My take on "A Matter of Life and Death"

Marjorie Williams' A Matter of Life and Death , originally published in Vanity Fair, might be about 4 years old already. But I came across to it a few weeks ago and although I had read about it years ago, I still find it as charming as it was last time. Marjorie Williams lost her battle with cancer and died in 2005. This piece tells her journey of fighting the battle.

What I like about this piece is about how honest the author though almost without the non-existence of self-pity. This piece is almost like a journal, very personal and lighthearted. At times I forgot how she's such in a severe condition with cancer and her life was on the line.

"The beast first showed its face benignly, in the late-June warmth of a California swimming pool, and it would take me more than a year to know it for what it was. Willie and I were lolling happily in the sunny shallow end of my in-laws’ pool when he—then only seven—said, “Mommy, you’re getting thinner.”

Oh how such an endearing opening paragraph. Not the fact that "the beast showed up", but how she's trying to take us there slowly by not stating how serious the problem was. She later on admitted that she took pleasure in the fact that she lost weight and how this is related to "American woman's yearning for thinness" that made her not realizing her bad fortune.

On and on, the piece tells us about each symptom that she felt and how she reacted to it. She spared the details meticulously and even when it comes to what other people said to her. Or just how minuscule details about others who were involved in her treatment process. She also talked a little bit of how the receptionist made her wait when she was trying to make an appointment for her CT scan and just ignored her while talking to the manager of the garage regarding an inaccurate bill. She even quoted the receptionist's conversation in her piece. Vivid details like this make her journey seem like a short movie for me. I didn't have a hard time at all imagining what she was talking about given every single details of it.

My favorite part is this,
"Sometimes I simply feel horror, that most elementary thing. The irreducible fear, for me, is the fantasy that I will by some mistake be imprisoned in my body after dying. As a child I never enjoyed a minute of any campfire stories of the buried-alive genre. And even without that unwelcome and vivid fear in my mind, I can’t find any way around the horror of being left alone down there in the dark, picked apart by processes about which I’m a little bit squeamish even when they’re just fertilizing my daylilies. Intellectually, I know it won’t matter to me in the slightest. But my most primal fear is that somehow my consciousness will be carelessly left behind among my remains."

I see so much honesty in the excerpt above, it's almost surreal. It's like she went in to grab her subconscious- self and made it tell her everything about it. She revealed her fear courageously and it ended up being such a carefully crafted piece of thoughts that I've never been exposed to before.

She ended her piece with a scene of a party eating pizza with her dear friends and the kids. With the kids not knowing how close she was to death.

Overall, I find this piece to be uniquely amazing. I didn't know anyone who was dying could write such beautiful and honest piece like this.

Photo: The Woman at the Washington Zoo