Circle of Healing

This morning I read a NY Times book review of Swimming in a Sea of Death, A Son’s Memoir, by David Rieff. His mother is well-known author Susan Sontag, a two time survivor of cancer who eventually died of the disease at age of 71. In Rieff’s memoir, he shares his anxiety about his mother’s last effort to overcome the disease, described as an arduous treatment that was bound to fail. He is troubled by the idea that she may have put herself through an unnecessary ordeal because she had a false belief in her own exceptionality and capacity to rise above any adversity, no matter how great. Says the reviewer, “Rieff questions whether, on some level, his mother thought that she was too special to die. He investigates the line between hubris and bravery, grandiosity and vitality.”

I can well understand Rieff’s point of view. It is painful to witness the suffering of someone we love - and he seems to be saying that if only she would accept “the democracy of the disease” then she would have suffered less. And to back up this point of view, he recounts a conversation with a doctor who believes there is a “folie a deux between some cancer patients and their doctors, where physicians offer elaborate treatments, holding out hope when there is essentially none, in order to honor their patients’ last wishes to battle their disease”. But I would like to suggest another way of looking at it. When I first began reading the article I thought that he was describing her first encounter with the disease and was demonstrating that her belief in her ability to overcome adversity proved useless, since she did ultimately die of the disease. Then when I read further I realized that her first encounter with cancer occurred when she was in her early forties. So, since she lived for almost 30 years after that first encounter you might say that her belief in her ability to overcome adversity served her well. The fact that, in the end, she kept trying even when hope was slim, could be seen as an extension of the traits that kept her going until she was 71, rather than a “folly”.

But to call these last-ditch attempts to prolong life “folly” minimizes the majesty of the human spirit. The love of life is strong in many of us and the wish to do anything to prolong it, no matter how illogical, is something to celebrate, not denigrate. Even if we fail, we go out knowing we have done absolutely everything in our power to succeed. And isn’t it always easier to accept an unacceptable outcome if we know we’ve done everything possible to prevent it?

And then there is the fable of the two frogs. These two frogs were hopping around one day and came upon two tall crocks partially filled with milk. Each jumped into one of the crocks and then were horrified to find the sides were too slippery to climb on and it was too steep to jump out. After thrashing around for a bit the first frog gave up and drowned. The second one kept thrashing his legs for what seemed to be a very long time, and eventually was surprised to to feel a hard surface under his feet, so he jumped out and lived. And what was the hard surface? Butter churned by the frog’s “hopeless” attempts to jump out.