LITMIR.BIZ

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      Having accepted death long ago in order to be physically and morally free to some extent, I am not crushed by this final sentence of death, at least not yet, and I don’t think it is denial. Why should it be different now? Ought I to crack up because a bluff has been called? I am sick and exhausted, numbed and darkened, by my approximate dying a few weeks ago from Pneumocystis, and consider death a silence, a silence and a privacy and an untouchability, as no more reactions and opinions, as a relief, a privilege, a lucky and graceful and symmetrical silence to be grateful for. The actual words I used inwardly read ambiguously when written out: it’s about time for silence.

      I’m sixty-two, and it’s ecological sense to die while you’re still productive, die and clear a space for others, old and young. I didn’t always appreciate what I had at the time, but I am aware now that accusations against me of being lucky in love were pretty much true and of being lucky sexually, also true. And lucky intellectually and, occasionally, lucky in the people I worked with. I have no sad stories about love or sex.

      And I think my work will live. And I am tired of defending it, tired of giving my life to it. I have been a figure of aesthetic and literary controversy, the object of media savagery and ridicule, also at times of praise. I have been sniped at in the gossip-flood of New York and Europe and used up enormous amounts of energy dealing with it all. But I have liked my life. I like my life at present, being ill. I like the people I deal with. I don’t feel I am being whisked off the stage or murdered and stuffed in a laundry hamper while my life is incomplete. It’s my turn to die—I can see that that is interesting to some people but not that it is tragic. Yes, I was left out of some things and was cheated over a lifetime in a bad way, but who isn’t and so what? I had a lot of privileges as well. Sometimes I’m sad about its being over but I’m that way about books and sunsets and conversations. The medicines I take don’t grant my moods much independence, so I suspect these reactions, but I think they are my own. I have been a fool all my life, giving away large chunks of time and wasting years on nothing much. I had a mania for brave talk and some flirtation with or sense of possibility—and then I wanted to lie down and think about it. (Bernard Malamud once said that I had talked away a dozen books I might have written. I never told him how much time I spent lying down and staring at nothing.) And maybe I am being a fool now.

      And I have died before, come close enough to dying that doctors and nurses on those occasions said that those were death experiences, the approach to death, a little of death felt from the inside. And I have nursed dying people and been at deathbeds. I nearly died when my first mother did, leaving me practically an orphan at almost two years old. (My real father, Max Weintrub, was an illiterate local junk man, a semipro prizefighter in his youth and unhealably violent; I saw him off and on when I was growing up but never really knew him as a father. I was told that after my mother’s death, he sold me to relatives—the Brodkeys—for three hundred dollars.) As an adult, at one point, I forced myself to remember what I could of the child’s feelings. The feelings I have now are far milder. My work, my notions and theories and doctrines, my pride have conspired to make me feel as I do now that I am ill.

      I have always remembered nearly dying when I was seven and had an allergic, hypothermic reaction coming out of anesthesia. When I was thirty, a hepatitis thing was misdiagnosed as cancer of the liver, and I was told I had six weeks to live. The sensations at those various times were not much alike, but the feeling of extreme sickness, of being racked, was and is the same, as is the sense of real death.

      I have wondered at times if maybe my resistance to the fear-of-death wasn’t laziness and low mental alertness, a cowardly inability to admit that horror was horror, that dying was unbearable. It feels, though, like a life-giving rebelliousness, a kind of blossoming. Not a love of death but maybe a love of God. I wouldn’t want to be hanged and it would kill my soul to be a hangman but I always hoped that if I were hanged I would be amused and superior, and capable of having a good time somehow as I died—this may be a sense of human style in an orphan, greatly damaged and deadened, a mere sense of style overriding a more normal terror and sense of an injustice of destiny. Certainly, it is a dangerous trait. I am not sensible … At all times I am more afraid of anesthesia and surgery than I am of death. I have had moments of terror, of abject fear. I was rather glad to have those moments. But the strain was tremendous. My feelings of terror have had a scattered quality mostly, and I tended to despise them as petty. I have more fear of cowardice and of being broken by torture than I do of death. I am aware of my vulnerability, of how close I come to being shattered. But next to that is a considerable amount of nerve—my blood parents and real grandparents were said to have been insanely brave, to have had an arrogant sangfroid about their courage and what it allowed them to do. They had, each of them, a strong tropism toward the epic. My mother, before I was born, traveled alone from near Leningrad to Illinois in the 1920s, a journey that, at her social level, took nearly two months. The year before, her older brother had disappeared in transit, perhaps murdered. My father once boxed a dozen men in a row one evening on a bet and supposedly laid all the women under thirty who lined up afterward. Another time, better attested, with two other men he took on a squad of marching local Nazis in St. Louis, twenty-five or thirty men, and won.

      One of the things that struck me when I was first told that I had AIDS was that I was cut off from my family inheritance of fatal diseases—the strokes and high blood pressure and cancer and tumors of my ancestors. My medical fate turned out to be quite different.

      I felt a bit orphaned again, and idiosyncratic, but strangely also as if I had been invited, almost abducted, to a party, a somber feast but not entirely grim, a feast of the seriously afflicted who yet were at war with social indifference and prejudice and hatred. It seemed to me that I was surrounded by braveries without number, that I had been inducted into a phalanx of the wildly-alive-even-if-dying, and I felt honored that I would, so to speak, die in the company of such people.

      What will happen to us? Is death other than silence and nothingness? In my grazing experiences of it, it is that disk of acceptance and of unthreading and disappearance at the bottom of the chute of revenant memories, ghosts and the living, the gauntlet of important recollections through which one is forced in order to approach the end of one’s consciousness. Death itself is soft, softly lit, vastly dark. The self becomes taut with metamorphosis and seems to give off some light and to have a not-quite-great-enough fearlessness toward that immensity of the end of individuality, toward one’s absorption into the dance of particles and inaudibility. Living, one undergoes one metamorphosis after another—often they are cockroach states, inset with moments of passivity with the sense of real death—but they are continuous and linked. This one is a stillness and represents a sifting out of identity and its stories, a breaking off or removal of the self, and a devolution into mere effect and memory, outspread and not tightly bound but scattered among micromotions and as if more windblown than in life. Or this is what I imagine, on the approach.

      AIDS had never been one of our serious fears. It was not one of my secret dreads. I am so shaken by what has occurred that I tend to remember crazily or like someone tortured. I have lost much of the discipline of memory, yet I remember what should have seemed significant at the time. Ellen and I were in Berlin and then in Venice, meeting with publishers and translators, and some people—everyone, really—said I was too thin. Ellen began to worry when a blackish, caved-in spot appeared in my right cheek, but I thought it was the macrobiotic diet I was trying to follow. The poetry of being recognized and accepted as an important writer in Berlin and then in Venice while I was sickening in some way I could not understand presents to me a dark beauty of complete wreckage. I think, too, that when I heard the news from Barry there was already in part of my mind some literary sense of death, of suicide, as the appropriate outcome. I had written a novel in one year, a novel I liked, that I was proud of; I had expected the effort to kill me. I was subject to strange exhaustions and was wobbly on airplanes, but beyond that I was strained past my level of strength by the difference in reputation and treatment I received in various countries—great artist here, fool there, major writer, minor fake, villain, virtuoso, jerk, hero.

      Life is a kind of horror. It is OK, but it is wearing. Enemies and thieves don’t lay off as you weaken. The wicked flourish by being ruthless even then. If you are ill, you have to have a good lawyer. When you are handed a death sentence, the newly redrawn battle

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