This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death

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Harold Brodkey. This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death

This Wild Darkness. The Story of My Death. Harold Brodkey

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

CONTENTS

SPRING 1993

SUMMER 1993

LATE WINTER 1994

SPRING 1994

SUMMER 1994

EARLY FALL 1995

LATE FALL 1995

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

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For Ellen, my light …

—Ellen Schwamm Brodkey

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And I have died before, come close enough to dying that doctors and nurses on those occasions said that those were death experiences, the approach to death, a little of death felt from the inside. And I have nursed dying people and been at deathbeds. I nearly died when my first mother did, leaving me practically an orphan at almost two years old. (My real father, Max Weintrub, was an illiterate local junk man, a semipro prizefighter in his youth and unhealably violent; I saw him off and on when I was growing up but never really knew him as a father. I was told that after my mother’s death, he sold me to relatives—the Brodkeys—for three hundred dollars.) As an adult, at one point, I forced myself to remember what I could of the child’s feelings. The feelings I have now are far milder. My work, my notions and theories and doctrines, my pride have conspired to make me feel as I do now that I am ill.

I have always remembered nearly dying when I was seven and had an allergic, hypothermic reaction coming out of anesthesia. When I was thirty, a hepatitis thing was misdiagnosed as cancer of the liver, and I was told I had six weeks to live. The sensations at those various times were not much alike, but the feeling of extreme sickness, of being racked, was and is the same, as is the sense of real death.

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