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[W]hen you are acquitted in this fashion the charge is lifted from your shoulders for the time being, but it continues to hover above you and can, as soon as an order comes from on high, be laid upon you again. . . . [B]ut again it is possible, just as before, to secure an ostensible acquittal. One must again apply all one's energies to the case and never give in.
Franz Kafka, The Trial
Franz Kafka was one of Susan Sontag's intellectual heroes. I cannot read these famous words of his without remembering her with sadness and admiration. In this passage the "painter" is explaining to K., the perennial defendant, that freedom is always temporary and provisional. The best one can hope for is an "ostensible acquittal"; "final acquittals" almost never occur. The medical equivalent of an "ostensible acquittal" is "remission." In its original meaning, remission meant release from the penalty of sin. We now use remission to mean release from the burden of illness, usually incurable, chronic illnesses like cancer. Good health, like freedom, is at best temporary and provisional.
Good health eluded Susan Sontag throughout much of her life. As a child she suffered from severe asthma. In 1976, at age forty-three, she was hospitalized with stage IV breast cancer with thirty-one positive lymph nodes and told she had a 10 percent chance of living two more years. After aggressive treatment she had her first remission. In 1999 she again received chemotherapy for uterine sarcoma. Sadly, on December 28, 2004, she died of complications of preleukemia at age seventy-one. Yet, unlike Kafka's K., who was a perennial defendant, Sontag was not a perennial patient. She wrote two classic monographs on illness and literature; she also wrote four novels, four plays, two films, dozens of celebrated essays, and she was an active human-rights advocate. Although she considered her own life story "banal," her cultural significance is in part due to the exemplary way she conducted her life.1 Despite her famous formulation that illnesses like cancer and AIDS are "meaningless," she showed that illness can be a positive event that one can live with rather than being defined or limited by it.2 Resisting the temptation to become defined as a cancer survivor, she used...