The speaker in "The Cossacks" is a pessimistic person, a fact she reveals in the first stanza. The first line describes her feeling that demise is always on the way. While she makes this statement as a comment about the Jewish community from which she comes, the poem is really about her own feeling that the worst awaits her. Perhaps she feels comfort or justification in her feelings by being part of a collective mind-set, which is why she claims that her pessimism is part of her culture. Regardless of why she feels the way she does, her grim outlook on life shapes her experience of life. Most of the first stanza describes that experience; she assumes that a spot on her own arm is the beginning of cancer, and she chooses to spend New Year's Eve totaling up the people who died that year instead of planning for a wonderful new year ahead. Thoughts of death pervade her thinking, and she sees death as a menacing and violent hunter.

The speaker's pessimism also shapes the way she sees other people. In the second stanza, she discusses her mother's final days as death approached. Because she knew her mother so well, she feels confident in saying that the manners her mother exhibited to visitors were merely covering her real feelings. In the third stanza, she wonders whether her friend adopted the same strategy. She wonders whether her friend's serenity in her final days was denial or repressed feelings. Because the speaker holds such a pessimistic view of death, she interprets other people's experience through that lens. Even at the end of the poem, when she claims to want to embrace optimism and hope, she cannot help but feel the impending doom of death.

In describing her mother's death, the speaker recalls visitors coming and being greeted by superficial chat about books and vacation destinations. The speaker says her mother displayed "serenity / as a form of manners." Rather than engage visitors in meaningful ways that might give them closure and peace, her mother prefers the safety of small talk. She does not want to show the emotions—fear, regret, uncertainty, or sadness—that would be expected at such a time. What is particularly interesting about her mother is that she has nothing to lose in being honest with her friends and family at this time. She is facing death, so there would be no consequences of sharing her true feelings with them, yet she chooses to remain confined within the comfort and familiarity of idle chat. Her social mask seems to be such a part of her personality that, even in her final hours, she cannot remove it.

In contrast, F. has no use for a social mask because, in her final hours, she has genuine peace. She makes plans for a future that will include her, perhaps for the benefit of those who will carry on without her. F. chooses to spend her time engaged in something meaningful, even if her plans will not be fulfilled. Perhaps F. is playing out important "what if" scenarios, or perhaps she is letting her friends and family know that she expects them to continue living satisfying lives without her. Whatever her reasons, she occupies her final days with something more meaningful than shallow discussions of books and travel, as the speaker's mother chose to do. The speaker can tell the difference between her mother and F., even though they both show serenity in their times of crises. The reader can assume that the speaker has this insight because she, too, struggles with her own social mask, but her awareness of it (as evident in the poem) indicates her desire to live without it.