Un mar de muerte

As a war reporter, David Rieff has covered most of the conflicts of the last decades. However, the hardest battle he had to witness began in the spring of 2004, when his mother, Susan Sontag, was diagnosed with incurable leukemia that would end her life that same year. Rieff movingly narrates the experience of being with her -a woman of insatiable curiosity and with an infinite desire to live- the last months of her agony and her own mixed feelings: the guilt both for not being enough comfort and for supporting her in the idea that it would be able to prevail over the disease. Traversing his mother's diaries and letters, which Rieff read after her death, and the texts of other great writers on death, this book provides an intimate portrait of Susan Sontag's last days and a profound meditation on the mortality. Brutally honest and moving, it's a beautiful elegy.