Do Not Go Gentle: A Memoir

This is an excerpt from a memoir by Marcia Sartwell titled "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Living On." It's the remarkable story of a midlife romance, the author’s marriage to Frank Sartwell and his subsequent death from emphysema, and, finally, Marcia’s grief and her later coming to terms with the tragedy. Copies of the book can be ordered through Amazon.com

Chapter 4, Master of Fantasy

“I am the master of fantasy.” Arthur Rimbaud, Nuit de L’Enfer

When Frank came home from the hospital, I sensed—despite his optimism and some carefully phrased doctors’ comments that could be construed as hopeful—that this was the beginning of the end. At that time I had no idea what a long ending it would be, what it would be like, or what it would do to me. I did not know that I would do things I never thought I’d do and think in ways that once would have shocked me. I did not know that the long ending would wear down all defenses and all illusions and leave only raw emotion, or that I would have to confront feelings so powerful and so painful that they would shatter my views about what kind of person I was.

Over the three years of Frank’s decline, I was a human being under extreme stress, and it brought out the best—and the worst—in me. Though I was happy to find reserves of strength I never knew I had, I was appalled to uncover the depth of my rage and fury. I was equally appalled to discover that there were times when I longed to save my own life at any cost and to smash and destroy things as wantonly as I felt my own life was being destroyed. In the end, all I wanted was to get through it—it didn’t matter how.

In the beginning, though, I wanted to be perfect. I wanted to have all the right qualities—selflessness, courage, endless good humor, unfailing strength, “grace under pressure.” I wanted to be everything Frank needed. Since I didn’t know anyone who had been through a similar experience, and since my efforts to discuss it with people only drew conventional pieties (“Be brave, my dear”) or caused them to pull away from me, I took a lot of my ideas from books and movies. I thought our troubles should draw us closer as we faced them together. I had some notions, gathered, I guess, from Readers’ Digest articles, that, when life was suddenly cut short, people found a way to live each day so fully that they crammed a lifetime of joy into the time they had left. That was what I thought we should do.

So I tried to set my feelings aside—tried to ignore the shock I still felt at the lightning speed with which our lives had changed, tried to suppress my grief and self-pity at the prospect of losing him. Such emotions seemed wrong and selfish at such a time. I was determined to hide them from Frank and even from myself.

I also wanted to overcome my fear of illness. All my life I had fled it, excusing myself on the grounds that I just was not good with sick people. One of my fervent hopes had always been that I would never have to face a long illness—my own or anybody else’s. Now life had handed me the wrong problem, one I was singularly ill-equipped to deal with. For Frank I thought I could change, though; I would have to. I recalled how he once condemned a relative who had walked out on a sick husband: “We Sartwells do not abandon our wounded.” She had broken a code. I must never do that. Whatever lay ahead, I had to hold up under it. We would face our troubles together, and I would do “the right thing.”

Frank Sartwell

Frank’s approach to his illness, though, made figuring out “the right thing” a more daunting task than I thought it would be. For while I denied my feelings, he denied the facts. I got a foretaste of the difficulties to come when he insisted, on one of his first days home, that a proposed move of his editorial offices be carried out. This meant moving his office from the first floor to the third floor of a walk-up building. Nobody wanted to do it, but nobody wanted to spell out the reasons.

“Why do it?” I asked. “You’re fine as you are.”

“I am not fine. The staff is scattered all over the building. It’s a much better space for putting out a magazine, and I had to fight to get it.”

“It’s an awful lot of stairs.”

“I can climb stairs now. In six months I’ll be able to climb them just that much better.”

The move was carried out, and for the rest of his life, Frank had to cope with two long flights of stairs to his office. I always felt that I had let him down by not somehow blocking the move, but I would also have let him down if I had not supported his optimism and determination to live as fully as he could.

As for facing our troubles together, it soon became clear that we did not agree on what we were facing. Frank clung to the belief that he was going to get well—at least as well as he was before he caught the flu. I thought the flu had done extensive lung damage and that his two weeks in the hospital had brought him back about as far as he could come. I hoped he could stay there for a long time and not lose ground.

We even interpreted the same information differently. Shortly after leaving the hospital, Frank tape-recorded a talk with one of the doctors. What Frank heard (“I’d say the prognosis is quite good”) confirmed his belief that he would get well. Listening to the same tape, I heard evasions and qualifications everywhere. When Frank asked, “Doctor, if the prognosis is good, why am I not getting better faster?” I heard the embarrassment in the doctor’s voice as he explained that “good is a relative term.”

Yet there were times when I allowed myself to hope that Frank was right—that he would get better, that we had a long married life ahead of us. I knew the facts did not point that way: that the lungs, once damaged, do not heal, that there was no cure for emphysema. But the opposite seemed equally unbelievable—that after one brief year of marriage my husband was dying. It didn’t seem possible that such a thing had happened to me. Those things happened in books, in movies, maybe to other people. And it had happened so suddenly. Maybe, I thought, it will stop just as suddenly, and I will see how needlessly worried I have been.

Then, too, in the beginning Frank’s determination was so strong and his spirits so buoyant that he sometimes convinced me that the rules didn’t apply. For surely if anyone could charm the gods into reversing the fates—or the course of an incurable illness—it would be Frank, with his wit, his exuberance for life, and his cheerful assumption that if he just committed himself to a full life, the means to live it would somehow follow.

He was so outrageously unrealistic that I sometimes thought it just might work. Whenever he could draw a decent breath, ideas and plans for good times would flow, and he would plot daring deeds to defy his illness. It was as if he had decided that if he refused to take the illness seriously, it could not be a serious illness.