The Violet Hour Read Free

anxious, but I couldn’t stop. The material kept calling to me in a way I only partially understood. I felt compelled by these stories, obsessed with them; they were like puzzles or mysteries I couldn’t leave alone or stop thinking about.
    Ancient Egyptians used to read the
Book of the Dead
to learn practical tips on how to navigate the underworld—like how to not have your head cut off in the underworld, or how to take the form of a crocodile in the underworld, or how to not enter the underworld upside down—but we don’t have a
Book of the Dead
.
    The problem with the project is that it could have gone on forever. There were so many deaths I wanted to dive into: William Blake’s happy death, where he sat up in bed and saw angels; Honoré de Balzac killing himself through work and coffee; Primo Levi’s probably suicidal fall down the stairs; Christopher Hitchens’s fierce commitment to reporting his death; Virginia Woolf’s descent into the river, with stones in her overcoat; Franz Kafka’s starving, like his hunger artist, in the sanatorium; Leo Tolstoy leaving his wife and dying near a train station at the stationmaster’s house; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s heart attack in Hollywood. All of them seemed to call to me.
    I don’t believe that you can learn how to die, or gain wisdom, or prepare, and the work I have done on this book has, if anything, confirmed that suspicion, but I do think you can look at a death and be less afraid.
    As I was working on them, I found the portraits of these deaths hugely and strangely reassuring. The beauty of the life comes spilling out. The power of an inspiring mind working on the problem. Somehow these sketches were freeing, comforting, exhilarating, in part because the people I was writing about lived great, vivid, gloriously productive lives. There is something about the compression of the final moments, the way everything comes rushing in, the intensity, that is beautiful, even though the death is not.
    Maurice Sendak owned Keats’s death mask, which he kept in a wooden box. He adored it. He liked to stroke its forehead. I saw it and it was very beautiful. Why would anyone want to own a death mask? I asked myself. But I knew. In a way, I was writing death masks.

    For some reason when I think of my father’s death, I keep going back to the part where he falls onto the marble floor of the lobby of his building. He is on his way back from dinner and a concert. My mother says to him, “Should I call an ambulance?” It is like my mother to ask, to defer to him, the doctor. “No,” he says. He is irritated—I can imagine this tone—at theimplication that he can’t take care of himself. He is in the middle of a massive cardiac arrest.
    By the time my sister and I arrive at the hospital, he is dead.
    He is nearly eighty-two, but his death feels sudden, out of the blue. He walked twenty blocks to work every day; he scheduled patients until seven o’clock at night; he carried suitcases and bags and babies for the women in his life; he was startlingly healthy for a man his age.
    But still I have the sense that before the night of his heart attack, death had begun to appear to him privately as a subject. He had, increasingly, moments of retreat, of withdrawal into himself. He would be absent suddenly, in the middle of a dinner or a walk. He was distracted; he was being taken slowly out of life.
    In the weeks before my father died, he had, by chance, a thorough cardiological workup. His doctor told him that he had the heart of a man thirty years younger. And yet, at around that same time, in late November, he suddenly decided to sit down and write the names of all the artists of the paintings and drawings he had collected over sixty years. He didn’t think my mother and my sisters and I would otherwise know what they were. Why in the sixty years that he had owned and collected those pictures did he choose that particular moment? He did not consciously know he was about to die,