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).]
2 comments:
I don't think the euphemisms are necessary even with children. Every year, I read Charlotte's Web to my 4th graders, and E.B. White doesn't elide or soften Charlotte's death - it is what it is. The kids are always very quiet at that moment and sometimes some of them cry, but White knew that to draw a discreet curtain or otherwise "spare their feelings" would have been disrespectful to his characters and his audience; he would have been cheating them.
Memento mori, skulls, the Day of the Dead and all that puzzle me. "These things are needed to remind us that someday we will die." I don't need any reminders. I can't stop thinking about death. I've been thinking about death since the dawn of consciousness. Is there anybody who doesn't think about death all the time? If there is, they should know that death has nothing to do with skeletons and graveyards and all that. By the time those things come into the picture, you're long gone.
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