In spring 2004, Susan Sontag was diagnosed with the incurable blood cancer which would kill her later the same year. In this fiercely honest and beautifully written memoir, her son David Rieff chronicles the last months of Sontag`s life. Sontag had fought off two previous bouts of cancer, against all the odds, and had developed a sense of herself as somehow charmed, able to beat this disease. She also had a huge appetite for experience, and a wild, extravagant desire to live. Rieff details her reaction to the diagnosis, and the way that her friends and doctors responded to her shock and grief.He writes movingly about being by her side during that last year and at her death, and about his own contradictory emotions: his guilt both for not consoling her enough, and for somehow colluding with her in her belief that she could beat the disease. Drawing on Sontag`s journals and letters, which Rieff read after her death, and on the writings about death of other great thinkers, "Swimming in a Sea of Death" provides a vivid portrait of Sontag in the last year of her life and a haunting meditation on mortality.

`[This] story of an embattled death-refusenik is the more affecting because it sheds no tears.` (The Guardian)

"Swimming in a Sea of Death" is Rieff`s brief record of how high priests of the body and blood sort -- whether oncologists or monsignors -- must so often disappoint. And how they disappointed his mother. In the end, neither science nor medicine, reason nor raw intellect, "avidity" for life nor her lifelong sense that hers was a special case -- nothing could undo her death. Susan Sontag "died as she had lived: unreconciled to mortality." And there is the sadness at the heart of Rieff`s testimony: that mothers die, as fathers do, regardless of what they or their children believe or disbelieve. It is our humanity that makes us mortal, not our creeds or their antitheses." (Los Angeles Times)