Life & Wisdom Quote by Susan Sontag

Sontag is puncturing a sentimental lie that medicine, literature, and polite conversation collude to keep alive: the idea that some illnesses deliver a tasteful, almost decorous ending. She treats that fantasy as “mythology,” not because death isn’t mysterious, but because the story is socially useful. If a disease isn’t “shameful or demeaning,” we grant it a gentler script - one that lets the healthy imagine control, dignity, closure. Soft deaths reassure the living that suffering can be curated.

The barb sits in her careful qualifier: “most diseases that are not considered shameful.” Sontag is mapping stigma’s invisible hand. Illnesses coded as moral failure - historically, cancer in its hush-hush era; tuberculosis romanticized but also class-marked; later AIDS as an explicit target of disgust - don’t get the luxury of the “easy” narrative. They’re made to mean something about the person who has them. The “mythology” doesn’t just describe dying; it distributes social value.

Context matters: Sontag spent her career fighting the metaphorization of illness, arguing that turning disease into allegory (“a battle,” “a punishment,” “a character test”) piles meaning onto bodies already under strain. Here, she’s showing how even kindness can be ideological. The soft-death story isn’t compassion; it’s a way to keep death at arm’s length, to maintain the fiction that some suffering is refined and some is degraded. Her sentence reads like a diagnosis of culture itself: we don’t merely fear dying; we fear what our death will say about us.