Susan Sontag's final wish

Did not telling her the truth about her condition take a toll on you?

It exacted a tremendous price. I never got to say goodbye. I don't want to romanticize the end of life, but we never had the kinds of conversations I would've liked to have had with her. Conversations about the past. I would've liked to have said certain things to her. We had a complicated relationship. There were very good times and very bad times between us. I would have liked to have gone beyond those before she left us. But that's impossible if you decide not to acknowledge the fact of dying. So that's the price I paid. But she made it very clear what she wanted. I didn't feel that my interests could be put ahead of that.

You write that it wasn't just that she desperately wanted to live, she was also terrified of dying. Wasn't there a kind of existential dread?

There was. In my experience, lots of people are terrified of dying. I've also met lots of people who aren't. But she was one to whom it was just terrible news. So I don't think she was at all unique. Of course, some people of faith find it easier. But my mother wasn't a person of faith.

Your mother was an atheist. She refused to accept any consolation from the hope of an afterlife. How much did that contribute to her dread?

Well, I'm an atheist too; if anything, more militant than my mother. I think it would have been grotesque of my mother to have become a person of faith purely in the interest of consoling herself. Surely, that would have been the most terrible therapeutic use of faith, and a disgrace in terms of faith. You shouldn't start to believe because it suits you.

But it does raise the question: Without the consolation of religion, does the prospect of dying lead to dread?

Well, it sure doesn't help. I don't know. There are certainly religious traditions that don't believe in an afterlife. So I don't think we can just take the Christian or the Islamic model and say those visions of a personal afterlife are what religious faith is. If you look at Buddhism, if you look at Judaism, neither has an afterlife in that sense. So I'm not sure it's faith vs. atheism.

These days, there's a lot of talk about what's called "a good death." Usually this means someone who accepts dying and stops fighting it. There's a certain grace that can follow. Not only is there a sense of inner peace, but the dying person often has meaningful and profound conversations with friends and family. To use a word you scorn in your book, there is some "closure." By contrast, it would seem that your mother had anything but a good death. Do you see it that way?

No, I think that's something people say to console themselves. I don't believe a word of what you just said. I don't know whether you believe it or not. But I know this argument very well. First of all, I think that argument does a real disservice to human variety. People are very different in their lives and very different in their deaths. The idea that one good death fits all seems incredibly reductive to what human beings are all about. It's like saying all human beings should be cheerful. I don't know that being cheerful is better than being a melancholy person. People have different temperaments. When you say "grace," it lets family members off the hook. They don't have to feel so bad that the person is going. So I don't buy it.

I have the impression that this is the way your mother had to die. Given who she was, there was no other way.

What I'm saying is that the right way for one person to die may not be the right way for another person to die. And she was somebody who desperately didn't want to die. So why should she have made our lives easier by going gracefully? That doesn't seem right to me.

She was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris, where many famous writers are buried. You say your mother had a horror of cremation. Do you know why that was?

Sure. Cremation seemed to confirm extinction. If you have a grave and your bones are there, it's somehow less confirming of extinction. I understand that viscerally. She spoke a lot during her life about how horrified of cremation she was. But all the decisions about her burial are decisions that I made, trying to think through what I thought she wanted. She gave me no instructions of any kind.

You have just a brief reference to Annie Leibovitz, your mother's off-and-on companion for 20 years. You call her book of photos -- which included pictures of your mother as she was dying and after her death -- "carnival images of celebrity death." There seems to be a good deal of bitterness packed into that short sentence.

There is, but it's contained in that sentence. And that's all I propose to say about Annie Leibovitz.

You have been a writer for many years, but to my knowledge, it's only been quite recently that you've written this directly about your mother. Not only did you write this memoir, you're also editing her diaries and helping put out some of her unpublished essays. Why have you taken this active role in your mother's work?

That's a good question. One answer is because I'll probably do a better and more responsible job than someone who didn't know her. If I'm going to edit stuff about her life in the '50s, I'm the only one alive who would know about it directly. Another answer is that if I had her journals in my possession after she died, and they were simply mine to dispose of as I wished, I don't think I would have published them. I don't know if I would have destroyed them or simply left them for other people to deal with after I'm dead. But I'm fairly certain I would not have published them.

But in her lifetime, long before she was diagnosed with MDS, my mother decided they were going to be public. She sold her papers, including her diaries, to UCLA. So they were going to appear at some point anyway. And she didn't embargo them. So I felt either they would leak out in one way or another or I could try to edit them to make them coherent. What I've left out, people will be able to go to UCLA and read. It's not as if I burned anything.

Near the end of the book, you say, "I have preferred to write as little as possible of my relations with my mother in the last decade of her life, but suffice it so say that they were often strained and at times very difficult." Can you explain why they were difficult?

No, I think that explains it. What I will say, though, is that when I wrote this book, I thought a lot about what I'd say and what I wouldn't say. And I decided, finally, that I would tell the truth about anything that I could tell the complete truth about. That doesn't mean someone else who was there would agree with my account.

But I also decided that I was going to leave out certain things. And that may be because I didn't want to have a fight with somebody, because I didn't want to offend somebody, because I thought I'd hurt somebody's feelings, or because I just preferred that something not be known. I'm just not prepared to talk in any seriously honest and self-revealing way about my relationship with my mother.

So I felt what I needed to do was not give the false impression that somehow our relations had been very good, but instead to say they were very complicated. And over that decade, they had very high highs and very low lows. It was important to have that on the record. But I wasn't going to say anything more. I'm not a confessional writer. I'm not a confessional person. This is all very new territory to me.

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