Stay of Execution
Cox, Suzanne C.
& Stay of Execution & LIFE I-IAD ALWAYS been good to Stewart Alsop. He was born with rich blue blood in his veins, which meant he could pronounce All-sop with a long, distinguished A. He...
...After the first shock of confronting death, however, a ~kind of protective by Stewart Alsop J.B...
...In fact, I found myself skipping over a few pages of hemoglobin, megakaryocytes, and platelets just to get to them...
...All of which means that if Spiro Agnew was still around and kicking, he would have called Alsop an impudent snob...
...It is for each of us to eventually decide what those terms will be...
...This leaves Alsop in a state of flux or what he describes as a "hell-to-heaven-to-purgatery existence...
...Borrowing a page from Churchill, he writes to a friend: "We will fight amongst the platelets, we will fight in the bone marrow...
...He is an able raconteur...
...Yet he will not deal with that one all intriguing subject--death...
...Alsop became a political columnist with an assist from his brother Joe, achieved national prominence with the Saturday Evening Post and later Newsweek~ and joined that elite corps (or is it that effete corps...
...This means, of course, that you won't read much about death in his book other than to find out that there is always a little pea of fear that remains in the back of his mind...
...Alone in his bed one night, he is overcome with fear and desperation: %Vould it really be worthwhile to spend a month or more cooped up all alone in a laminar flow room, losing my hair and my flesh, either to die in the room or to emerge a bald skeleton and wait for death...
...Alsop can only tell us that while it may be difficult at first, one does come to terms with death...
...C'est la vie...
...That morning, at his country home in Needwood, Maryland, Alsop suddenly found himself gasping for air and heard his heart pounding furiously...
...I think," says Alsop, "God was wrestling with the Devil every right and ffmally threw him out of my body.,' ~Fnat's as good a theory as any we have," replies his young doctor...
...We will fight in the peripheral blood, we will never surrender...
...Alsop possesses a rich and varied store of tales about his experiences during the war, his career as a journalist, the public figures he has met (everyone from Churchill to Rubin), and his personal friends and family...
...The treatment of leukemia is a drawn out, hideous process...
...The possibility of a cure is virtually nonexistent...
...Lippineott $8.95 mechanism took over," as Alsop explains it...
...To complete the picture, Alsop has a happy marriage, a large handsome family, and a spacious home in the country...
...From that time on, he made an effort to close off his mind to the prospect of death...
...At one point when the pec~iar disease has his doctor stumped, Alsop offers his own theory...
...He goes to church once, perhaps to find some answers...
...n e r e is certainly a mystery out there somewhere," he concludes...
...But this second time, there would be no escape...
...And then a sense of the reality of death crowded in on me---the end of a pleasant life, never to see Tish [his wife] or Andrew or Nicky or the four other children again, never to go to Needwood again, or laugh with friends, or see the spring come...
...It is an elusive enemy, at times breaking out in a full attack, at times disappearing...
...And he attended Groton and Yale, which meant he belonged to the Eastern Establishment...
...But once inside the church, he feels embarrassed...
...He refers to it as a battle in his bones, and manages to reflect upon it humorously at times...
...It is perhaps the embarrassment that one feels in asking for something that one does not quite feel deserving to receive...
...What is it about death that Alsop fears...
...A day later, lying in a hospital bed, Stewart Alsop learned that he had acute myeloblastic leukemia and one year, possibly two, left to live...
...Although the disease can at times be interesting, there is probably too much about it...
...Alsop does wr~te a great deal about his disease...
...Life is no longer worth living for...
...But when his white cell counts are down Cthe griz~ed, battle-hardened sur~dvors of a once mighty army"), he enjoys nothing...
...Face it Alsop," he told himself then, "you're in trouble...
...He was born with rich blue blood in his veins, which meant he could pronounce All-sop with a long, distinguished A. He was related to Franklin Roosevelt, which meant he would become a rather (long A, again) conventional New Dealer...
...ambassador's residence in New Delhi...
...What, if anything, is beyond death...
...The G r e a t American Moment It was 2 o'clock in the morning at Roosevelt House, the gradiose modern pile that serves as the U.S...
...Most of the guests had gone home, but the strains of "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square" echoed through the chandeliered vastness of the main reception room...
...His humor still remains intact, however...
...Alsop will not say there is no God, he will only say he does not know whether there is a God...
...I am an agnostic still...
...Newsweek March 18, 1974 The clinical record he maintains is at times intriguing, because his disease is a peculiar brand of leukemia...
...He has saved some of the best of them for this "sort of memoir...
...Luckily, however, he was soon rescued and wound up happily ensconced in a chateau with pretty French girls...
...What meaning does death have...
...There came upon me a terrible sense of aloneness, of vulnerability, of nakedness, of helplessness...
...When his blood counts rise and he is given to expect the possibility of a cure, he feels wonderful: ~'I felt as though I wanted to feel life with my bands, and see it, and smell it, and taste it, and breathe it down deep inside myself...
...Because without a faith in something beyond just ourselves, without a hope of something beyond just 6ur life, then we are trapped...
...These are questious that go unanswered...
...When the war broke out he joined the King's Royal Rifle Corps, and this meant he survived it rather comfortably...
...This need to believe in something spiritual, but not being able to do so perhaps accounts for those feelings of "aloneness, of vulnerability, of nakedness, of helplessness" that Alsop felt when he first confronted death...
...There is no chance of victory over death...
...The only other time that Alsop had uttered those ominous words was one night during the war when he accidentally parachuted alone into occupied territory...
...Suzanne C. Cox 32 The Alternative June-September 1974...
...I am not a religious man," he says, ~but I think when nobody's looking I'll drop into a church tomorrow and say a prayer...
...I have been an agnostic since I was about eighteen...
...this way," Alsop says, ~the unbearable becomes bearable and one learns to live with death by not thinking about it too much...
...Isn't that how Ziegler responded to Haig...
...of journalists who control the news from their desks at the Washington Post, or, more frequently, their luncheon tables at the Sans Souci...
...But having written this, he breaks down into tears...
...In short, he enjoyed the best that life could offer...
...We must eventually surrender...
...It sounds ~trangely familiar...
...The author is right in assuming that most sensible readers will become bored with hemoglobin, megakaryocytes, or platelets...
...He finds himself thinking of that childhood poem, ~'I'ne worms-drawl in and the worms crawl out.frhey crawl all over your face and snout.frhey make a helluva mess of y o u . . . " That he says seemed to him a more likely prospect than life after death...
...But he is also right in assuming that the reader will find some interest and amusement in reading about another subject Alsop devotes a good bit of the book to---his life...
...That is, he did until the morning of July 19, 1971...
...But he is not totally satisfied with that explanation either...
...Suddenly Alsop can't face it...
...Would it not be more sensible to reach for Hamlet's %are bodkin,' in the shape of sleeping pills...
...The man was the .A~nerican ambassador to India, Daniel Patrick Moynihan...
...The woman was visiting journalist Claire Sterling...
...And yet-and yet," he hesitates remembering another verse slightly more elegant from Hamlet, '~here are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy...
...As the Indian servants looked on in silent disapproval, a man in a polka-dot bow tie led a woman in a graceful dance step atop a varnished coffee table...
...I didn't want to die, but I didn't want desperately not to die," he confesses...
Vol. 7 • June 1974 • No. 9
