Deadlines

My friend and former colleague Linda Hughes recently sent me an article from last Sunday's New York Times by the poet Meghan O'Rourke called "Deadlines."  O'Rourke contemplates the fact that while death has always been one of the great subjects of literature, we are living in an age of a sub-genre: the literature of dying: "Writers are recording their own deaths as they happen."  She cites work by Updike, Hitchens, Broyard, Ebert, and Marjorie Williams, as well as her "favorite," James Merrill's last book of poetry, A Scattering of Salts.  Of course, no book has been more important in de-mythologizing death/dying in literature than Susan Sontag's seminal Illness as Metaphor, in which she brings down the curtain on the use of illness as anything but what it is--no more romanticization (as with tuberculosis) or demonization (as with cancer and later AIDS), no more "wars" on cancer. 

Why this new kind of literature?  One reason is our current penchant for and ease of documenting ourselves (think of 'selfies' and 'photo bombs'). I didn't have to search for a publisher; I spent maybe ten minutes choosing a blog platform, registered for free, and chose a background; voilà I had an immediate forum.  More important are the changing nature of the illnesses from which people die, the medical advances that prolong life, and our attitude toward fatal illnesses.  It wasn't until the 1970s, as O'Rourke points out, that patients with terminal diseases were told that they were dying.  O'Rourke calls ours the age of "protracted death."

For the first half of the essay, I nodded along in agreement with the various ideas and quotations.  I was particularly struck by Christopher Hitchens's realization: "I don't have a body.  I am a body."  And I would add that it's almost as if I have two bodies: externally I'm aware of what's going on, of the diminishment, a word that I have often used as did Updike.  How far is it back to the car?  Will I have any appetite for dinner?  Will I make it from the car to the bathroom (the details that Nora Ephron didn't want to burden her friends with, yet that determined the rhythm of her days)?  And then there's my internal body and the inability to know what's really going on.  Yes, once every three months, I lie on my back, my clothes still on, but my pants pulled down, on a moving table that slides me into a whirring machine for a series of CT scans.  I know the routine by now.  I stare at the slot that says "laser beam  do not stare."  I know the mechanical voice that says, "Breathe in.  Do not breathe.  Exhale" while an orange icon with puffed out cheeks gets ready to change to a green one with its mouth open."  I know the needles and the different styles of injecting them, and I know what size port I need put in.  I glance at the blood work report with its red exclamation points by those numbers that are problematic.  But I don't know what the abbreviations in the left hand column mean or what the numbers are supposed to be.  What's happening internally is a mystery to me, and I suspect often to the oncologist as well.  I make the leap of faith to trust what he tells me to do next; what he can't tell me is what will happen next.

The second half of O'Rourke's essay speculates on the authors' motives, and there begins the divergence between her interpretation and what I think I'm doing in writing the blog.  I don't think our "realism" is a form of denial, nor do I see it as a final "act of control."  The process of diminishment is a galvanizing subject, but not, I think, a terrifying one.  Frustrating, irritating, and sometimes discouraging, yes.  But terrifying, no.  And what we know we can't control as writers is giving the narrative an end.  Life and art have a shape: from Aristotle on we've talked about beginnings, middles, and ends.  But what the narratives of dying, unlike the dying itself, can't by necessity have is an ending, except perhaps as a postscript added by an editor.  That will always be out of control, and I think writers are well aware of that limitation.

Tomorrow is my 68th birthday.  It's always marked by ambivalent feelings--especially positive when I've spent le quatorze juillet in France with parades, flyovers, and a giant fireworks display at the Eiffel Tower.  Everyone is in a celebratory mood that day.  On the other hand, my father died on my birthday thirty-one years ago.  He was 68.  Neither of my grandfathers lived past 68 either.  I used to think that this year would be a worrisome one, even if the worry was irrational.  After the diagnosis and prognosis, I thought, "well, that's one worry I won't have to face."  But here I still am.  And here comes year 69.  My goal is to break the pattern of my paternal relatives--and to be true to my own skepticism by putting away any nagging thoughts that the year is jinxed.  It's going to begin with a very different kind of landmark event, one I never thought I'd live to see, let alone participate in: our marriage.  So here's to year #69.