The Violet Hour (2 page)

Why did Sendak want to draw death? Why did Annie Leibovitz take her controversial and startling last photographs of Susan Sontag as she lay dying and after she died? Why did the Victorians photograph dead babies propped up in prams and on people's laps? Why did the Romantics make death masks? “I do it because I can't not do it,” as Sendak said about his art generally. “Something malfunctions in me.”

I think if I can capture a death on the page, I'll repair or heal something. I'll feel better. It comes down to that.

At first I thought I was trying to understand death, but then I realized that was a lie I was telling myself. I want to see death.

When I say “see,” I mean something specific and bookish. Another, bolder journalist might go to a hospice to talk to people who are dying, might fly to war zones, might interview patients in Ebola hospitals, but my way of seeing has always been different, shyer. To see the world I've always opened a book.

I start with a room. Freud's room, with its French doors overlooking the blossoming almond tree; John Updike's institutionally homey room at the upscale hospice in Danvers, Massachusetts; Susan Sontag's last room at Sloan Kettering; Dylan Thomas's room at St. Vincent's, with its oxygen tent; Maurice Sendak's sprawling “comfort care” room at Danbury Hospital. I very conspicuously do not belong in these rooms.

This is one of our few powerful taboos. Sherwin Nuland writes, “Modern dying takes place in the modern hospital, where it can be hidden, cleansed of its organic blight, and finally packaged for modern burial. We can now deny the power not only of death but of nature itself.” We do not see death the way people in other centuries saw it all the time—a mother in childbirth in a four-poster mahogany bed, a baby carried down the hall in a sheet, a child burning up with scarlet fever. We do not see people die in our homes very often, and death is something that we can forget about, cordon off. But the heat or curiosity is there. Susan Sontag once wrote that “the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked.” She captures a near-pornographic
feel to death, a desire to see that feels illicit, wrong.

I have thought a lot about this desire to see a death. A reporter asked Annie Leibovitz about the photographs she took of people close to her—Susan Sontag, and her father—dying and dead, and she said: “You find yourself reverting to what you know. It's almost like a protection of some kind. You go back into yourself. You don't really know quite what you're doing. I didn't really analyze it. I felt driven to do it.”

Is that drive prurient, voyeuristic? Is there something sick or unhinged or vulturish about it?

Even if there is, the curiosity feels natural. For me it involves going back.

The work I did for this book included talking to a lot of strangers about their mothers and fathers and husbands and close friends dying. In the beginning, I felt uncomfortable for intruding, for asking them to dredge up a dark, impossible time. I wrote long apologetic letters and emails about how much I understood if they didn't want to talk to me. “I don't want to impose on your privacy,” I would write. “I would be very grateful for your time but completely understand if you don't want to talk.” The people I was interviewing frequently started reassuring
me;
that was how
awkwardly I was coming across. But the conversations we had ended up, very often, being among the most extraordinary I've had in my life.

The story of a death is intimate, scary, huge, but maybe in some ways easier to tell a stranger. Curled up in my bed, I talked on the phone for hours to several people. Some called me back or emailed with new things they remembered or thoughts or bits of analysis. Some stopped and started. Some said they didn't want to talk and then said they would. Some said they didn't want to talk and proceeded to talk for hours. One cried on a barstool. One would only answer my questions while he painted my portrait, so I sat in his studio, trying and mostly failing not to move or gesture, while we talked. Sometimes interviews would turn into teas and lunches and drinks and visits to museums and sprawl out over months. The talk was electric; the desire to explain, to mull over with someone also invested, was undeniable, a surprise. The people I talked to were generous with their impressions, deeply personal reactions, fraught moments, but they also wanted to talk about something that isn't talked about, all of us uneasily circling a taboo.

One of the people I interviewed for the book said to me at one point: “I don't question your motives.” I was floored with gratitude because, of course, I was always questioning my own motives: I roiled through them constantly. Why am I doing this? Why do I want to know this? What normal person wants to blunder into this hushed and sacred space? Why do I want to
get this close to a death? Why can't I respect the decent boundaries?

At various points in the years I was writing this book I wanted to stop, because it was tricky, dangerous, unwieldy, or confusing, or making me anxious, but I couldn't stop. The material kept calling to me in a way I only partially understood. I felt compelled by these stories, obsessed with them; they were like puzzles or mysteries I couldn't leave alone or stop thinking about.

Ancient Egyptians used to read the
Book of the Dead
to learn practical tips on how to navigate the underworld—like how to not have your head cut off in the underworld, or how to take the form of a crocodile in the underworld, or how to not enter the underworld upside down—but we don't have a
Book of the Dead
.

The problem with the project is that it could have gone on forever. There were so many deaths I wanted to dive into: William Blake's happy death, where he sat up in bed and saw angels; Honoré de Balzac killing himself through work and coffee; Primo Levi's probably suicidal fall down the stairs; Christopher Hitchens's fierce commitment to reporting his death; Virginia Woolf's descent into the river, with stones in her overcoat; Franz Kafka's starving, like his hunger artist, in the sanatorium; Leo Tolstoy leaving his wife and dying near a train station at the stationmaster's house; F. Scott Fitzgerald's heart attack in Hollywood. All of them seemed to call to me.

I don't believe that you can learn how to die, or gain wisdom, or prepare, and the work I have done on this book has, if anything, confirmed that suspicion, but I do think you can look at a death and be less afraid.

As I was working on them, I found the portraits of these deaths hugely and strangely reassuring. The beauty of the life comes spilling out. The power of an inspiring mind working on the problem. Somehow these sketches were freeing, comforting, exhilarating, in part because the people I was writing about lived great, vivid, gloriously productive lives. There is something about the compression of the final moments, the way everything comes rushing in, the intensity, that is beautiful, even though the death is not.

Maurice Sendak owned Keats's death mask, which he kept in a wooden box. He adored it. He liked to stroke its forehead. I saw it and it was very beautiful. Why would anyone want to own a death mask? I asked myself. But I knew. In a way, I was writing death masks.

For some reason when I think of my father's death, I keep going back to the part where he falls onto the marble floor of the lobby of his building. He is on his way back from dinner and a concert. My mother says to him, “Should I call an ambulance?” It is like my mother to ask, to defer to him, the doctor. “No,” he says. He is irritated—I can imagine this tone—at the
implication that he can't take care of himself. He is in the middle of a massive cardiac arrest.

By the time my sister and I arrive at the hospital, he is dead.

He is nearly eighty-two, but his death feels sudden, out of the blue. He walked twenty blocks to work every day; he scheduled patients until seven o'clock at night; he carried suitcases and bags and babies for the women in his life; he was startlingly healthy for a man his age.