Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir, by David Reiff, Simon & Schuster, $21.00 

By Melissa Nurczynski 

Whenever I teach memoir writing, I tell my students a good, publishable memoir has two key elements. One, it must speak to the universal. Two, it must contain elements of the unusual or exotic. Swimming in a Sea of Death, David Rieff’s crisp, thin memoir of his mother’s death from cancer fulfills both those criterion. In it, he recounts familiar, mundane details of twenty-first century death: a frightening diagnosis, callous doctors, long-shot treatments, well-meaning friends who say and do precisely the wrong things and his own feelings of helplessness. However, Rieff’s mother was the great intellectual Susan Sontag – so everything in the book is filtered through the prisms of celebrity and intellectualism.  

The book glamorously begins as Rieff, en route home from a writing assignment in the Middle East, makes a series of phone calls from a Heathrow lounge. One of them is to his mother, who tells him she may be sick. Shortly thereafter, the glamour ends as Rieff takes his mother to visit Dr. A. This patronizing and insensitive leukemia specialist delivers brutal news. Sontag has myelodysplastic syndrome (or MDS), and there are no treatments. It is fatal. From there, Rieff tells the story of his mother’s unsuccessful fight to survive and his reaction to it. 

Rieff, who writes professionally about grandiose and impersonal subjects like politics and war, doesn’t get too writer-ly in his prose There is a distinct lack of descriptive, sensory detail. It’s almost as if he’s too polite to put the reader into the antiseptic hospital rooms and uncomfortable doctor’s offices where much of the action takes place. Instead, the book places the reader not inside Rieff’s head – but rather in his therapist’s chair. It’s as though you are sitting there, listening quietly as he tries to make sense of his brilliant mother’s struggle against the inevitability of her own death, the frustrations of the health care system and his own complete inability to do any good for his mother.  

For those with an interest in Sontag herself, Rieff paints a complex, loving picture. He speaks admiringly of her earlier, successful bout with breast cancer as though he is still shocked that she wasn’t able to simply apply the same principles she did then during her last illness. He occasionally gives up delightful trivia, such as when he describes the staunchly atheistic Sontag as having no interest in her own Jewishness but a long standing “Wildean appreciation of the Roman Catholic Church.” He describes his mother’s bravery in divorcing his father when she was in her twenties, her ambitions as both a writer and an essayist, and her desire to always do better, more interesting work. In the end, her illness robbed her of an old age that she believed could have been productive and fulfilling.  

He references various friends and confidents, but barely touches on Sontag’s significant relationship with the photographer Annie Leibovitz, who has done her own remarkable work inspired by Sontag’s death. Leibovitz remains mostly absent - except one fairly explicit slam against her work that says volumes.   

And while the book does skimp on descriptive details and gossip, Rieff does not hold back when it comes to his story’s climatic moment. He carefully, with deliberation, describes the moment when his beloved mother ceased to exist. He depicts a peaceful death, and that peace gives him a small bit of comfort.  

But the comfort is short lived, especially when her devoted, weeping physician (not the aforementioned Dr. A.) declares, “We have to do better.”  At that moment, it becomes clear that the doctor and Rieff are mourning for different reasons. For Rieff and Sontag, there is no better. She is permanently gone.  But for the doctor, who is reeling from failure as opposed to loss, there will be more patients and more chances. And Rieff is left wondering just how much better the man will be able to do since everyone eventually dies.  

And in the end, the book’s strength lies not as a portrait of fame or intellectualism. It is instead, a brilliant man’s meditation on disease and loss – both his loss and Sontag’s. And Susan Sontag never gave her son the deathbed gift so many people grant those they will leave behind. She never found God or peace. She never told her son that it was okay or that she was ready. She wanted to live and fought for life as long as she could. And in that, she may have given him something far greater and more exotic than peace. She gave him truth.

 

Melissa Nurczynski teaches Professional Writing at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania. Additionally, she writes for national magazines such as Budget Travel and Newsweek and under the name of Melissa Marshall. She has also contributed to print travel guides such as The Rough Guide to the USAand Mobile Travel's Guide to Traveling with Your Pets. She lives in Philadelphia with her Chihuahua, Maximilian.