Free The Violet Hour by Katie Roiphe Page A

she swallow the Zarnestra, which was very painful with the thrush in her mouth. The struggle unnerves Sharon, as its logic has begun to elude her, has begun to seem purposeless. Sharon writes that the only thing she can make out from Sontag’s rambling is, “I don’t want to die in the hospital.”
    During her earlier treatment for breast cancer, Sontag wrote, “Being ill feels like a diminishment. I’m no longer the owner of my own body. Can I turn that into a liberation? For a moment I felt myself clad in steel. Let them do with my body what they want. I’m here not there. Catch me if you can.”
    Time in the hospital is strange; it just hangs there, with no progression of the sun, no night, even, in all that fluorescence, in the nurses ducking in at three in the morning, in tests, and medications, and blood pressure takings. There are still typed-up schedules of her day, though; they are perhaps shadows, commentaries on those other schedules that used to mark her days, the brisk, packed schedules of dinners and talks and theater that used to be pasted to her refrigerator. Annie’s office coordinates with Anne Jump, who is still running Sontag’s office. These schedules are kept because she doesn’t want to be alone. They are also kept to manage the wild and different forms of love that Susan elicits, to order and control the conflicting devotions.
    Annie comes on Christmas afternoon with lots of gifts for Susan. But Susan doesn’t respond to them, and Annie gives up trying to unwrap them for her.
    The last time Susan sees Annie, she holds her sleeve and says, “Get me out of here.” Afterward, Annie flies down to Florida to see her father, who is also dying.
    On December 28, at three-thirty in the morning, the nurse at the hospital calls Sharon to say that the moment has come. Sharon calls David. She tries to call Sontag’s close friend Paolo Dilonardo, who is staying at Susan’s apartment, but he has flown in from Italy the night before and doesn’t answer the phone, so she goes over, pounds on the door until she wakes him up, and together they go to the hospital. She tries to reachAnnie. When she and Paolo arrive, David, his girlfriend, and Hasan Gluhic, Susan’s driver from Sarajevo and close friend, are already there. After a couple of hours, Dr. Nimer comes in and turns the monitor off. He explains that if the monitor is on, people watch the lines on the monitor instead of focusing on the patient. Dr. Nimer holds her hand, her arm. At 7:10 he feels for her pulse.
I’m here not there. Catch me if you can
. She is gone.
    They wait in the hospital for a few hours. After desperately scrambling to get back from Florida, Annie finally arrives from the airport. She sits alone with Susan in the quiet hospital room. Around noon, the men from the funeral home come to take her.

Sigmund Freud
    Credit 2.1
SEPTEMBER 1939
    On an early September day, Freud opens the novel he is reading: “ ‘Wretched weather for drowning yourself,’ said a ragged old woman, who grinned at him.” The French doors of his study give way to the garden, with its blossoming almond tree.
    His study in London is an exact replica of his study in Vienna, Egyptian statues lined up like soldiers in the same order on his desk, same Persian carpet, same shawl thrown across the couch, a re-creation of the old sanctum in this more spacious, beautiful house: someone’s generous refusal of change. His famous patient, the Wolf Man, talked about the “sacred peace and quiet” of the study, and now there is a new kind of peace and quiet. The patients are gone, but stacked on the desk are the midnight-blue notebooks with his notes on their sessions.
    A few months earlier, during a particularly brutal radiation treatment, Freud had written to his former patient and friend Marie Bonaparte, “My world is again what it was before—a little island of pain floating in a sea of indifference.” And nowthe pain is unruly, would be for most people