When it comes to the task of dying, ordinary people get the better deal
I never saw an episode of Charlies’ Angels and so far this hasn’t had much impact on my life or happiness. The first place I encountered Farrah Fawcett Majors was in an American magazine called Good Housekeeping that a friend of my mother used to send her every month. In one edition, my eye was caught by a full page ad of a smiling blonde with a tap around her neck. No kidding – she was wearing a pendant made in the shape of a bath tap. Or maybe a sink tap. But a turn-on-the-water tape, one way or the other.
“The Farrah Faucet in 14 carat gold,” was the slogan.
It took a bit of research to establish that the girl in the picture was famous and that the pendant was a pun. It took educated guesswork to work out that demand for the gold tap was never going to put it among the jewellery top ten. I mean, come on. A tap? Would you insult your girlfriend with a tap? Even if you adored the star, would your homage find expression in tap-purchase? I was vaguely sorry for the girl in the ad. It seemed a poor payoff for star status, flogging small taps in a woman’s magazine. In retrospect, it was a hell of a lot better than where the same girl ended up: flogging the television story of her dying to US TV networks.
Not so long ago, cancer sufferers pretended they didn’t have the disease. Neither they nor their families acknowledged the Big C. It was a silent, secret dying. Now, it is an occasion for autobiographical exploration, in books, newspaper columns, blogs or – in the case of Farrah Fawcett – a TV documentary made at her request by her friend Alannah Stewart. Like all autobiography, these columns, blogs and documentaries are an attempt by the subjects to understand their own lives.
But perhaps they are also a wild cry against mortality, a refusal to go gentle into that dark night. Or, more tragically, they may be part of that great pointless metaphor about “fighting cancer.”
You might think that Susan Sontag’s devastating critique of the usage might, by now, have eroded its popularity, but no – media chooses to present anybody famous suffering from the disease as “bravely battling cancer.”
It is a beguiling and spurious simile, freighted, as it is, with the implication that personal courage can destroy disease. While some evidence suggests that an optimistic personality may do better, when infected or injured, the reality is that nobody’s personality changes to one of boundless optimism in the face of cancer, if they weren’t already buoyantly positive. So the theme of courage becomes at once a promise and a pressure.
That’s greatly added to by the nonsense talked by oncologists. Each one of us has had friends or relations diagnosed with some form of cancer known to be 100% lethal. Each one of us has seen those friends or relations eagerly submit themselves to treatments carrying brutal side effects, delightedly reporting the experts’ tests as showing the tumour has shrunk by 25% or 50% percent. (Since cancer always seems to be spoken about in terms of a fruit basket, the tumour is often described as shrinking from grapefruit to tangerine size.)
Few of us, watching the bright-eyed face under the scarf concealing the chemo-baldness, have had the courage to say “You’ve suffered two months of hell to get yourself to a position where any passing infection will kill you, in order to reduce the size of a cancer that will definitely kill you, so that you can go through the same miseries you went through the first time it grew, all over again. What have you gained?”
We don’t say that because hope is the thing with feathers and it is regarded as cruel to assassinate it, even if the real cruelty is encouraging the patient through pointless torture.
Not that they would listen, anyway. Nobody listens, once the team has described them as “cancer-free.” Oh, that wonderful statement. The patient hears it as “You’re cured. You’re not going to die.”
One memoir after another records the phrase, followed, within weeks or months, by a call from the hospital announcing the need for further tests, because something has shown up, or by the return of unmistakable symptoms.
And yet received wisdom holds that optimism is a duty and truth-telling in some way destructive.
The Farrah Fawcett documentary took her through that process, with all the brutal honesty so beloved of exploitative television. Alannah Stewart, one of those people whose market value hinges on others (she was once Rod Stewart’s wife, and is now “Farrah’s documentary-maker”) says that she turned off the camera at one point when the Charlie’s Angels star was vomiting into a kidney bowl. Farrah, she says, instructed her to keep filming, because “This is what cancer is.”
Of course it is. We know that. Where is the gain from seeing someone throwing up as a result of treatment? One possible gain is a kind of downward egalitarianism.
The millions who watched the Farrah programme may have developed a sense of commonality with the sick star: see, she’s just like us, money doesn’t make any difference, we all suffer to the same extent once a major disease takes hold.
In fact, the rich may suffer more than the poor, in some cases where the seduction of spurious treatment possibilities outweighs sense. The documentary showed Farrash Fawcett paying a fortune for demonstrably ineffective alternative treatments in Germany – and suffering grievously on the return journey to the United States. Some things don’t change. Twenty years ago, the star was Steve McQueen, the location was Mexico and the utterly pointless treatment was a preparation called Laetrile derived from the hard nut in the middle of apricots.
A raging malignancy afflicts “ordinary” people and the rich and famous in similar, yet painfully different ways. It creates a vacuum attracting others into the patient’s shortening life. Ordinary people get the better end of the deal. Friends and relatives rally around and show a love and care the sick person may never have known they could draw upon.
The vacuum around the rich and famous, in sharp contrast, attracts the exploitative and the inquisitive, the greedy and the tawdry. Fawcett’s now-and-then partner, Ryan O’Neal, revived some of his forgotten fame through tearful TV interviews during the woman’s last weeks, in the course of which he promised he would marry her before she died.
In the documentary, he was seen, looking like a raddled pantomime dame in a toweling dressing gown, welcoming their son for what may have been the latter’s last visit to his mother. Viewers got to watch the son – a violent drug addicted nonentity – being admitted to his dying mother’s bedroom clanking in chains from prison, flinging himself full length on the bed and whispering to a clearly unresponsive wraith.
Openness and transparency have become the imperatives of the 21st century. It’s time we questioned if they have a place in the terrible task of dying.
