The Dying of Susan Sontag

David Rieff, the only child of Susan Sontag (essayist, novelist, filmmaker, and activist -- a rather overrated thinker in my estimate), has written a book on his mother's last days, Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir. Here is a review by Mark Greif:

Western thought records a long tradition of morbid interest in how philosophers met their deaths. Memorials, testimonies, and whole Platonic dialogues have been devoted to great thinkers' final hours. That's because, historically, the ability to face mortality with perfect equanimity, and fearlessly hold onto values higher than those of daily life, was considered the greatest part of wisdom. "And is not philosophy a practice of death?" Socrates asked in the Phaedo. It was, of course, a rhetorical question: Socrates drank his hemlock, calmed his disciples, and earned the amazement of posterity -- his death demonstrating how great a philosopher he was. Epicurus, who famously preached the doctrine that death must hold no fear because no person persists past death to suffer from it, proved his consistency by dying happily, drinking wine in a warm bath.

In modern times, too, philosophers' deaths have had great significance -- like that of David Hume, a notorious atheist. Christians across Europe prayed that he would be terrified into a deathbed conversion or betray some tiny hope for immortality. After visiting him in his final hours, however, the famous biographer James Boswell testified that Hume remained wholly consistent to the end, jolly and godless to his last breaths.

In light of this history, David Rieff's slim new memoir of the death of his mother, Susan Sontag, has significance apart from its contributions to two contemporary popular genres, the end-of-life narrative and the personal reflection on the death of a parent. Sontag will be remembered as a philosopher. Rieff chose to bury her in Paris' Montparnasse cemetery, steps from Simone de Beauvoir, and in the posthumous company of Jean-Paul Sartre, Emile Cioran, and Raymond Aron.

More here.