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.

Do Not Go Gentle: Epilogue

Excerpt from Epilogue

“A death blow is a life blow to some.” Emily Dickinson

Part One: Five Years Later

When Frank died, it seemed to me that my life had stopped—and that therefore everything in the world must surely stop, too. I could scarcely believe that the sun came up as usual, that stores and offices opened and people went to work, that ads still came addressed to Frank Sartwell (“We know a lover of the outdoors like yourself would appreciate the comfort of these hiking boots”).

Sometimes the feelings of sadness, guilt, longing, and despair were almost overwhelming; and sometimes there were no feelings whatsoever, just a kind of numbness where I observed my body moving about doing familiar things. I could never tell whether I was making “progress.” One day the sadness would lift a little, and the next day I’d feel washed overboard  with no land in sight. Somewhere in a book I came upon two wise observations: recovering from grief will take longer than you expect, and you will not be the same afterwards.

Grieving is a solitary process, although it doesn’t seem so at first. Like many widows, I discovered that there is an immediate outpouring of sympathy and support. For two or three weeks I was inundated with cards, letters, phone calls, and invitations to dinner. Then they stopped. Except for a few close friends, almost nobody made a second sympathetic gesture. I was surprised to find out how fast the world is finished with your grief—and how fast it expects you to be done with it, too. The message is: Take a couple of weeks to deal with it, then pull yourself together and go on as if nothing significant has happened.

I soon realized that my presence often made people uncomfortably aware of their own mortality. And some friends, despite the best intentions, simply could not be in the presence of so much raw pain.

About three weeks after Frank died, Mary and Geoff, good friends for more than two decades, invited me to dinner at a Georgetown restaurant. I was looking forward to an honest talk, but when I got there, another couple, whom I barely knew, was also at the table. After the obligatory, “We’re so sorry about your loss,” conversation moved to safe topics—weather, children, movies—with much light banter intended to be cheerful and distracting. I tried to join in, to be light-hearted and pretend that nothing had happened, but it is an ordeal to do that when, in fact, your heart is broken. When it was over, I put the evening down to good intentions gone awry.

A few weeks later Mary and Geoff again invited me to dinner. To my surprise, we were joined by the same couple, and so we repeated the previous evening’s superficialities. This time I realized that Mary couldn’t take me as I was. I guessed that my grief must be almost palpable to her and that she didn’t like the feel of it. My very presence was so unsettling to her that to be with me at all, she had to have a buffer between us. Perhaps I reminded her that one day she, too, could lose a beloved partner, or perhaps she lived so much in her own intellect that she could not tolerate intense emotion. At any rate, I understood that under the circumstances we could no longer be friends. I sent her a thank-you note and did not see or hear from her again for nine years.

I felt isolated. I feared that never again would there be a place for me in the mainstream. I would live forever on the fringes of society—the third person in the car or the seventh at dinner, always feeling like an outsider. With Frank gone, I had little physical contact with anyone, and the well-meant pats on the shoulder from friends scarcely replaced Frank’s warm bear hugs. Sometimes I felt that an invisible space surrounded me and that no one could break through it.

I experienced grief as physical pain. I felt that in the back of my throat I had a golf ball, which I tried constantly to swallow down, and between my ribs I occasionally got a pain that pierced like a knife. I also had the strange sensation that a piece of me was missing, blown away somewhere.

I operated much of the time in a fog. My voice sounded strange to me, as if I were under water. It was difficult to concentrate. Once I set out to purchase something on the third floor of a five-level department store. I stepped on the escalator, forgot to get off, and rode it all the way to the top. Annoyed at myself, I got on the down escalator and did the same thing again, riding it all the way to the basement. When I got on again, it took an enormous effort to remember to get off on the third floor and then to recall what I wanted to buy.

I managed on the job because I didn’t pretend to be more on top of it than I was. For many months, I slogged through on automatic most of the time, relying on ingrained habits and familiar routines. Most of the time they were enough to get the job done adequately. When they were not, two wonderful senior staff members rescued me, tactfully nudging me in new directions: “Are you sure you want to do it that way? I was wondering if we might try. . .”

When the day was over, I took the elevator to the parking garage, got into my car, put my head on the steering wheel, and let the tears flow. There in the car, I didn’t have to hold up any more. No one noticed me; no phones rang; no one could even hear my noisy sobs. I drove home on roads that were a watery blur.

Nothing really mattered. In the back of my mind was a thought that kept edging itself forward: “If it doesn’t get any better, I can always . . ."

About three months after Frank died, I realized that the decision had been made. There was no reason to go on. I could end the heartache and the struggle. It would be a cop-out, I realized, a selfish thing to do, and a terrible legacy to leave one’s son. But at least Dan was through college and on his own. One day perhaps he would understand and forgive. The immediate problem was that my financial affairs were not in good order. I would need to straighten them out and make a will so that I didn’t leave a tangled financial mess to further burden Dan and my two stepsons. Every time the thought of suicide came up, I told myself, “Yes, but not now. My financial affairs are a mess.” And every time I told myself to call a lawyer and make a will, I put it off. It was as if the healthy part of me was playing for time.

For months I stood at the edge of this abyss and looked down. All through the first winter, when I came home to a big, empty house, I promised myself that I didn’t have to go on doing this much longer. The abyss became almost a real presence, a dangerous, darkly reassuring one.



Marcia Sartwell

 And yet I kept on going. After six months, I noted in my journal: “I welcome the passage of time. It does make things hurt less. Or maybe it’s just that, in going on, we prove to ourselves that we can go on. And there is some comfort in that.”

Copies of the book can be ordered through Amazon.com