Authors: Andrew Solomon
Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold
Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet
Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam
Floats up from those dim fields about the homes
Of happy men that have the power to die,
And grassy barrows of the happier dead.
Petronius’ story of the Cumaean Sibyl, who was doomed also to immortality without eternal youth, was to form the despairing epigraph to T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land
: “When asked, ‘Sibyl, what do you want?’
she would reply, ‘I want to die.’ ” And even Emily Dickinson, living quietly in New England, came to a similar conclusion about the gradual descent into loss:
The Heart asks Pleasure—first—
And then—Excuse from Pain—
And then—those little Anodynes
That deaden suffering—
And then—to go to sleep—
And then—if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor
The privilege to die—
In our family, discussions about euthanasia began long before my mother developed ovarian cancer. We all signed living wills in the early eighties and talked at that time—entirely in the abstract—about how uncivilized it was that the euthanasia options famously available in the Netherlands were not available to Americans. “I hate pain,” my mother said casually. “If I reach the point at which I’m in nothing but pain, I hope one of you will shoot me.” We all, laughingly, agreed. We all hated pain, all thought that a quiet death was the best kind—in your sleep, at home, when you were very old. Young and optimistic, I assumed that we would all die that way at some point in the remote future.
In August 1989, my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. During her first week in the hospital, she announced that she was going to kill herself. We all tried to shrug off this declaration, and she didn’t particularly insist on it. She was not at that time speaking of a considered agenda of terminating her symptoms—she had scarcely any symptoms—but was rather expressing a sense of outrage at the indignity of what lay ahead and a profound fear of being out of control of her life. She spoke of suicide, then, as people disappointed in love may speak of it, as a swift and easy alternative to the painful, slow process of recovery. It was as though she wanted vengeance for the snub she had received from nature; if her life could not be as exquisite as it had been, she would have no more of it.
The subject lay low as my mother went through an excruciating, humiliating bout of chemotherapy. When, ten months later, she went in for exploratory surgery to assess the chemotherapy’s efficacy, we discovered that the regimen had not been as effective as we’d hoped, and a second round was prescribed. After her surgery, my mother lingered for a long time in a resistance to consciousness forged out of rage. When she finally began to speak again, a flood of anger came out of her, and this time when she said she was going to kill herself, it was a threat. Our protests were thrown back in our faces. “I’m already dead,” she said as she lay in her hospital bed. “What’s here for you to love?” Or else she instructed, “If you loved me, you’d help me out of this misery.” Whatever meager faith she had had in chemotherapy had vanished, and she laid down as a condition of her accepting another round of punishing treatments that she would do it if someone would get her “those pills,” so that she could stop whenever she was ready.
One tends to accommodate the very, very sick. There was no answer to my mother’s rage and despair after her surgery but to say yes to whatever she demanded. I was living in London at that time: I came home every other week to see her. My brother was in law school in New Haven and spent long days on the train. My father neglected his office to be at home. We were all clinging to my mother—who had always been the center of our close family—and we wavered between the light but meaningful tone that had always been our mien and a terrifying solemnity. Still, when she had relaxed into a facsimile of her usual self, the idea of her suicide, though it had gained resonance, once more receded. My mother’s second round of chemotherapy seemed to be working, and my father had researched a half dozen more treatment options. My mother made her dark remarks about suicide on occasion, but we continued to tell her that there was a long time before such measures could be relevant.
At four o’clock on a blustery September afternoon in 1990, I called to check on some test results that were due that day. When my father answered, I knew at once what had happened. We would continue, he told me, with this therapy for the moment while we explored other options. I had no doubt what other options my mother would be exploring. So I should not have been surprised when she told me, in October, over lunch, that the technical details had been taken care of, and that she now had the pills. In the early stages of her illness, my mother, stripped of disguises, had suffered the loss of her looks as a side effect of her treatments, a ravagement so obvious that only my father could contrive to be blind to it. My mother had previously been beautiful, and she found the physical losses of chemotherapy intensely painful—her hair was gone, her skin too allergic for any makeup, her body emaciated, her eyes ringed with exhaustion and constantly drooping. By the time of that October lunch, however, she had begun to take on a new kind of pale, illuminated, ethereal beauty, completely different in its effect from the 1950s all-American appearance she had had during my childhood. The moment that my mother actually sought the pills was also the moment at which she accepted (perhaps prematurely, perhaps not) that she was dying, and this acceptance afforded her a radiance, both physical and
profound, that seemed to me, at last, more powerful than her decay. When I remember that lunch, I remember, among other things, how beautiful my mother had become again.
I protested, as we ate, that she might still have lots of time, and she said that she had always believed in planning things carefully, and that now that she had the pills, she could relax and enjoy whatever was left without worrying about the end. Euthanasia is a deadline matter, and I asked my mother what her cutoff would be. “As long as there is even a remote chance of my getting well,” she said, “I’ll go on with treatments. When they say that they are keeping me alive but without any chance of recovery, then I’ll stop. When it’s time, we’ll all know. Don’t worry. I won’t take them before then. Meanwhile, I plan to enjoy whatever time there is left.”
Everything that had been intolerable to my mother was made tolerable when she got those pills, by the sure knowledge that when it became really intolerable, it would stop. I would have to say that the eight months that followed, though they led inexorably toward her death, were the happiest months of her illness; that in some obscure way, despite or perhaps because of the suffering in them, they were among the happiest months of our lives. Once we had all settled the future, we could live fully in the present, something that none of us had really done before. I should emphasize that the vomiting, malaise, hair loss, adhesions, were all relentless, that my mother’s mouth was one great sore that never seemed to heal, that she would have to save up strength for days to have an afternoon out, that she could eat almost nothing, was a mess of allergies, shook so badly that on some days she couldn’t use a fork and knife—and yet the excruciating business of the continuing chemotherapy seemed suddenly unimportant because these symptoms were permanent only until she decided she could take no more, and so the disease was no longer in control of her. My mother was an adoring woman, and in those months she gave herself over to love as I have never seen anyone else do. In
A Short History of Decay,
E. M. Cioran writes, “Consolation by a possible suicide widens into infinite space this realm where we are suffering. . . . What greater wealth than the suicide each of us bears within himself?”
I have since then read and been particularly moved by Virginia Woolf’s suicide note, so similar in spirit to the terms of my mother’s departure. Woolf wrote to her husband:
Dearest:
I want to tell you that you have given me complete happiness. No one could have done more than you have done. Please believe that.
But I know that I shall never get over this: and I am wasting your life. It is this madness. Nothing anyone says can persuade
me. You can work, and you will be much better off without me. You see, I can’t write this even, which shows I am right. All I want to say is that until this disease came on we were perfectly happy. It was all due to you. No one could have been so good as you have been, from the very first day till now. Everyone knows that.V.
Will you destroy all my papers?
It is an unusually sympathetic note precisely because it is dispassionate and so clear about illness. There are people who kill themselves because they have not yet found, or perhaps because they have not yet sought, an existing cure. Then there are those who kill themselves because their illness is genuinely refractory. If I had truly believed when I was ill that my situation was permanent, I would have killed myself. Even if I had believed that it was cyclical, as Virginia Woolf knew her complaint to be, I would have killed myself if the cycles seemed too much weighted toward despair. Woolf knew that whatever pain she was feeling would pass, but she didn’t want to live through it and wait for it to pass; she’d had enough of waiting and time and it was time to go. She wrote:
Oh, its beginning is coming—the horror—physically like a painful wave swelling about the heart—tossing me up. I’m unhappy, unhappy! Down—God, I wish I were dead. Pause. But why am I feeling this? Let me watch the wave rise. I watch. Failure. Yes; I detect that. Failure, failure. (The wave rises.) Wave crashes. I wish I were dead! I’ve only a few years to live I hope. I can’t face this horror any more—(this is the wave spreading out over me).
This goes on; several times, with varieties of horror. Then, at the crisis, instead of the pain remaining intense, it becomes rather vague. I doze. I wake with a start. The wave again! The irrational pain: the sense of failure; generally some specific incident.
At last I say, watching as dispassionately as I can, Now take a pull of yourself. No more of this. I reason. I take a census of happy people & unhappy. I brace myself to shove to throw to batter down. I begin to march blindly forward. I feel obstacles go down. I say it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. I become rigid & straight, & sleep again, & half wake & feel the wave beginning & watch the light whitening & wonder how this time, breakfast & daylight will overcome it. Does everyone go through this state? Why have I so little control? It is not creditable, nor lovable. It is the cause of much waste & pain in my life.
I wrote to my brother during my third bout of depression, before I knew how fast that one would pass, “I can’t spend every other year this
way. In the meanwhile, I’m trying my best to hold on. I’d bought a gun which I had around the house, and I gave it to a friend to take care of because I didn’t want to end up using it in a moment of impulsiveness. Isn’t that ridiculous? To be afraid you’ll end up using your own gun yourself? To have to put it someplace else and instruct someone not to give it back to you?” Suicide is really more of an anxiety response than a depression solution: it is not the action of a null mind but of a tortured one. The physical symptoms of anxiety are so acute that they seem to demand a physical response: not simply the mental suicide of silence and sleep, but the physical one of self-slaughter.
My mother had worked out the details, and my father, given to careful planning, went over the whole thing as though a dress rehearsal would exhaust in advance some of the pain of the event itself. We planned how my brother and I would come to the house, how my mother would take the antiemetics, what time of day would be best for this exercise; we discussed every detail down to the funeral home. We agreed to hold the funeral two days after the death. We planned it together much as we had on previous occasions planned parties, family vacations, Christmas. We discovered, there as elsewhere, an etiquette within which a great deal would be determined or communicated. My mother quietly set about making her emotions completely clear to all of us, intending in the course of a few months to resolve every family difference into transparency. She talked about how much she loved us all and unearthed the shape and structure of that love; she resolved old ambivalences and articulated a new clarity of acceptance. She set aside individual days with each of her friends—and she had many friends—to say good-bye; though few of them knew her actual agenda, she made sure that each knew the large place she occupied in her affections. She laughed often in that period; her sense of humor, warm and encompassing, seemed to spread to include even the doctors who poisoned her monthly and the nurses who witnessed her gradual demise. She recruited me one afternoon to help buy my ninety-year-old great-aunt a handbag, and though the expedition left her exhausted to the point of collapse for three days, it also renewed us both. She read everything I wrote with a mixture of acuity and generosity that I have not encountered elsewhere, a new quality in her, softer than the insight she had previously brought to my work. She gave little things away to people and made order of larger things that were not for giving away yet. She set about having all our furniture reupholstered so that she would leave the house in reasonable order, and she selected a design for her tombstone.
Bit by bit, that her suicide plans would become a reality seemed to settle on us. Later she was to say that she had considered doing the whole thing on her own, but that she had thought that the shock would be worse than the memories of having been with her for this experience. As for us—we wanted to be there. My mother’s life was of other people, and we all hated the idea of her dying alone. It was important, in my mother’s last months on earth, that we all feel very connected, that we none of us be left with a sense of secrets kept and agendas hidden. Our conspiracy brought us closer together, closer than we had ever been.