The Violet Hour

I forget how to breathe. I am being pulled underwater. The taxi driver carries me into the emergency room because I've passed out in the cab and my mother can't lift a twelve-year-old.

In
How We Die
, Sherwin Nuland describes the physical effects of pneumonia: “The microscopic air sacs called alveoli swell and are destroyed by inflammation. As a result, proper exchange of gases is prevented, and blood oxygen diminishes while carbon dioxide may build up until vital functions can no longer be sustained. When oxygen levels drop below a critical point, the brain manifests it by further cell death.”

Someone puts a mask on my face. I taste the sweetness of the oxygen, like tasting sky.

I have a 107-degree fever. At home, my mother had put me in a bathtub with ice cubes in it. In intensive care, there are tubes or snakes in my arms; there are good or evil nurses. An intern
sticks a needle into an artery to measure my oxygen levels. In the next bed over, a baby's heart stops.

This is when I start writing this book.

Three weeks later I leave the hospital, but I do not get completely better.

The cough is so bad it's like an animal that lives with me and sleeps in my bed. On the worst days my mother tries to get me to stay home from school, but I am adamant about going.

I have fevers every evening, shivering through dinner, homework, bath. There is no question that this is the way I will feel forever; there is no idea of after the fever, or if there is any idea like that, it is wan, unconvincing, because the fever is a world.

I wake up with my nightgown soaked in sweat, the sheets wet with sweat. The sweat is shameful, something to be hidden; the fever is also something shameful.

Doctors are consulted, antibiotics prescribed. I go into the hospital and come out of the hospital. My father, who is a doctor himself, is very quiet when the doctors talk. There is no name for what is wrong with me.

One day when I cough, there is blood in the tissue. I taste blood in my mouth. I know this means that I am dying, and so
I do the sensible thing and tell no one, not my mother, my father, my sisters, my doctor.

I am not exactly a worldly twelve. During my first pneumonia, a friend of my mother's makes me a little cardboard-box house, with a furry toy mouse in a blue gingham dress, with little bedspreads and armchairs and clothes and books; I love this house and play with it, even though I'm too old for it. I am a girl who still plays with a fur mouse in a dress, trying to get a handle on coughing up blood.

My mother plots and pleads and calls up doctor friends to get me an appointment with a famous lung specialist. When I am finally in his office she explains that I can't walk up a flight of stairs in our house without being out of breath. The doctor asks me how I feel. I don't say anything about the blood I am coughing up. I say, “I feel fine.”

In the meantime, I am reading strange books. I am reading exclusively books about genocide: Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, firsthand accounts of the Armenian genocide. I have a great, endless appetite for these books, not just for people dying but people dying in great numbers, including children, wars, massacres, naked bodies in trenches. I read them one after another. I am reading with something like desire. I want to see children die.

My mother buys me silk nightgowns for the hospital, because cotton hospital pajamas with their gaping holes and faded prints and little ties are demoralizing. The big clustering
groups of doctors and residents and medical students lift up these frothy honeymoon nightgowns to listen, one after another, to my mysterious lungs. I am embarrassed to be half naked in front of a crowd of young doctors.

A family of Pentecostal Christians comes to visit the diabetic child I am sharing a room with. They light candles, and start chanting in Spanish to banish the devil, and throw rice, which is surprisingly loud as it hits the floor. The nurse comes in and screams at them for lighting candles in the hospital, especially around my oxygen. They blow out the candles, and the minute the nurse leaves, they light them again. They offer to banish the devil over me, and my mother lets them.

I write a story in the school literary magazine about a girl in the hospital, which ends with a voice calling to her: “Come to me, daughter of the wind.” The voice is calling her to give in, pack it up; it's almost cellular, this voice, something in the girl's body telling her to stop fighting, to go under. The line brings something back to me now. How death, this thing you are resisting, fighting, terrified of, suddenly turns and becomes seductive. As Virginia Woolf writes in her dazzling meditation “On Being Ill,” “illness often takes on the disguise of love, and plays the same odd tricks.”

Eventually I have a test where they put a tube down my throat and inject white dye into my lungs. This is supposed to show the doctors whether the chronic infection is localized enough for them to operate. In the X-rays, it looks like there are snow-covered trees in my lungs.

The night before my surgery, the sound of bagpipes floats through the hospital hallways. The sound frightens me, it is so incongruous and beautiful and funereal. My mother explains that the son of a policeman has cancer, and the police have sent a troupe of bagpipe players to play for him.

The operation lasts seven hours. They remove half of one of my lungs. In the recovery room, a tube in my throat, tubes draining my lungs through small holes between my ribs, a tube in my arm, I swim up from the anesthetic and ask for my mother. A nurse says to me, “You are too old to call for your mother.”

My older sister is in medical school. She is not intimidated by the tubes and climbs into the bed with me, which cheers me up. She brings me a red tin of madeleines that she has made. My best friend does not visit me in the hospital. She has decided to stop being friends with me.

When I come home, I am sixty pounds. I am too weak to open a door. My hair has fallen out in the front, so I have to cut it all off. My father takes me on slow walks down our street, but I can't yet make it around a city block.

You read about soldiers who have trouble coming back into civilian life. They can't fit themselves back into everyday preoccupations: whether to wear a winter coat, whether to go to a party, whether to eat lunch. They are totally and completely wrapped up in the shocking time; they are constantly drawn back to it; they are in love with it the way you love someone
who has hurt you: It will not let them go. In the end it doesn't matter if they are the best or worst hours of your life; all of that is irrelevant and stripped away: You are drawn back into it. After the hospital, I feel like that, but I don't know what to call it. I go back to
The Road from Home: The Story of an Armenian Girl
.

Maurice Sendak sat with the people he loved as they were dying and drew them. To some, this might seem like a perverse or weird thing to do, but I understand it completely and intuitively. In fact, I am doing something like it myself.

I am writing about deaths. Not the deaths of people I loved but of writers and artists who are especially sensitive or attuned to death, who have worked through the problem of death in their art, in their letters, in their love affairs, in their dreams. I've picked people who are madly articulate, who have abundant and extraordinary imaginations or intellectual fierceness, who can put the confrontation with mortality into wordsâand in one case imagesâin a way that most of us can't or won't.

It would be hard to pin down why I chose these particular people. I was drawn to each one of them by instinct, felt some heat coming off their writing, some intuition that they could answer or complicate or refine the questions I was asking myself, that their deaths, laid open, would show me what I needed to see. I chose writers who meant something to me, whose voices were already in my head, whose approach toward death
was extreme in one direction or another: inspiring or bewildering or heroic or angry. I chose lives that were puzzles, that confused and intrigued and unsettled me, that threw me for a loop. I chose people whose imagination is bigger or greater or holds out some possibility of more intense perception or precision of description than I would be capable of myself. I was thinking: If it's nearly impossible to capture the approach of death in words, who would have the most hope of doing it?

Once I settled on my subjects, I combed through their work, their letters, their journals, their notes, their postcards, their scribbled cartoons, their interviews, their manuscripts, for glimmers of their evolving thoughts and feelings on dying. I talked to sons, daughters, lovers, wives, ex-wives, friends, caretakers, housekeepers, night nurses. I learned how they faced or did not face, embraced or evaded, made peace with or raged against death, sometimes all at once. I wrote down jokes they made in the hospital, or a haircut that cheered them up, or a moment where they took a piece of scrap paper and wrote something under harrowing and improbable circumstances.

Sigmund Freud, in great pain, refused anything stronger than aspirin so he could think clearly, and finally chose the moment of his own death. Susan Sontag, on the other hand, fought her death to the end, believing on some deep irrational level she would be the one exception to mortality. Maurice Sendak worked his whole life on death, taming his fear and obsession through drawings, and finally creating out of his wild imagination a beautiful painterly dream to comfort himself. The month before he died, John Updike laid his head on his typewriter,
because it was too hard to type up his final poems about dying and he was ready to give up, and then he found the strength to finish them. Dylan Thomas, in his last days, left his mistress downstairs at a party and went upstairs to sleep with the hostess, hurtling along with his peerless mixture of vitality and self-destruction; as he put it, “I sang in my chains like the sea.”

There are in these deaths glimpses of bravery, of beauty, of crushingly pointless suffering, of rampant self-destruction, of truly terrible behavior, of creative bursts, of superb devotion, of glitteringly accurate self-knowledge, and of magnificent delusion. There are things I could never have guessed or theorized or anticipated, and it is in the specifics, the odd, surprising details, the jokes, the offhand comments, that some other greater story is told and communicated.

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