'Taking Your Time, Angel of Death'

I like plain speaking when it comes to death. Not needlessly harsh but direct and above all unvarnished, no flowers, closer to a coroner’s report than a greeting card. A well-meaning reader has sent belated condolences for my brother’s death in August without once using any of the customary one-syllable words English gives us – died, dead, death. Instead, “passed,” “passing,” “passed on,” as though death were an interstate highway and his car is faster than mine. I’m grateful to my reader for thinking of me and remembering my brother but when I encounter such shadow-words I tend to think about them and not the subject at hand, death. Euphemisms are distracting. Perhaps they are appropriate when breaking the news to children but adults are best served by the unadorned truth. 

There are death-haunted writers. That doesn’t mean morbid or otherwise perverse. Montaigne is one of them. Laurence Sterne and Philip Larkin are others. So is the American poet Samuel Menashe (1925-2011). I’m reading his poems again and perhaps I’ve been sensitized by my brother’s death, but the subject recurs throughout his work, early and late. “The Visitation” reminds me of my brother’s final weeks, lying in bed in the hospice in Cleveland:

 

“His body ahead

Of him on the bed

He faces his feet

Sees himself dead,

A corpse complete

With legs and chest

And belly between

Swelling the scene

Of the crime you left,

Taking your time,

Angel of Death”

 

Blunt, though hardly a documentary. The word visitation I associate with children and divorce, prison, and funeral homes. Here the visitor is, in Hebrew, malakh ha-mavet: “The dancing Angel of Death often recited or sang; in his song he stressed the vanity of mortal and perishable values and contrasted them to everlasting and immortal merits and piety.” More realism in Menashe’s “What to Expect,” and not a euphemism in sight:

 

“At death’s door

The end in sight

Is life, not death

Each breath you take

Is breathtaking

 

“Save your breath

Does not apply –

You must die.”

 

One more, ‘Transfusion,” another return to that hospice in Cleveland:

 

“Death awaited

In this room

Takes its time

I stand by

Your deathbed

Making it mine”

 

One euphemism for death I still find amusing: “kicked the bucket.”

 

[The books to read are Menashe's New and Selected Poems (Library of America, 2005) and The Shrine Whose Shape I Am: The Collected Poetry of Samuel Menashe (Audubon Terrace Press, 2019).]