“Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,” wrote the poet Mark Strand in his stunning ode to what Emily Dickinson termed “the drift called ‘the infinite.’”
Hardly any writer has chronicled their own drift toward death with more dignified composure and attentive aliveness than Alice James (August 7, 1848–March 6, 1892) — sister of pioneering psychologist William James and novelist Henry James — in The Diary of Alice James (public library).
Alice was a woman who considered herself “simply born a few years too soon.” She was also an exquisite writer from whose pen seemed to flow the best of her brothers’ aptitudes — William’s insight into human psychology and Henry’s novelistic splendor of style — along with a sublimity of sentiment entirely her own.
In a letter to William penned two years after their sister’s death, Henry extolled Alice’s diary as an embodiment of her “extraordinary force of mind and character, her whole way of taking life — and death — in very much the manner in which the book does… It is heroic in its individuality, its independence — its face-to-face with the universe for-and-by herself — and the beauty and eloquence with which she often expresses this, let alone the rich irony and humour.”
An awareness of mortality had haunted Alice since her youth — her body was assailed by a mysterious ailment that kept her bedridden, with only intermittent relief from disability. For years, physicians failed to find an organic cause and diagnose her illness. (This, lest we forget, was the heyday of such “therapies” as blistering, leeches, cold water treatments, and medication with mercury — rudimentary medicine’s blind shots in the dark of the body.)
In Alice’s thirtieth year, her physical pain exploded into a severe mental breakdown. Her father wrote that she was “half the time, indeed much more than half, on the verge of insanity and suicide” — a wish for self-annihilation she had confided in him directly, asking whether he thought it was a sin.
Subverting the dogma of his era, he responded that there is nothing sinful in wishing to end one’s extreme suffering, and gave her his fatherly permission to take her own life if the physical and psychological pain became too unbearable, asking her only to do it in a gentle way.
But to Alice, there was something liberating about this surprising permission to take charge of her own death, which had the paradoxical effect of giving her a sense of agency in her own life. Half a century before Albert Camus posed the most important question of existence, Alice answered it in the affirmative — she chose to live. Still, the specter of death remained always near and animated her days for decades.
Just before her forty-third birthday, Alice received a diagnosis that was likely unrelated to the neurological nightmare of the preceding decades but was as devastatingly unambiguous as can be: late-stage breast cancer. Writing on the last day of May in 1891, in an era before the combined influence of Darwin and Freud shaped our relationship to mortality, Alice records the strange relief of her terminal diagnosis — the comforting concretization of death’s amorphous presence, which had haunted her many hears of undiagnosed suffering. A century before modern doctors treated Rosanne Cash in much the same way, Alice writes:
Ever since I have been ill, I have longed and longed for some palpable disease, no matter how conventionally dreadful a label it might have, but I was always driven back to stagger alone under the monstrous mass of subjective sensations, which that sympathetic being “the medical man” had no higher inspiration than to assure me I was personally responsible for, washing his hands of me with a graceful complacency under my very nose. Dr. Torry [James’s final physician] was the only man who ever treated me like a rational being, who did not assume, because I was victim to many pains, that I was, of necessity, an arrested mental development too.
The following day, she writes:
To any one who has not been there, it will be hard to understand the enormous relief of [the doctor’s] uncompromising verdict, lifting us out of the formless vague and setting us within the very heart of the sustaining concrete. One would naturally not choose such an ugly and gruesome method of progression down the dark Valley of the Shadow of Death, and of course many of the moral sinews will snap by the way, but we shall gird up our loins and the blessed peace of the end will have no shadow cast upon it.
What allowed Alice to meet her mortality with such serenity was not a physical fact but the single most important psychological and emotional event of her life, which had taken place a decade earlier. When she was thirty-two, Alice had met Katharine Peabody Loring — an energetic young education reformer and activist, whom she described as having “all the mere brute superiority which distinguishes man from woman, combined with all the distinctive feminine virtues.” Alice marveled that “there is nothing [Katharine] cannot do from hewing wood and drawing water to driving runaway horses and educating all the women in North America.” In short, she was in love, and so was Katharine, who proved to be the most loyal and loving partner one could wish for.
The two women shared the remainder of…
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