A Season in Hell (26 page)

In past times, it was customary for authors to beg pardon of the (usually) aristocratic patron-reader for taking up her or his time. Even a great poet like Edmund Spenser would apologize for his lack of skill, offering fervent assurances of his desire to please. Such disclaimers do not fall comfortably on twentieth-century ears, but as I finish this book, I feel a need to ask the reader’s indulgence for my long recital of personal ills. I feel uncomfortably like someone who obsessively subjects others to hours of description of her latest operation. Perhaps I feel this way because although I wrote this book in the hope that others might find it useful or interesting, I also needed to write it for personal reasons.

Over the past four years, when people asked what had happened to me, I would offer a brief explanation. If they were curious and probed, however, I found myself telling them the whole story. I told it over and over. It was not the telling that was a problem; it was my bewilderment about why I
needed to
tell it and how I could tell it over and over without tiring of it. Worst of all, I wondered why I felt a knot of tearfulness rising in my throat, especially when I spoke of events surrounding the coma. I wondered if I was suppressing some unfinished psychological business.

Judith Herman writes that “unassimilated traumatic experiences are stored in a special kind of ‘active memory,’ which has an ‘intrinsic tendency to repeat the representation of contents.’ The trauma is resolved only when the survivor develops a new mental ‘schema’ for understanding what has happened.”
*
She quotes Doris Lessing’s description, in
Under My Skin
, of her father’s stories of World War I, which “he told again and again, with the same words and gestures, in stereotyped phrases” (Herman, p. 38). Although I had not reached this point, I felt that if I was ever going to be able to lay the past to rest, I must in some systematic way deal with my memories and glean the memories of the people close to me. I feel this has happened through writing this book, by what magical means I don’t know.

Many people expect accounts by survivors of serious illness or accident to affirm some intuition of deity or purpose. I can offer neither of these. At no time in my illness or during my recovery did I believe that I was part of any larger purpose, a pawn in some god’s plan. Nor did I feel selected for a special ordeal, as people seem to who ask, “Why me?” When people insist—always with a knowing look, an assumption of superior knowledge—that I was saved for a reason, because I am special, I think, but do not say: Does that mean that among the uncountable millions who died in Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Bhopal, or the most recent massacre by a madman with a repeating rifle, there was not one who was special? Only I am special? Only I, of all the people who develop esophageal cancer, mattered enough to save? The idea that one was saved because one is intended to accomplish something is offensive: it assumes that doing something in the world is of greater importance than simply being.

Some may protest that if there is no larger purpose to our lives, they have no meaning. But what is the meaning of statements that life has meaning, or hasn’t? Why should life have a meaning outside ourselves? Is it necessary, for our peace of mind, that we fit into a scheme larger than ourselves, in which we are each little cogs contributing to the sum of good or evil? We do not even know, really, what good and evil are: it seems to me this is the subject on which humans are most deluded. The demand that life have a purpose beyond itself diminishes life. We have enough purpose for our own lives: we want to feel alive, we want certain things—not just materialities, but experiences. We want to be important to at least one other person and loved by many people; we want to use our abilities, whatever they are. We want to contribute to our little—or larger—worlds and be respected within them. We judge our lives and ourselves by how closely we have come to achieving the things we desire, by how we feel about ourselves, and most of all by the quality of our daily lives. We do not need more. To imagine a deity who resembles a schoolmaster keeping a list of merits and demerits on each human soul seems to me infantile. What would be the point of that in a world in which evil and ugliness so far outmeasure virtue that we are amazed when we discover goodness?

When we die, all we are possessed of is our experience. It is one part of our lives that is largely in our own control. We have no control over where we are born, our sex, color, or size, our intelligence and talents; we have only limited ability to change our class or economic status; and no control at all over the twists of history, which with utter caprice and randomness can toss us into a death camp, a peaceful quiet period, an economic depression, or an exciting period of renaissance. Most of us spend much of our lives simply coming to terms with the inexorable conditions of our lives. But we ourselves choose the way we take, deal with, think and feel about, and respond to those conditions. This area of life, the experiential, is most completely ours; it is what defines us and the quality of our lives. It—not accomplishment, wealth, worldly power, or fame—is the only real measure of a life. And only we ourselves can assign our lives a “grade.” The richer, deeper, and more varied our thoughts and feelings, the wider and richer our interactions and connections, the richer our life. When we are old and look back, it is only this that matters. The rest is all props.

Surviving an illness or a disaster is largely a matter of luck. Although Americans in particular like to pretend that we can control our fates by not smoking, drinking alcohol, indulging in excessive sex (or the “wrong” kind)—if we exercise and eat properly, we can live forever—I find this idea superstitious. Good habits may help us live longer, if we don’t die in a plane crash or from a terrorist’s bomb. Yet my pre-illness habits were far from healthy, and I lived. No one knows why. The Sloan-Kettering doctors shrug off the question: they simply don’t know. A hospital newsletter described me as a “miracle” patient. I asked my oncologist if he would write up my case. “No,” he said. “I didn’t do anything different with you than with any other patient. I don’t know why you lived. I can’t take credit for it.”

I also reject the automatic assumption—almost universal—that life is always better than death. People cling to this belief unyieldingly and unthinkingly, but I have always questioned it, and when I was “dead,” as I felt it, I liked the incredible calm and quiet—a calm far deeper than any I felt in life. When I swam up from it, or tried to sink back in it (which happened frequently after I first woke up), I was eager to return to that velvet tranquillity. Death is a friend. I still feel this to be true.

When I was about eighteen, I read André Malraux’s
Man’s Fate
, a novel about the Chinese Civil War that deeply impressed and moved me at the time. Of the many scenes that embedded themselves in my memory, one was of Kyo—the hero—in prison. A guard beats an old drunken man cruelly; Kyo, standing in his cage holding on to the bars, protests. The guard comes over to him and smacks his hand hard with the truncheon, or whatever he is using. It is horribly painful, but Kyo refuses to move his hands. Later, he is offered his life if he will betray his comrades. If he chooses death, he will be killed, like them, by being thrown in the tank of boiling water in a train steam engine—Chiang Kai-shek’s method of killing the Communists who in good faith surrendered to him in Shanghai. Kyo chooses death.

At the time I read this, I had never questioned that life was the ultimate good. I thought about it long and as deeply as an eighteen-year-old can; life did seem to me the highest good, and I questioned those who claimed honor, or faith to a deity or a fatherland, to supersede the value of life itself. On the other hand, there are terms of life that are not acceptable, terms so depraved that they would poison whatever life was saved by accepting them. I decided then to consider moot the question of ultimate good, and I have never been able to move beyond that.

Before I fell ill, I worked for over ten years on a history of women that covered the period from prehistory to the present. In many of the societies that I described, women’s lot was abominable; laws regarding women were stringent and cruel, and it seemed that so were women’s lives. I was wrenched and anguished as I read and wrote about these periods, and the thought often crossed my mind that death was a blessing: at least the poor souls were now at rest.

Ordinary people rarely encounter a situation like Kyo’s; ordinary people choose death for undramatic reasons that are not necessarily moral. To choose death when one is in terrible pain (physical or emotional), is old and helpless and dependent, or faces serious debilitation, cannot be labeled moral or immoral. It is a practical decision, made for practical reasons. The choice to die when one is in such circumstances is a moral decision
only if suffering is considered a moral good
—the suffering not only of the chooser but also of the people involved with her or him. And suffering is considered a good only within an authoritarian ethos, a belief that obedience to and fear of superiors, the state, or a god, is necessary. Such an ethos teaches that the individual should defer to the will of some higher power and die only when it decrees. It condemns as apostasy most efforts to take one’s life in one’s hands, to live by one’s own will. I have rejected this ethos ever since I could think—as a life choice, not a death choice.

Moreover, the fact is that most people cling to life tenaciously. However sick they may be, in whatever pain, people continue to regard life as precious. This is a profound and almost universal truth. People who are miserable and barely able to wrench out a smile grit their teeth and insist ferociously on going on living. There is a reason why the people in the death camps were heartened by the rare suicide: although life was not worth living for the internees, they went on passively doing so. Suicide was a heroic act. It is said that Moishe Feldenkrais, who invented the Feldenkrais method of physiotherapy, went on choosing life even though he was paralyzed almost completely at the end; and a recently translated book describes the life, clung to, of a man who could move only his eyelid. Comatose, my mother clung to life for five weeks, although her last experience in life was of humiliation, as she tried to stand up and found herself tied to a chair and cried out in terror to my father to take her home. Ruth McKechnie clung to life even after they removed her life supports.

We all know of cases in which doctors say that if they remove someone from a respirator, she or he will immediately die. After much agonizing, the family finally decides to do so, and yet the patient does not die but holds on for days or weeks, comatose yet willful, clinging to life. My father-in-law, Robert French, fell ill in his thirties. He was in agony, but no doctor or clinic was able to diagnose his disease. After years of serious illness (he was unable to work, unable even to move easily, in agony when he sat up, unable to eat), he went to the Mayo Clinic. They operated and found tuberculosis of the intestines; they surmised that in France during World War I, he had eaten meat exposed to poison gas, which rotted his innards. They removed most of his large intestine and sent him home to die. He lay in an upstairs bedroom for months. Every day, a local doctor visited him. Every day, the doctor, pitying his patient’s agony, said, “Bob, I’m leaving some extra morphine tablets here on the bedside table for you. If you need them, they’re there.” Bob never took them, no matter how terrible his pain. And one day, he rose from that bed to live for twenty years more.

I believe that most of us are like Bob French. I, having prepared myself for death, having in my rational mind accepted death, was gripped, each time I approached it, by something else, something deeper and grittier and more elemental. Some people call it will, an ambiguous term which, they say admiringly, I possess in great quantity. But I cannot take credit for something unconscious. I credit my survival of terminal cancer and a lethal coma to luck, my father’s family genes, and the love of my family and friends. But clearly I wanted to live, despite my frequent aspersions on the living state.

Since most people, even those in pain of body and mind, cling to life with something like desperation, we as a race take no risk in making a means of death accessible. When I was helpless after the coma, at my lowest, speaking to my friends of wanting to die, I know (and knew then) that if I had possessed the means of accomplishing my end, I would not have used it. I spoke of death daily but made no effort to kill myself. In fact, I was making a strong effort to get better. I was negotiating with life and death.

I firmly believe that death is a friend, into whose arms one sinks gratefully when it is time. I also firmly believe in people’s right to end their lives when they desire to. The argument over euthanasia in this country seems to me wrongheaded, approached in the wrong way. The question being debated is whether the populace should grant someone—a doctor or panel of doctors—the authority to decide whether a person may be permitted to die. This removes freedom from the act, which again becomes part of an authoritarian pattern. Every and any adult who expresses the wish to die should be able to obtain the means of death—a prescription, a drug, whatever. Whether people take the drug or not—or when—is up to them. I do not believe that were the means of suicide accessible, great numbers of depressed people would kill themselves in a momentary funk. Suicide is an extreme step, and one must be in an extreme state to attempt it. Moreover, I really wonder about the thinking of people who seem to assume that if death were made accessible, large numbers of people would choose it. We are intelligent enough and strong enough to be in charge of our own lives, and we all, or almost all, cling almost superstitiously to life.

Despite my daily negotiations with death in 1993, I am now deeply gratified at having lived and grateful to whatever enabled me to do so. I have no anger at the medical establishment, which may inadvertently have caused the coma and whose “cure” did cause my present afflictions. There is no malice in it; the medical establishment did for me what it could. That cancer treatment remains at a savage state is not the fault of doctors scurrying to find more benign cures. Individual doctors can be care-less and cavalier, or caring and committed, but the medical establishment as a whole, the huge, indifferent machine, did what it could do, and by some fluke, I survived. It did what it was supposed to do, what it knew to do. Until more civilized treatments for cancer are discovered, treatment will continue to be like playing craps: toss the toxin and see which dies first, the cancer or the patient. My present problems are the payment I owe for surviving such a treatment. That they exist makes my life hard in some ways; that they are not more severe makes my survival sweeter.