Tolstoy’s near-suicidal despair is palpable in that book, and I’m not recommending that one try to replicate it for the sake of art, but it’s evident in both Confession and The Death of Ivan Ilyich, as well as his novels, that Tolstoy could write so well about death because he was fascinated by it and could easily imagine himself dying.
Having been exposed to death does help when writing about it, but how can we write plausibly from the point of view of the dying when we have not died ourselves, and have no one around to ask what it is like to die?
“Death,” as Michael Ondaatje writes in The English Patient, “means you are in the third person.”
Even taking into consideration “near-death” narratives, we have no true accounts of the most common type of death, the irreversible kind. In the end, we can only imagine what it’s like to die, and to stay dead. (“The reason for living is getting ready to stay dead” the dying—or already dead—Addie remembers her father saying in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.)
“In reality there is no experience of death.… it is barely possible to speak of the experience of others’ deaths. It is a substitute, an illusion, and it never quite convinces us,” Albert Camus writes in The Myth of Sisyphus, his treatise on his philosophy of absurdism.
Still, we continue to speak of other people’s deaths, as Camus did in his novels and essays. We write about the dead to make sense of our losses, to become less haunted, to turn ghosts into words, to transform an absence into language. Death is an unparalleled experience, so we look to death narratives, and to the people in our lives who are dying, for some previously unknowable insights, which we hope they will pass on to us in some way. Someone’s calm and dignified death is meant to be a model not just for the way we might eventually want to die, but also for the way we might want to live. Someone’s tortured and melodramatic death is supposed to be a cautionary tale, a warning for us to put our house in order so that we might do better, or be better, when our turn comes.
In The Writing Life, novelist and memoirist Annie Dillard exhorts us to write as though every story were our last, as though we were dying. “At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?”
Every writer brings a different set of beliefs, experiences, and observations to their writing about death. Tolstoy’s desire to share with others what it’s like to die apparently extended beyond literature. He supposedly came up with a series of codes, including eye movements, so that when his time came, he could describe to the people around him what it was like to die. Tolstoy wished for a singular death and he eventually got one. At eighty-two, he died of pneumonia in the stationmaster’s house at a small-town train station. Some of his final days were recorded on film, and his last words were said to be “How do peasants die?”
How do peasants die? Or how do mothers die? Even when we’re there to witness a physical death, we’re not 100 percent sure. Each death is as singular as the individual who is dying, and in the end we will get no definitive answers. Lacking absolutes, all we have is our faith and belief and imagination to either haunt or comfort us.
There’s also no limit to how long a death scene can last. In Taiye Selasi’s 2013 debut novel, Ghana Must Go, Kweku Sai, the family patriarch and a gifted surgeon, spends over ninety pages dying in a garden in his native Ghana. His death begins on the first page with “Kweku dies barefoot on a Sunday before sunrise, his slippers by the doorway to the bedroom like dogs.” He takes his last breath ninety-one pages later.
In between are flashbacks to crucial moments from Kweku’s life in both Ghana and the United States, ranging from childhood memories to how he met both his wives, the birth of his four children, and the death of his mother. To mirror the stop-and-go urgency of Kweku’s “slow-building” heart attack, some of Kweku’s thoughts flow like stream-of-consciousness poems. A few simply drift into micro paragraphs.
In the garden where he will die, Kweku thinks in alliteration. His thoughts have both a poetic and a musical quality.
Glittering garden.
Glittering wet.
As he lingers there awhile, he realizes:
Dewdrops on grass.
On the soles of his feet:
sudden, wet, unexpected, so shocking they hurt.
Time is rendered in shorthand.
Winter again, 1989.
The delivery ward at the Brigham.…
And, later,
A hospital again, 1993.
Late afternoon, early autumn.
The lobby.
Borrowed from screenplays, this abridged method of marking place and time is quite fitting given that Kweku imagines his life as a kind of reality show in which a cameraman is shadowing him to record different versions of the man he’s trying to be: the considerate husband, the well-respected doctor, the provider father. This type of shorthand is necessary also because Kweku knows he has very little time left. In a reversal of Hemingway’s “iceberg,” Kweku’s abundant, multilayered “spiral of thoughts” is guiding him toward accepting death, but not before he revisits as much of his life as he can. His recollections also highlight the fact that he’s spent his life focused on the wrong things.
“I didn’t know what was beautiful,” he thinks; “I would have fought for it all, had I seen, had I known!”
This is the biggest regret of this dying man’s life, and Selasi wants to be certain we don’t miss it, amid the beautiful and powerful imagery that follows, many pages later.
And so to death.
He lies here facedown with a smile on his face. Now the butterfly alights, finished drinking. A spectacular contrast, the turquoise against pink. But unconcerned with this, with beauty, with contrast, with loss. It flitters around the garden, coming to hover by his foot. Fluttering its wings against his soles as if to soothe them. Open, shut. The dog smells new death and barks, startling the butterfly. It flaps its wings once, flies away.
Silence.
One might be tempted to call out the butterfly as an easy metaphor for death and the afterlife. I have used it myself, as has the maestro Gabriel García Márquez, as a symbol of visiting spirits, a sign of mystery, and a harbinger of good and bad news. In Ghana Must Go, the butterfly is so intimately woven into the story that the metaphor does not feel forced.
The butterfly makes its first appearance at Kweku’s mother’s wake, where, “Black and blue … an almost neon shade of turquoise,” it lands on his mother’s toe. Later, as he is dying, Kweku’s mother’s voice is one of the last things he hears—she tells him to “rest”—so it’s not surprising that she would also return to soothe the soles of her son’s feet, just as some ancestor had done for her, via the butterfly.
Selasi gives the Sais their own singular butterfly, a swordtail, which has the specific task of preparing members of a migratory family for their final journeys.
The way words are laid out on the page in Ghana Must Go also creates an emotionally charged linguistic and emotional map. The word “Silence,” for example, gets its own page in the novel, making that page look like a tombstone. Selasi’s “Silence” is also a transitional narrative break between the first section, “Gone,” in which Kweku dies, and the second section, “Going,” in which his family comes together to bury him. I also think of this page as an equivalent of the moment right after somebody has died when others have yet to be notified. In that moment, in that silence, the dead person is still alive in many people’s minds, which makes it tempting to delay breaking that spell.
A few years after reading Ghana Must Go, I couldn’t stop thinking about the book, especially as people in my life were dying, both those who lived close to me and those who, like Tante Rezia, lived far away. I wanted to find out how Selasi came to write Kweku’s death so convincingly, so I sent her an e-mail.
She wrote back that she’d wr
itten the first hundred pages of her novel “in a sort of frenzy, more quickly than I’d written anything to date. I heard the first sentence, ran to my laptop, and didn’t stop typing.” Looking back, though, she could see that a kind of intricate structure had emerged: episodic, achronological.
The common trope is one’s life flashing before one’s eyes. As Kweku lies dying, moments from his life flash before his eyes (and ours), an image or sensation in the present moment triggering a memory from the past. The dewdrops in his garden remind him of the birth of his daughter. One memory follows on naturally from another, much in the way the mind wanders: forward and backward, gently circling the present. He is dying, yes, but he is remembering the heartbreaks that have shaped his life. Kweku’s final heartbreak—less tragic than triumphant—is discovering that he was loved. He has found a worthy “point” to his story. In this, for me, he dies redeemed.
Tante Rezia’s deathbed scene, I’m told, was mostly unremarkable, at least from the outside. She remained unconscious in the hospital, but was on oxygen and IVs for a week. Her two sons and other family members took turns keeping vigil at her bedside. One afternoon my cousin Fritz heard a loud crackle, as though she were clearing her throat. It also sounded like she’d been running too fast and was trying to catch her breath. Then her chest stopped moving up and down and there was no more breath.
From the inside, it might have been different. Tante Rezia might have been thinking about the sudden events that had precipitated her toward death, the uncertainty of deeds left undone and words left unsaid. She might have been drafting in her mind sentences she would never get to say to her children and grandchildren. She might have been worried about her stall, her pens and paper, as well as her books, her livelihood for the past thirty-five years. She loved the books she sold: textbooks and occasionally some French novels. She loved their smell, their shapes, and the noise they made when their spines were cracked. Maybe her final thought was of this one concentrated pleasure: the ecstasy of unpacking books.
Was she afraid to die? Apparently, the older we are, the less afraid we are to die, no matter what our belief system. Tante Rezia was seventy years old and a Christian. She might have been praying, either to live a few years longer or to painlessly slip away.
Tolstoy too was a Christian. The Death of Ivan Ilyich echoes the principles of Ars Moriendi, a fifteenth-century guide that taught Christians the proper way to die. In the Ars Moriendi tradition, before the dying take their final breaths, the deathbed becomes a battleground between good and evil spirits, and between the present and the past.
“Is there any meaning in my life that wouldn’t be destroyed by the death that inevitably awaits me?” Tolstoy wonders in Confession.
We may never fully be able to answer that question, but the structures and demands of a life—or a story—urge us to at least try.
Peabody, the rural doctor in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, offers what I consider a plausible, if not direct, reply to Tolstoy’s question.
When I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind—and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.
I know now, having watched my mother die, that death is a phenomenon of both the body and the mind—her body and mind, and now mine too. I believe that death is not the end. I’d rather think that it’s some type of new beginning, a positive one for her. I like to think as well that it’s like moving from one place to another, a more beautiful and peaceful place, a more permanent tenement or town.
We like to think of dying as being most comforting when it’s not a solitary affair, as it was for Kweku Sai. Saying that someone has died alone is like stating that that person has received an even graver sentence than usual. But what if the last face a person sees is that of the person who is taking her life away?
I read Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones when it came out, in 2002. It was the book everyone was talking about that year, and for good reason. The novel is narrated by a dead girl, who tells in great detail the story of her rape and murder and its aftermath, from her version of heaven.
After a brief prologue, the novel’s first chapter begins:
My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie.
I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.
This is testimonial prose, right down to its apparent verisimilitude. Exact dates and other concrete details of the period create the feel of an eyewitness account, albeit one that’s being told from beyond the grave. Susie Salmon doesn’t even have a proper grave, we come to find out as she narrates her own death.
Alice Sebold makes some courageous narrative choices, the most audacious being the prolonged death scene in which Susie’s neighbor Mr. Harvey rapes, kills, and dismembers her. I can’t recall ever reading a murder scene—at the beginning of a book, no less—that is as unflinching yet also as filled with life: the life we are about to mourn, the life that’s slowly being carved away, piece by piece, from this young girl. Susie Salmon’s prolonged killing proves what Hospital Tommy, an old barber, declares in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, that “every killing is a hard killing.”
“Killing anybody is hard,” he continues. “You see those movies where the hero puts his hands around somebody’s neck and the victim coughs a little bit and expires? Don’t believe it, my friends. The human body is robust. It can gather strength when it’s in mortal danger.”
Susie’s is certainly a hard killing, an unbearably hard killing. Susie fights as much as she can, yet Mr. Harvey eventually overpowers her. Her killing, she tells us, took place at a time “when people believed things like that didn’t happen.” She also tells us other things. She describes the scent of cologne that invades the air as Mr. Harvey approaches, the earthy smell of the hole in the ground, the eerie light in there that “would make his features hard to see when he was on top of me.” She tells us too that she was a member of the Chess Club at school and that she liked a quote from the Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, which is in her junior high school yearbook. It turns out that the quote contains great advice for writers as well: “If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.” No ruled paper here. Alice Sebold is writing the other way.
Susie’s descriptions of her murder make for an agonizing read. Still, as Susie matter-of-factly describes fitting her limbs back together in heaven, Sebold convinces us that there is no other way her story could have been told.
“A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable,” Gustave Flaubert once wrote in a letter to his lover, the poet Louise Colet. This is also true for a powerful scene, or series of scenes, in a novel. A great scene should be unchangeable. Susie Salmon, to use Faulkner’s words, is “a single tenant” moving out of this world in the most brutal way, with her unchangeable memories—her shadows—trailing behind her.
Sometimes we must write what we are most terrified to write, and we need our shadows, however haunting they may be, in order to write the best book we can. In February 2003, Alice Sebold told Boston Globe reporter David Mehegan, “That idea of a shadow that travels with you, that has another destiny than you might have imagined, has always fascinated me. For me, that shadow has always been a teenage girl who died.”
Soon after I finished reading The Lovely Bones, I was curious about Sebold’s other work and sought out her 1999 memoir, Lucky. Lucky recounts in unwavering detail Sebold’s brutal rape in a Syracuse, New York, park when she was a college student. Lucky is as unflinching as The Lovely Bones, even more so because we know that the assault and torture Sebold endured actually occurred. After her rape, Sebold was told she was “lucky”: a girl had recently been murdered and dismembered in the same tunnel, in the same park.
Sebold’s memoir offers some interesting insight into her fiction, just as Confe
ssion allows us to probe the mind that created The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Anna Karenina, and Tolstoy’s other works. Sebold started writing The Lovely Bones, then realized she couldn’t finish Susie Salmon’s story until she told her own.
“I stopped to write Lucky,” she told National Public Radio’s Terry Gross in July 2002. “And one of the things that was very important for me to do was to get all the facts of my own case down.”
Susie Salmon tells not only her own story but also the stories of other women and girls who’d been raped and killed by Mr. Harvey. As Susie recounts these women’s stories, she comes to terms with why she needs to tell her own. “Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain.”
Reading this line reminded me of the first time I thought someone could kill me. I was still living in Haiti with Uncle Joseph and Tante Denise. When I was ten years old, an older boy—Tante Denise’s godson and nephew, Joël—moved into their house after his grandmother died. Many nights, over several weeks, he would walk into the room where three other girls and I slept and would slip his hands under our nightgowns and touch our private parts. Our bunk beds were lined up near the armoire from which he needed to get a set of sheets, and before he’d pick up the sheets he would touch us. Sometimes it was one or two of us. Sometimes it was all four of us, all of us too terrified even to discuss among ourselves what was going on, all of us too afraid that he might kill us if we screamed or told anyone else.
During those moments, I would pretend that my body was no longer mine and that I had merged with the bedsheet. In the daytime, I would find certain objects to keep me from thinking about the night: self-made amulets in the form of beautiful black and brown women on toothpaste boxes. I would cut out these faces and their gleaming white teeth and I would think how lucky these bodiless women were because no one could touch them in terrible ways. These women could also shield me, I thought, by drawing me into an imaginary world where people laughed all the time and had no vulnerable flesh.
The Art of Death Page 3