‘We Are Not Alone, and We Never Have Been.’

Part two of a two-part conversation with Michael Ignatieff on his beautiful and poignant new book “On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times.”

Death and Woman Wrestling for the Child by Käthe Kollwitz, Drypoint, 1911

By Michael Judge

Last week in part one of my interview with esteemed author, historian, and former Canadian politician, Michael Ignatieff, I wrote that over a nearly 50-year career, Ignatieff has published 20 books, including The Needs of Strangers (1984), Blood and Belonging (1995), and The Ordinary Virtues (2017). But his latest book, On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times (2021), has taken him in what he calls “a new direction.” Now in his mid-70s, he’s turned to “thinking about the history of our attempts to console ourselves for the timeless ordeals of life—death, loss and tragedy—and how we manage, despite everything, to live in hope.” And I have to say, that while we talked of loss and touched on everything from the death of Gustav Mahler’s 5-year-old daughter, Marie, from scarlet fever, to my older brother John’s suicide when I was 16, I came away from our conversation consoled. In his introduction, he explains that the word “comes from the Latin consolor, to find solace together.” And that, in a conversation that I will always be grateful for, is exactly what we did.

MJ: The final chapter in On Consolation is titled “The Good Death.” It’s about Cicely Saunders, the founder of modern hospice care. Early in her adult life, you explain, she met David Tasma, a Polish Jew who had lost everything in World War II and was dying alone at the age of 40—alone except for her, a social worker at the time who sat with him in a noisy hospital ward, reading to him from the Bible, and consoling him. Years later, she had another life-changing encounter when, as a doctor, she fell in love with another Polish patient who was dying of bone cancer. “Their time together,” you write, “transformed her sense of what was possible when time was running out. … When dying patients told her they had run out of time, she replied that there was always enough time, if you could be with someone to share it.”

MI: Yes. It’s one of the wisest things she said to me when I met her years later, and it creates a whole sense of the possibilities that open up in these situations. In situations of crisis like a deathbed, you think time is slipping away. You’re watching the hourglass drain down and you’re watching a life drain away. It gives you a kind of terrible sense of panic. And what is beautiful about her story of being with these two Poles—one after the other across the space of time—is that somehow these people found time for each other and found time to listen to each other and hear each other. One of the lessons that I took from her, which came as a tremendous surprise to me, was this sense that when you’re dying, you need consolation, but you can also give consolation. And the consolation that you can give is to take away the fear of death from those around you, to the degree that you can. You can show them that it is possible to have a good death. And this occurs quite frequently, I think. People die surrounded by their loved ones.

Just a couple months ago a woman I’m very fond of described to me, because I wasn’t there, the death of her husband. It had just happened in the week previously, and she described it in such a way that it was clear that this was the good death. They were together, physically together. The family was around, and they all approached this moment with apprehension. But the sense that they were together took away some of the sting and they watched her husband’s breathing slowly, slowly stop until it took some moments to understand that he had just died.

And she said it was a revelation. I mean, she felt lots of very complicated and sad thoughts about him and losing him. But she was above all surprised what dying was like, and somehow not inspired by it, but astonished by it. And it opened up a sense of possibility here. The possibility is that there’s something you can do for other people, even in the last moments of your life.

I think that was very strong in Cicely Saunders. She was absolutely transformed by her own experience of other people’s dying and came away with a kind of very matter-of-fact, very down-at-earth sense of death, and a sense that even in our last moments, we’ve got work to do, moral work to do, and we can make it easier for people. And I think about that. I don’t know what cards I’ll be dealt. I mean, this is where fate and fortune come in. I may be in a great deal of pain, or I may just die in the middle of the street and not have time to say a damn word to anybody.

But if the cards play out right, you kind of think, wow, there’s something I could do here. You know, I would like my children not to be frightened about death, or do whatever I can to make it a little less scary for them. I’d like my wife not to be scared if I could. I have no idea whether I’m capable of it, but until I spent time with Cicely Saunders and the hospice movement, it didn’t even occur to me that that’s one of the things we can do for each other.

“I don’t think everything that happens to us is an illness from which we can recover with appropriate therapies. I just don’t see it that way. Something else is required here, and that’s why the rhetoric and the music of poetry, and music itself, is so important in giving us access to these deeper registers of hurt and yearning, and wishes that someone wasn’t dead, and wishes that they could come back, and wishes that it was all just a terrible mistake, or wishes that there was something you could have said that would’ve made a difference. All of this stuff is just part of the experience.”

One of the reasons I started The First Person was because too often in the media we listen to talking heads who don’t talk about things that really matter to them or their own lives; they don’t risk vulnerability in a way that humanizes us all. This is one reason why this book is so beautiful, because it’s in a realm that really speaks to each one of us. My first experience with hospice, very close up, was with my father. He was dying of jaw cancer, which came on very quickly. He went to the dentist and they saw something in his mouth; he began chemo, and he died in less than a year.

Wow.

But he had had a long life. He was almost 80. And the hospice … What I wanted to say was the environment that we were given in hospice was exactly what I think Cicely Saunders imagined. It was the most … in a way, peaceful and familial feeling. My siblings were all there. My father had a good death. We were all there. We got to say goodbye to him. Thankfully, our stepmom, Mary Lou, had summoned us to be with him, because, as you say in some of your earlier books, we’re all sort of disjointed now living in various places, and that sense of community is lost in a lot of ways. But that sense of community was what we were given at his death with my siblings…

Beautiful.

We were all there together. And this hospice nurse said a beautiful, beautiful thing. She said, “You guys are tired, you’re exhausted. You’ve been up for a couple days. Your father’s not going to die tonight. I can guarantee you. Go out for dinner and enjoy your time together. And I can assure you, he will be here when you come back.” So my brother and my sister and I, we went out and we had the most beautiful bonding dinner together of our lives as adults, knowing that our father was dying. And then we were all with him… We were there for that breathing … the final breaths. And thank goodness for Cicely Saunders and the hospice movement, because it was one of the most beautiful things we’ve ever shared together.

Yes, that’s a wonderful story, and you were lucky to have such a wise nurse. These people are beyond price, just fantastic. I’m glad, very glad, that hospice meant something to you and helped your family. In a way, that’s why I put Cicely Saunders in there. She’s in the company of all these heavy-duty philosophers and writers, but, in a way, no one made a greater contribution to creating the possibility of consolation and peace among families than she did. She was an extraordinary woman—an absolutely amazing woman.

I love how you say in your book that instead of, as we often do, thinking of dying as the loneliest moment in our life, she understood it was among the most public and social moments, and that it demanded a setting in which this was understood and honored.

I’m glad you saw those parts of the book. That’s great.

And then there are other, more difficult… I had a brother when I was in high school who took his own life while suffering terribly from schizophrenia. As you say, we don’t always have this moment of closing at death. In fact, most people don’t experience that—especially during a time of war, or during a time of plague, or at the height of COVID. I was taken by your chapter on Gustav Mahler, “Songs on the Death of Children,” that addresses his devastation after scarlet fever took his 5-year-old daughter Marie. You also write of your musician friend who lost his 8-year-old daughter. He said he had to keep on performing, keep on working. There was nothing else he could do. Decades later he found some consolation in the thought that “she had been spared suffering” and “her life had been complete.” “It was full,” he tells you in the book. “She lived it. She was spared the rest.” That’s the way I feel now about my brother John’s death. I’ll be 56 soon. I was 16 when he died. It’s taken the better part of 40 years for me to come to that recognition.

Yes. I understand.

And I think that’s why I began sopping up so much poetry when I was young. I was drawn to poetry, and to literature, as a means of survival. I needed form, ritual, and tradition to survive. And so often we don’t have that in our society anymore. Those things are missing. And that’s what, I see now, the study of poetry and the study of literature gave me.

I often think that the process of consoling yourself can take a lifetime. I’m not surprised that it’s 40 years, it’s still going through you. I’d be very surprised if it didn’t. I just think that’s what happens. And I hope my friend who said that about his 8-year-old daughter, I hope that has consoled him. I think the other uncertain aspect of this is just what is true. I think he’s over it, but she continues to haunt him in a certain kind of way. I don’t see consolation as a rational process in which some propositions give you hope and that’s it. It’s an unconscious process. I’ve been struck recently that it’s a process in which rhetoric and art do as much work as rational propositions.

We’ve been talking about poetry for a reason. It’s the rhetoric of poetry, literally the music of the words, that provide consolation. Just like music we listen to, real music—there’s some way in which, mysteriously, these things tap into emotional registers of which we’re not even aware, and there is healing. I don’t use the word healing very much because I’m not sure that the death of your brother was an injury, or an illness. It was a mortal existential blow to you and your family and it doesn’t fit the language of healing very well at all, which is why I think the language of consolation is more capacious, somehow, for this.

I don’t think everything that happens to us is an illness from which we can recover with appropriate therapies. I just don’t see it that way. Something else is required here, and that’s why the rhetoric and the music of poetry, and music itself, is so important in giving us access to these deeper registers of hurt and yearning, and wishes that someone wasn’t dead, and wishes that they could come back, and wishes that it was all just a terrible mistake, or wishes that there was something you could have said that would’ve made a difference. All of this stuff is just part of the experience.

Right. My mother, who’s lost two children now, is exactly 30 years older than I am. She’s 85, and lost most everyone she once knew. She’s condensed this into one beautiful phrase, which is, “He was loved and he knew it.”

Yes.

Which at first, I didn’t understand. When my oldest brother, Steve, passed away a few years ago, she said, “He was loved and he knew it, Mike.” And it sounds immediately like somebody saying… Well, I can’t even hear it that way anymore. Because now when I hear it, I hear it as all we can do is love, and he knew that he was loved. And, so, we have nothing to regret. But the conciseness of that… It's just genius.

Yes. Absolutely. And he knew it is key because part of what haunts you about these situations is did he know it? And if your mother believes, and mothers know stuff, that he knew it, then it puts what happened in a completely different dimension, and yeah, very succinct.

All this reminds me of your chapter on Albert Camus, “To Live Outside Grace.” My mother has devoted her life to educating people about mental illness and getting treatment for those who suffer from severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or depression. She made people know they were loved no matter how ill, no matter what they were suffering from. And there’s this beautiful line where you quote from Camus, from The Plague, where Tarrou says to Dr. Rieux, who has stayed behind to treat those suffering from the plague, “Your victories will never be lasting.” And Dr. Rieux says, “Yes, I know that, but that’s no reason for giving up the struggle.”

Yes. In writing this book I came to an understanding of Camus that I didn’t have before. I’ve always been sort of irritated or bored by all this stuff about the absurd. I never got the absurd. It seemed like a kind of Parisian bit of discourse. It didn’t really connect. But I do think that reading Camus again I began to see something deeper, and it’s directly relevant to consolation. He’s simply saying the world does not make grand sense. There is no ultimate metaphysical meaning that it is possible for us human beings to discern. In that sense the world is absurd, in the literal meaning of luck governs much of what happens. One person gets sick in The Plague. The other person does not. There’s no rhyme or reason.

But even if we’re in a universe that doesn’t really care about us, we have to care for each other.

Yes. And that’s why the image of the old woman tending Rieux’s friend at night, so he won’t die alone, is such a powerful image to me, in that book, of exactly that. The world may not make much sense, but we know what we owe each other. That very strong sense in Camus is, I think, very, very powerful.

I want to get back to what I think you alluded to earlier, that consolation is not illusion. That we don’t console people with false words. You have this beautiful sentence in your book: “There is no true consolation in illusion. So we must try, as Václav Havel said, ‘to live in truth.’”

Yes. Particularly when we are grieving or suffering, we don’t want to be manipulated. Our radar remains on, when people talk to us, and seek to console us, and we evaluate what they’re saying in a way. And that function of trying to look for truth even in moments of despair, is extremely important, because otherwise people could say just anything to us. And they can’t. They know they have to choose their words carefully, just as we know we have to choose our words carefully—and sometimes choose silence rather than words, because we don’t want to speak falsely.

That reminds me, again, of my father. He had a feeding tube that went directly to his stomach because the cancer was in his jaw. His wife’s nephew, Chris, was helping him at the end of his life. Chris was the one who would feed him through the feeding tube, into the stomach, with something like a syringe. Until my father’s aspirating made that impossible. So, near the end, my dad asked, “No more feeding?” And Chris nodded his head. And my dad nodded his head. And they were silent. At that moment my father understood… Chris didn’t lie to him. They both understood that this was it. There was a clarity and honesty that is necessary at the end of life.

Yes. That’s a very powerful story and captures this perfectly.

Which reminds me of our hero the poet Czesław Miłosz, whom, as you write in the book’s epilogue, you and your wife met at his home in Berkeley, Calif., “on a bright January day in 1998.” You talk about his short poem “Gift,” and how much that poem, which he read aloud to you, means to you and your wife. I can’t tell you how much Miłosz’s poetry, and just his being in the world, has given me consolation.

And us as well. 

I’ll send you a beautiful TFP piece by Molly Wesling, a student of Slavic languages and literatures who worked for Miłosz at his home in Berkeley in the 1990s. When her son Nicholas was born, Miłosz sent a book, The Complete Winnie-the-Pooh, with an inscription, “that you may enjoy it as I did.” It’s fun to think of Miłosz and Pooh together.

That is great.

Miłosz said something in his 1980 Nobel acceptance speech that is similar to your line “There is no true consolation in illusion. So we must try, as Václav Havel said, ‘to live in truth.’” Miłosz said: “Those who are alive receive a mandate from those who are silent forever. They can fulfill their duties only by trying to reconstruct precisely things as they were, and by wresting the past from fictions and legends.” Which I think of more often now with Russia’s horrific war on truth and against Ukraine. Miłosz, of course, had lived through World War II and the ghettos in Poland and the slaughter and Soviet occupation. We owe the dying the truth, but we also owe it to the dead.

Absolutely. A lot of the book is just trying to reconnect us to the past so that we do not feel alone, on the one hand, but so that we also feel our duties to ourselves and to them. And so Miłosz, as always, is entirely right.

Well, with that I’ll let you go. I know you’re busy. I’m really grateful we got to talk and...

Yes. Me too. We got to talk about some real things and I’m grateful to you for that.

Like all TFP conversations, this conversation was edited for length and clarity.