The Violet Hour (41 page)

The fear returns, or it never goes away. It remains in the form of some fierceness I know springs from those weeks in the hospital. I would not be who I am without the fear.

When I have my first baby, I go back to the hospital. The baby is one month early. The surgeon does an emergency cesarean, because I am losing amniotic fluid. The baby is four pounds but she is breathing on her own. Earlier that day, when it became clear that something was going very wrong, I had asked the sonogram technician if she could just tell me if the baby was dead or alive. She said I would have to wait and speak to the doctor, and so I waited in the hallway on a bench for the doctor for forty minutes without knowing if the baby was dead or alive.

Hours later, in the operating theater, the blue scrubs, the paper on the gurney, the face masks, arouse something in me. I begin to panic; my heart races; my blood pressure rises dangerously. I try to picture an empty beach with palm trees, but the hospital intrudes.

For days after the cesarean, my heart rate stays dangerously elevated. The doctors can find nothing wrong with me, no preeclampsia, no pregnancy complication, but I can't stop panicking.
The hospital—even the happy maternity ward, with its babies wheeled in glass prams, its new mothers, shocked and queenly, shuffling their way through the halls in robes—is making me panic; any doctor who comes near me with a stethoscope around her neck makes me panic; the mysterious, undetectable thing wrong with me, which ironically is panic, makes me panic. At night, I have trouble breathing.

When the nurses measure my blood pressure, they measure it again, because they think they must have gotten it wrong. The doctors put me on a magnesium drip to slow my heart. It feels like a truck is running through my brain. The room is blurred. My thoughts are gluey, slowed. There is a chair next to my bed, where my husband should be, but he is in the office. Even though we will not separate for two and a half years, it is now that he leaves. I hold my skinny baby. I am thinking that we will die.

Salter tells me about one of his commanders, Colonel Brischetto, very confident, very little flying experience. They were all going to North Africa to a gunnery camp, and they were waiting on the runway. The airplanes flew off in pairs. The colonel was flying with a wingman. He made a request to change radio channels, but he did not pull the lever correctly on the indicator and lost communication with the other plane. He had turned too sharply to the left and then corrected, and then he had lost his bearings in the clouds. Salter says it's easier than you'd think in the sky to lose the sense of where the earth is. The colonel turned downward.

“Cousin Echo,” the wingman called. “I've lost you.” The wingman couldn't follow and broke off and flew away. He tried the colonel on the radio several times but got no response. Salter imagines the colonel looking down at the channel selector for a few minutes, since he didn't hear the radio, and losing track of where he was. For a second, Salter imagines, he saw the ground through the windshield. Salter writes, “If, even for a moment, he thought of bailing out, it was already too late. As if in a nightmare, in the final second his eyes smashed through surfaces.” Salter and the other pilots on the ground knew something was wrong, because they heard an announcement that the runway was closed.

The colonel is hurtling through the clouds at full speed toward the ground. I am transfixed by this story. Once he gets below the clouds, he can see. He sees through the windshield of the plane, and for a split second he processes it, but how? “First there is the surprise of it,” Salter says to me. “His mind has gone through a dimension. There in the soup.”

Is there a moment of panic, or is it possible to let go, to give in, to go under? There in the soup. (“The soup” is pilot slang for being lost in the clouds when you can't see and are operating on instruments.)

Salter thinks he had seconds to be afraid.

M
E:
My father's death was very close to dying in his sleep.

S
ALTER:
It was?

M
E:
Well, he had a heart attack and collapsed on the floor of the lobby of the building. My mother asked him if she should call an ambulance, and he said no. It was so quick, he didn't know it was happening to him.

S
ALTER:
I don't know about that.

M
E:
What do you mean?

S
ALTER:
Well, he probably felt pain.

This shocks me. That he would have been in pain. That he would have time to think about what was happening to him. I am not sure why I hadn't thought of him either feeling pain or knowing in those minutes what was happening or having time to wonder what was happening or to be afraid.

S
ALTER:
He was probably thinking, Is this something that will pass?

M
E:
Maybe that's why he said no to calling an ambulance.

S
ALTER:
Probably he was thinking about whether it would go away on its own. He was thinking, What's happening and will it go away? Or is this the end?

Did he panic? I am not able to let myself think of him panicking. Panic is not a feeling I can associate with my father, who, like Salter, did not show weakness generally and fear specifically.

M
E:
You're probably right. I have told the story so many times. My father died suddenly. He didn't know what was happening to him. But it's wrong.

S
ALTER:
Don't dwell on it.

M
E:
I guess in my head I whitewashed it, made it easier.

S
ALTER:
Don't think about it.

Why had I never thought of pain? I had always thought of my father's heart attack as so sudden he would feel nothing; I thought that it was over in a second. But he spoke after he collapsed, so it was clearly not, in fact, over in a second. Why had no one ever pointed that out to me before when I told the story? Probably because this is not something someone would say in normal civilized conversation. But this is not normal civilized conversation, or it's the outer edges. This is where this book has brought me.

Later, I look up heart attacks in
How We Die
. Sherwin Nuland writes about the pain that most often accompanies heart attacks: “It has been most commonly described by its sufferers as constricting, or viselike. Sometimes it manifests itself as a crushing pressure, like an intolerable blunt weight forcing itself against the front of the chest and radiating down the left arm or up into the neck and jaw. The sensation is frightening…because…it is accompanied by awareness of the possibility (and quite a realistic awareness it is) of impending death.”

Don't dwell on it. Don't think about it.

What is most devastating is the image of my father being afraid on the floor of his lobby. The idea that he didn't have time to be afraid had consoled me.

I am coming to see that the real thing I am afraid of is not death itself but the fear of death. This fear is not abstract to me. The knowing you are about to die. The panic of its approach. That is what seems unbearable to me. That's what I've been trying to write my way through.

But here's what I learned from the deaths in this book: You work. You don't work. You resist. You don't resist. You exert the consummate control. You surrender. You deny. You accept. You pray. You don't pray. You read. You work. You take as many painkillers as you can. You refuse painkillers. You rage against death. You run headlong toward it.

In the end the deaths are the same. They all die. The world releases them.

There is a photograph Annie Leibovitz took of Sontag after she was dead, in the Frank Campbell funeral home; it is like a triptych, with three different photos that look almost stitched together. With a gentle light coming from below, her cropped white hair smoothed back, Sontag is lying on a table in an elegant pleated dress from Milan, wrists bruised, hands folded over her stomach, as if she had died serenely.