Free The Violet Hour by Katie Roiphe

others would think so. “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.”
    He decides later that it was some statement of emotional need, if not belief. He thought she was saying to him that she wantedcomfort. After the Lord’s Prayer, they do a Buddhist prayer called the four thoughts, which lead to renunciation. And then she seems satisfied, calmer. Very quickly, though, the natural flow of events at the hospital intrudes. A nurse comes in to check something.
    Any conversation is broken off by a nurse coming in; any moment of drifting thought is cut short: Your thoughts are not your own in a hospital; your thoughts belong a little bit to the nurse who is coming to check something.
    A few days later, Sookhee sits with Susan, holding her hand. She can’t talk at this point, so Sookhee says, “If you want me to pray for you, squeeze my hand.”
    Sookhee believes that Sontag squeezes her hand.
    Sookhee says, “Lord, I am asking you to give Susan peace. She needs peace in whatever situation she is in. Touch her body, Lord, touch her mind, touch her spirit, Lord.”
    Sookhee thinks that Susan wants to hear her pray. Others might think that Susan just wanted to squeeze her hand, or they might think,
Too abstract: death. Too concrete: me
.
    When Susan was in Europe with Leon Wieseltier, he was shocked that she would take communion in a Catholic church. But she was up for anything, a tourist, an adventurer, a dipper of toes in strange worlds. She did not believe in the body and blood of Christ, but she wanted to see what it was all about.She once went with Peter to a Tibetan prayer meeting. She took notes very seriously the whole time, but afterward she said, “He was very charming, but, my God, what nonsense!”
    Sharon asks Dr. Nimer if there is any medical possibility of taking Susan home to Chelsea. Dr. Nimer says that if she left the hospital she would be dead before she got there.
    David cancels a Christmas vacation he was planning with his girlfriend. He imagines a conversation he could have had with his mother if it were ever admitted between them that she was dying. In this conversation he would ask her questions about some of the decisions she made. By this he means some of the decisions she made about him. He would tell her he loved her. He can’t tell her he loves her, as things stand, because this would mean admitting that she is dying.
    But does this final conversation that everyone imagines with a dying parent exist, this moment of perfect closure, the last thing you needed to say coming out whole and entire? Or is it just a fantasy thrown up by a desperate mind, an unobtainable mirage, glittering water in the desert? If you had this conversation, would it be satisfying? Or would it be one conversation in a lifetime of words; would it be, like every interaction we have with someone who is leaving us,
not enough
?
    What is not said matters, though; it accumulates and matters. In her autobiographical story, “Project for a Trip to China,” Sontag wrote an elegant line about her own mother: “After three years I am exhausted by the nonexistent literature ofunwritten letters and unmade telephone calls that passes between me and M.”
    Sontag and her beautiful mother were sometimes mistaken for sisters. She remembers her mother waking up at 4:00 A.M . in an alcoholic stupor. “I was my mother’s iron lung. I was my mother’s
mother
,” Sontag writes. “I despised myself for my fear of my mother’s anger. For my uncontrollable cringing + crying when she raised her hand to strike me.”
    David remembers his mother’s mind ranging to her own parents in the last weeks. Did she think about her own mother’s death? Her unhappy, withholding mother. As her mother was dying, her last words to Sontag were, “What are you doing here? Why don’t you go back to the hotel?”
    On Christmas Eve, Sharon emails David that Susan had been cranky and mumbling the day before. The nurse was insisting that