In the Slender Margin: The Intimate Strangeness of Death and Dying

by Eve Joseph

hope allows us to imagine a future. On the other hand, if we’re not careful, if we’re too focused on what we want to happen, we can miss what is happening right in front of us. Hope can be a thief. It can steal the present moment right out from under our feet.

In North America, it is easier to talk about sex than death. In the past, it was acceptable to talk to children about death but not sex; they were included at the deathbed at the same time as they were being told they were brought by the stork. Today, they receive sex education at school but might be told their loved ones are now stars twinkling in the heavens.

“God is, or He is not,” wrote Blaise Pascal in the seventeenth century. But which side to choose? His wager, as it was known, went something like this: weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. . . . If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. Heads or tails. In the end, maybe it doesn’t matter so much what we believe. Danish physicist and Nobelist Niels Bohr once hung a horseshoe over his doorway. Appalled friends exclaimed that surely he didn’t put any trust in such pathetic superstition. “No, I don’t,” he replied with composure, “but apparently it works whether you believe in it or not.”

We fly, as Emerson wrote in his journal: “we fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.”

as Christina Rossetti wrote: Who has seen the wind? Neither I nor you: But when the leaves hang trembling, The wind is passing through. And—it is the place of miraculous burials.

As Voltaire observes: To numerous insects shall my corpse give birth, When once it mixes with its mother earth: Small comfort ’tis that when Death’s ruthless power Closes my life, worms shall my flesh devour.

Oh, build your ship of death, instructed D. H. Lawrence, your little ark / and furnish it with food, with little cakes and wine / for the dark flight down oblivion.

should you need it, there is an online site with hints on how to express sympathy: say something simple, admit you don’t have a clue what to say, and for heaven’s sake keep your religious beliefs to yourself.

“For the sake of a single poem,” wrote Rilke, “you must see many cities, many people and things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming.”