The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death EDITED BY David Shields AND Bradford Morrow (W.W. Norton, 2011) From the Publisher: “What is death and how does it touch upon life? Twenty writers look for answers. Birth is not inevitable. Life certainly isn’t. The sole inevitability of existence, the only sure consequence of being alive, is death. In these eloquent and surprising essays, twenty writers face this fact, among them Geoff Dyer, who describes the ghost bikes memorializing those who die in biking accidents; Jonathan Safran Foer, proposing a new way of punctuating dialogue in the face of a family history of heart attacks and decimation by the Holocaust; Mark Doty, whose reflections on the art-porn movie Bijou lead to a meditation on the intersection of sex and death epitomized by the AIDS epidemic; and Joyce Carol Oates, who writes about the loss of her husband and faces her own mortality. Other contributors include Annie Dillard, Diane Ackerman, Peter Straub, and Brenda Hillman.”

A summer during which I attended four wakes and four funerals might be expected to have included much discussion about death. Not so. Other than feeble attempts to render the person present, remarks such as ____ would have hated this (the heat) or ____ would have loved to see him (a new nephew), there has been silence. The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death, edited by David Shields and Bradford Morrow, seeks to fill a pervasive cultural gap. The editors have done a masterful job of eliciting different viewpoints, none of them polemical, all partaking of the current ethos, essays which respectfully challenge old tropes or accept and renew them. How many people, given “death” in a word association game, would say “inevitable,” taxes as the shadowy counterpart playing across their faces? Our handy formulas embedded in cynical jokes, enable us to feel we have dealt with the worst and moved forward. Great literature, of course, and most philosophical and religious traditions confront death head-on. They have packaged the results for our consideration in memorable lines and now-challenged belief systems. It is possible to find websites that compile the best of human wisdom on the topic of death, quotations that could individually be pondered for hours on end and still bear fruit. In fact, many of the essays in this collection similarly draw upon the eloquence of the ages as a springboard for their ruminations. Ultimately this anthology is interesting because of the contemporary in its title. What gives comfort or meaning in this post-certitude age? What forms does our denial take now? How do we live in the shadow of death? No one has experienced death personally, as the authors here frequently acknowledge; we always see through the glass darkly. The editors have done a masterful job of eliciting different viewpoints, none of them polemical, all partaking of the current ethos, essays which respectfully challenge old tropes or accept and renew them. Some essays I found better than others, but in general, this is an even collection. In “Lessness,” Lance Olsen structures his personal reflections around aphorisms and received wisdom. Following Karl Jaspers, he writes “at the instant one allows oneself awareness of the Encompassing by confronting such imaginables as universal contingency and the loss of the human, the loss of the body — the latter otherwise known as death” (p. 284), one becomes authentically human. “Everything else refusal, fear, repression” (ibid.). Quite different is Lynne Tillman’s position that what we know about dying and death, “like most received wisdoms concocted of exasperating pieties and galling stupidity, should be eliminated” (“The Final Plot,” p. 280). In his engaging essay, “Invitation to the Dance,” Kevin Baker chronicles his decision to take the genetic test to discover that he has indeed inherited his mother’s Huntington’s Disease. He integrates that terrible knowledge by realizing “What I really wanted was to live like I always did, taking little care of myself, wasting time worrying over politics, or how the Yankees were doing…” (p. 234). Kyoki Mori astutely claims “Everything we say about death is actually about life” (“Between the Forest and the Well: Notes on Death,” p. 45). In a twist on the Pascalian wager, she writes: “I try to choose as though I would have to live forever with the consequences… Living to see the result of my potential mistake is just as sobering a thought as the possibility of dying with regrets” (pp. 48-49).

Greg Bottom’s “Grace Street” starkly chronicles society’s walking dead, “death all around me, embedded in every symbol and scene, pushing me constantly toward the narcissism of grief” (p. 268). Mark Doty celebrates the possibility of ecstasy amidst the forces of death in “Bijou.” Analyzing a gay porn film, he notes “even in the imagined paradise of limitless eros, there must be room for death; otherwise the endlessness of it, the lack of limit or of boundary, finally drains things of their tension, removes all edges” (p. 302).

“I craved the right to turn my face to the wall, to create a death commensurate with bourgeois achievement, political awareness, and aesthetically compelling feminist despair” (p. 250), writes Margo Jefferson in “Death Wish in Negroland.” Annie Dillard’s enigmatic essay “This Is the Life” concludes: “Say you have seen something. You have seen an ordinary bit of what is real, the infinite fabric of time that eternity shoots through, and time’s soft-skinned people working and dying under slowly shifting stars. What then?” (p. 328) If silence, then Jonathan Safra Foer offers a new system of punctuation graphics to signify the communication gaps caused by an underlying fear of death and loss, including at least five Barely Tolerable Substitutes, “whose meaning approximates ‘I love you’ and can be used in place of ‘I love you’” (p. 117).

But for me, these twenty articulate voices, with their alternate arguments and eloquence, proved bracing, intelligent company.

The strongest arguments for adhering to traditional systems of belief are presented in the most cerebral pieces: Sallie Tisdale’s “The Sutra of Maggots and Blowflies” and Robert Clark’s “Bayham Street.” Tisdale’s graceful Buddhism, her belief that “decay is a kind of perfection” (p. 109) is embedded in graphic biological details: “What lucky flies smelled the flowery scent of the Buddha’s death, and came—flowing through the air like a river in the sky, a river of flies!” Clark, “reserved and a bit cerebral in my Catholicism” (p. 66), models the argument for his fragile faith on Thomas Aquinas, the medieval Aristotelian theologian: “Thomas’s great preoccupation was the relation between the seen and the unseen… contained in the flux of time and space” (p. 68).

In the beautifully lyric “Silence and Awakening,” mourning first John O’Donohue and then more personally her mother, Diane Ackerman speaks with another kind of certainty: “I’ve no desire to visit her grave because I believe she’s not really there but has rejoined pure energy, once again a shimmer of atoms at dawn” (p. 130). Melissa Pritchard hopes for signs from beyond that her mother is all right in the hummingbird who “appeared in my garden the day after her death” (“A Solemn Pleasure,” p.153). Ultimately she embraces a similar non-personal afterlife, the notion of her mother “scattering into Light, in line to take our greater place, to be those distant stars, of a presence on the stair, unseen but felt, or that splashy violet bloom of azalea….” (p. 144).

In her thoughtful essay, Brenda Hillman defends her “belief in the animating spirit world” (“Cezanne’s Colors,” p. 306): “The notion of a highly populated, invisible world seems one of the best metaphors for meaning-beside-the-meaningless” (ibid.). Peter Straub admits no such consolation in his essay, “Inside Story:” “ That human beings should experience anything at all after the moment of death strikes me as so impossible that its proposal as a serious possibility verges on the immoral” (p. 216).

Christopher Sorrentino is similarly forthright: “…while another of the emotional purposes of organized mourning is to provide a comforting, if false, sense of death’s uniting us, the inherent function of death is to separate us, first from the deceased and then, in a process of extension, from others” (“Death in the Age of Digital Proliferation, and Other Considerations,” p. 160). “I hate that the world is leaving him farther and farther behind” (p. 31), writes David Gates of his father in “Deathwatch,” a personal narrative that hovers around belief. “Having watched the before-and-after on his deathbed,” Gates reports he is “satisfied there is such a thing as spirit” (p. 32).

Others search for the lingering presence of the dead in public places of mourning. Robin Hemley’s “Field Notes for the Graveyard Enthusiast” claims that visiting graveyards provides “our closest contact with death while remaining alive” (p. 197). In this liminal space, he meditates: “The anonymous dead are my brethren, and to the skulls of Kutná Hora, I can imagine adding my own to the fragile pile, from which nothing tumbles” (p. 203). Geoff Dyer writes about public memorial art, ranging from white bikes, so-called ghost bikes, chained to street signs at the scene of murders or violent deaths to the Temple of Tears and Temple of Joy in Nevada, built only to be ritually burned. “In a post-religious culture that lacks appropriate rituals of grieving and mourning,” he applauds these efforts as “a memorial predicated on transience, a work of art that was absolutely inseparable from the temporary city and the community it was designed to help” (“What Will Survive Us,” p. 322).

Comfort is missing from Joyce Carol Oates’ extraordinary contribution, “The Siege.” Only a person for whom writing is a semi-autonomic function could capture raw, naked grief as well as she does. Her words are two degrees beyond keening as she discovers most poignantly, in the death of her husband, her own death: “A nobler gesture would have been to erase myself. For there is something terribly wrong in remaining here — in our house, in our old life — talking and laughing with friends — when Ray is gone” (p. 171). She knows viscerally what we all give lip service to. Not for the faint of heart.

Death is a shared inevitability, but musing about death remains a personal choice. My mother-in-law would tolerate no such talk during her long ninety-six years of life, nor did her son turn to this book or anything like it for solace or inspiration during his summer of loss. But for me, these twenty articulate voices, with their alternate arguments and eloquence, proved bracing, intelligent company.