Susan Sontag - breast, uterine, leukemia cancers
When the radio said that Susan Sontag died on this day in 2004, I wrote her death date on my calendar so that every year I could remember her, as I do with other dead people who’ve influenced my life. Her birth date was also given, but I didn’t write that down. This struck me as curious. Would I rather grieve her loss or celebrate her birth and coming alive in her writings? One date affirms the beginnings of her creativity; the other boards her in with nails of sorrow.
Being a writer, I want to believe that the essence of who Sontag was lingers in her words, but this feels sentimental because she intentionally left herself out of her cancer writings. She survived breast cancer in 1975, then uterine sarcoma, before dying of leukemia at age 71. In her groundbreaking 1978 book Illness as Metaphor, Sontag didn’t talk about her feelings or struggles with cancer. Even in her journal from these years I find little mention.
Rita Charon thought that for Sontag, metaphors got in the way of getting your treatments and holding on to hope. Sontag wanted to demystify cancer in the same way that tuberculosis had been demystified, that if you got it, you die. That’s no longer true. Because of ongoing research, if cancer is caught early and treated, 90% of people survive for at least five years. If you are diagnosed at Stage 3 or 4, survival rates drop. Sontag also laid to rest society’s premise that we did something wrong to cause our cancer, that we should feel shame, although this notion still lingers in conservative Christian circles. Sontag said that cancer just is.
Her breast cancer treatments had ended by the time her metaphor book came out, and I’m guessing that she wanted to focus only on living, on writing new essays, and that she valued her thoughts about cancer more than her feelings of dealing with it because that might weaken her resolve to not die. It is hard to write about cancer and not extrapolate the limited data you have into the future. Yet, it’s her stories that I want to know — how her struggles led to the insights that she wrote about. Sontag the person was separated from Sontag the thinker.
Even though Sontag demythologized cancer and said that society was wrong for thinking that cancer was a metaphor of doom, and that it was caused by too much passion, or the repression of passion, or as a punishment for bad behaviors, when you are told you have cancer it still scares you to your bones. Cancer feels like the boom of doom coming down, and your first thought is I am going to die. I think this is because we don’t talk about how it feels to live with cancer in our society and still enjoy life. We don’t talk about having and surviving cancer. I didn’t know that any of my friends had prostate cancer until I mentioned that I did. Then some of them sheepishly confessed that they had it, too.
Killing the cancer is important, but I don’t think this is enough. I believe that cancer patients need whole-person care — body, mind, and spirit — because cancer and its treatments impact every aspect of our being. We need to share our stories of cancer with others, if only to calm the fears and strengthen the spirits of other cancer patients.
While the details of my life will be forgotten, I hope that if I write honestly about cancer, my words will last a bit longer. In contrast to Sontag, I will include my emotions alongside the medical details. My accounts, drawn from my journals, will include the stories of my struggle to endure the months and years of therapies and their aftereffects, the pervasiveness of the trauma, the indignity of feeling like a body being rolled through a medical institution, and my ongoing fear of dying. That’s a big one. There will also be stories of the cancer patients I’ve met and how we helped each other hold on to hope as radiation and chemotherapy went on. Medical facts don’t hold our hands or sit up with us late at night when new test results make our future look bleak. People do, and we want to know that someone like us has lived in this place and survived.
While Sontag debunked the notion that cancer is a useful metaphor for anything else, cancer continues to unnerve our psyche like few other diseases. Any distancing we do from the personal impact of cancer skirts the intense suffering involved and does a disservice to people with cancer who are struggling. With most diseases, once you are healed, those diseases are gone forever and out of mind. When you have cancer, even after doctors say you’re cured, it comes back in thirty percent of us, and Sontag could have spoken to this because her cancer returned twice more. How did she feel about this? Even if my cancer ends up being a one-and-done, I will always worry about its return. It’s a shadow that moves along the horizon like a waiting thunderstorm. Will it stay over the mountains or turn and head for me?
I would rather talk to cancer patients than to my doctors about my feelings of having cancer because my cancer friends know how cancer feels and moves. Because of time constraints, my doctors limit themselves to talking about test results and scans. And because they have so many patients, they can’t become emotionally connected to every patient if they want to protect their own emotional health.
One of the benefits to having cancer is that it gives us something more important to talk about than the weather.
© 2026 Mark Liebenow
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