother’s illness and, as soon became clear, the cumulative side effects of her treatment, increasingly had stripped her both of physical dignity and mental acuity—in short, everything except her excruciating pain and her desperate hope that the course she had embarked upon would allow her to go on living. I knew that for her the physical agony she was undergoing—and I am not being even slightly hyperbolic when I use those words—was only bearable because of this hope and that therefore my task had to be to help her as best I could to go on believing that she would survive. For me to have behaved in any other way would have meant saying to her, in effect, “your sufferings are for nothing: you gambled everything on a transplant, but you’ve lost.”

There is a Jewish saying, “Just as it is an obligation to tell someone what is acceptable, it is an obligation not to say what is not acceptable.” Never for a moment, during the course of my mother’s illness, did I think she could have “heard” that she was dying. Bedridden in the aftermath of her bone marrow transplant, her muscles soon so flaccid and wasted that she was unable even to roll over unaided, her flesh increasingly ulcerated, and her mouth so cankered that she was often unable to swallow and sometimes unable even to speak, she dreamt (and spoke, when she could speak, that is) of what she could do when she got out of the hospital and once more took up the reins of her life. The future was everything. Living was everything. Getting back to work was everything. And though her mind was fuzzy from chemicals—“chemo brain,” as cancer patients call it—and she was often disoriented and wild-eyed, seemingly in focus and out of her head, she counted the days until she might be released.

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