Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir
Both a memoir and an investigation, Swimming in a Sea of Death is David Rieff's loving tribute to his mother, the writer Susan Sontag, and her final battle with cancer. Rieff's brave, passionate, and unsparing witness of the last nine months of her life, from her initial diagnosis to her death, is both an intensely personal portrait of the relationship between a mother and a son, and a reflection on what it is like to try to help someone gravely ill in her fight to go on living and, when the time comes, to die with dignity.
Finished reading: February 2013
Ruminations:
As I read this book, I felt saddened at all the bitterness that Susan Sontag’s son seems to still harbor towards so many aspects of his mother’s last months and death. This bitterness, along with the rambling, repetitive nature of the writing, made it difficult for me to enjoy this book.
Rereading the synopsis above, taken from Goodreads, it occurs to me that the book described therein would be very interesting. But it does not seem to me this is the book David Rieff wrote. There is very little about his relationship with his mother. And I felt as if her fierce – at times even blind – desire to continue living meant her son was unable to help her die.
In the end, I found this book a poignant example of our society’s unwillingness to see death as a natural occurrence, and the extreme measures we go through to try to delay the inevitable.
Highlighted passages:
…while much has been said and written about how people transcend their pettier sides in crises, in my experience, at least, what actually happens is that more often we revisal what lies beneath the waterline of what we essentially are.
In any case, information is not knowledge.
As she died, we swam alongside her, in the sea of her own death, watching her die. And she did die. And speaking for myself, I find that I am still swimming in that sea.