[In the following essay, Klein considers the role of death and dying in Sarton's novels.]

Modern American society has no stronger taboo in both reality and conversation than the subject of death. Legal pronouncement, medical care facilities, and scientific investigation have combined to make dying seem like a failure of either individuals or society; it is less a natural process than an admission of inadequacy. Honest conversation about dying is rare. Pages of euphemisms designed to avoid the direct use of the word “dead” can be easily compiled. Dying is definitely not an acceptable subject whether at a cocktail party or family gatherings; even at funeral homes, one seldom hears the fact of death mentioned.

During the past ten years, psychologists and sociologists have begun to penetrate the defensive barriers established to protect society against the recognition of its own mortality. These scholarly efforts reflect, in part, a refusal to deal with the emotional stress which accepting finiteness can generate; through contrived intellectual distancing, a reader can acknowledge mentally what cannot actually be accepted. Yet the existence of these studies indicates, at least, a partial shift away from denial.

The study of thanatology has defined the anxieties which individuals experience when considering their eventual deaths. The most significant seem to be a fear of the unknown or mysterious, the failure to achieve desired goals, and the fear of catastrophic or uncontrollable destruction. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a pioneer in the study of dying patients, cites the third (fear of uncontrollable destruction) as the most dominant in her patients.¹ Accepting the knowledge that death follows no established rules, acknowledges no other commitments, permits no personal control is the most difficult for dying people to accept.

Since her earliest novels, May Sarton has consistently recognized the process of dying as an indisputable aspect of living. However, Sarton frequently permits her characters what is rare in reality—the opportunity to control the circumstances surrounding their deaths and the insight to mature through facing either death or bereavement. Their attempts to manipulate the dying process are a manifestation of the desire for knowledge; they are not merely busy finishing life's tasks except as the task is to know themselves. In particular, her characters have time to prepare themselves for dying; even when they choose to be the agents of their own deaths, they have been able to come to terms with death before having to experience it.

Few of Sarton's characters die unexpectedly during youth or middle age. Extraordinary numbers of people live well beyond the normal life span. Four-generation families and communities abound in the novels. Because maturity and wisdom come through long life and extensive experiences, old age is acknowledged as a mark of special quality. Although the characters occasionally complain of the physical limitations which accompany aging, only three of several dozen are either bedridden or confined. Although the ninety-year-old Jane Tuttle in Kinds of Love (1970) may rely on her companion for assistance in dressing and household duties, she also attends a bicentennial planning meeting, checks the health of a hawthorn tree she had planted near the old schoolhouse, and worries over the neglected condition of the local pond. Her neighbor, Christina Chapman, particularly admires what Miss Jane has achieved, partially as a reward for the maturity of old age—the ability to concentrate on a single, special item and appreciate it fully. Miss Jane's contemporaries in the community, Mamzelle, the Chapman's governess, and Old Pete, the town's hunting, non-working drunk, both respect what they have become as a result of their life's activities. Although the former is crotchety on occasion and the latter succumbs to the cold, even Old Pete, whose style of living is not ordinarily socially approved, recognizes and cherishes his independence although he may be inclined to overstate the force of his personality. A generation younger, Cornelius and Christina Chapman, are in their mid-seventies. In deciding to become “winter people,” to settle year-round in the small town where they had only summered before, the Chapmans create for themselves and recognize in their friends the maturation of their personalities. By finally setting the demands of town life aside, these two shed conventional and unwillingly assumed responsibilities to allow the influence of nature, solitary life, and introspection to reveal better ways of knowing themselves which can only come with time and age. In unspoken anticipation of their eventual deaths, they demand the opportunities for self-knowledge which they see benefiting their elders.

This rank of community generations is matched by the family longevity celebrated in Birth of a Grandfather (1957) as Aunt Jane Wyeth at 90 and her querulous brother GranQuan, ten years younger, join the sail to a small island off the coast of Maine on the fourth of July to celebrate the holiday with fireworks. Aunt Jane's death on this trip is almost incidental to the peace and security she had achieved. Despite the demands of family and particularly GranQuan, she consistently maintained her calm acceptance of life and herself. She even challenged herself, in response to her brother's pessimism, to live long enough to see her great-great-grandchild. On the other hand, her brother denies all the possibilities for increased awareness which long life allowed him. GranQuan's disappointment with religion and the death of his young wife are obsessions which, apparently, even time could not control. Having determined his stance years before and having insisted on retaining it, his final decision is to die. Nevertheless, the choices, both to reject self-discovery and to die, are demonstrably his own to make. Neither is unexpected nor unaccepted.

The opposite of these characters in material comfort and family affection are Miss Caro Spencer and her bedridden friend Standish Flint in As We Are Now (1973), who find themselves in the most ignominious circumstances to which old age can lead. Left by her equally aged brother, Caro is confined to an inadequate nursing home. Although age has allowed her to come to self-awareness and understanding, it has also almost denied her the means to effectuate this knowledge. Both she and Standish recognize that continued existence is a denial of their previous lives. She meticulously plots her own emotional salvation; neither her age nor her circumstances can restrain her.

For almost all of Sarton's characters, to be old is a privilege. They pass through the uncertainties and follies of youth, survive the ambiguities of middle age, and finally find the time to assimilate their knowledge—to achieve wisdom. Additionally, they are allowed sufficient time to come to terms with dying, to welcome rather than fear it. For those who must die before their natural discovery of wisdom, the final months or weeks are filled with intense efforts to connect with the essential elements of existence. To achieve this purpose, they seem able to mold the dying process itself.

Clearly the greatest degree of control individuals can exercise over their own death is to commit suicide, thus choosing the time, place, and means of death. Even uncompleted suicide attempts are demands for control of life. John Chapman (Kinds of Love) and Standish Flint (As We Are Now), dissatisfied with the quality of their lives, attempt to improve them by ending them. In Faithful are the Wounds (1955) Edward Carven's frustrations and disappointments since childhood are acknowledged by Sarton's emphasis on his choice of creating his life by deciding to commit suicide. Caro Spencer, on the other hand, battles against the idea of suicide, frequently rejecting it, yet gradually she comes to decide that she has no alternatives. Keeping a journal not to guard against loss of memory so much as to distill experience, she begins:

I call it The Book of the Dead. By the time I finish it I shall be dead. I want to be ready, to have everything together and sorted out, as if I were preparing for a great final journey. I intend to make myself whole here in this Hell. So, in a way, this path inward and back into the past is like a map, the map of my world. If I can draw it accurately, I shall know where I am.²

Her conclusions about death are most clear when she decides that it is more brave to destroy the nursing home than to continue existing in it:

It is strange that now I have made my decision I can prepare for death in a wholly new way. I feel free, beyond attachment, beyond the human world at last. I rejoice as the old can (for the newborn infant cannot see) the marvels of the world. … I have believed since I came here that I was here to prepare for death, but I did not yet known how to do it. At first I felt I must cling to myself, keep my mind alive somehow. That was the task set before me, a losing battle, for the best I could hope for was to stand still in the same place. Progress in an intellectual sense was clearly out of the question. It ended in greater and greater frustration and anger.

I see, now that death is not a vague prospect but something I hold in my hand, that the very opposite is required from what I thought at first. I am asked to listen to music, to look at the bare trees divested of all their fine structure, drink in the sunset like wine, read poetry again. … I am gathering together all that matters most, tasting it for the last time. As I do this, everything mundane falls away.

(125-26)

She again questions her willingness to die while she is still being treated kindly. The discovery of her journal and her fear of finally being thwarted give her the courage finally to set the nursing home on fire. Her suicide is a carefully conceived and considered plan. Her control over the entire operation is complete; her secret remains unrevealed. Despite her questions to the visiting minister about forgiveness, she accepts total responsibility for her actions and her own life. When Caro Spencer comes to know precisely what is most crucial about her existence, she controls both knowledge and life; in those moments of self-awareness, she experiences the fullness of her self.

However, the perceived violence of self-destruction is difficult for the complacent and ordinary to accept; the idealization of dying described in The Single Hound (1938) is the attractive prospect most people prefer to anticipate:

… now after a long gentle illness her mother was dying. … Now she was dying, like the daughter of a princess, very gently and gravely. Death could be in no way terrible when it was approached with such graciousness. Her mother seemed small and childlike now, and in the month of March when the blackbird started singing again, she died.

(12)

The reiteration of the word “gentle” and the reference to the ordinarily unpredictable month of March as a time of songbirds highlight the feeling of peaceful death despite the length of the dying process. The illness becomes insignificant in comparison with the dignity of death. This pleasant and reassuring prospect is not often validated by reality. Coming to terms with one's own mortality is often demanding and cruel; so much is outside the individual's ability to affect.

Sarton prefers to emphasize the areas in which the dying person has control over circumstances surrounding the death. Both Edward and Isabelle Caven's mother (Faithful are the Wounds) and Persis Bradford in Shadow of a Man (1950) maintain an independence of spirit despite their declining physical condition. Thus Mrs. Caven keeps her ill health a secret from her devoted son so that he will not abandon his studies abroad. Persis Bradford, a dominant and self-assured woman, keeps her impending death a complete secret for reasons never entirely specified. Both women have sufficient time in which to reach a state of acceptance rather than fight against their inevitable deaths. Each is also apparently sustained and comforted by being able to determine who should know of her condition when she could not actually control the dying process itself. At a time when the self seems about to be annihilated, these areas of authority become, for these women, the means to assert their own personalities.

Rather than being a secret, the discovery of Bill Waterford's cancer in Birth of a Grandfather not only provides him with the opportunity to discover the focus of his life, but also allows his friend Sprig Wyeth to reconcile certain warring sensations in himself. Until forced to divest himself of his normal activities, Bill had always regretted the time allotted to teaching rather than writing his book. Only when forced by illness to relinquish his classes and graduate students does he recognize the satisfaction he received throughout his career from his students. His frantic efforts to finish the book gradually abate as he comes closer to death. Finally, he acknowledges his willingness to die despite his wife's encouragement to fight for his life. His control over the illness and his dying is manifest twice: when he insists that his wife Nora not be told the severity of his illness and when he signals acceptance of his imminent death. Although Sprig finally agrees with Bill's readiness to die, he must also gradually work through his own stages of shock and disbelief. Gradually he comes to substitute his dying friend for all that was important to him previously precisely because the dying Bill will make no impossible demands after his death. Using his friend's dying as a shield, Sprig is also able to control his own life more easily, from initially rejecting it to recognizing finally the compulsions which have created his feelings of separation from all but his dying friend.

However, in no other novel does Sarton devote herself so clearly to the value and control of the dying process than in A Reckoning (1978). Faced with inoperable lung cancer at the age of sixty, Laura Spelman recognizes immediately “I am to have my own death. I can play it my way.”³ Courageous and exhilerated, she decides to do it “well.” Her control over her dying takes several different forms. For a brief while, she keeps the information to herself, refusing to share the news, and thus the management of her life, with her children or her sisters. At first, only her mother, too senile to understand; her Aunt Mina, a wise ninety-year-old survivor; and her friend Ella in England are informed. Laura demands the right to be selfish, to concentrate on the essential connections rather than to be drawn into the demands of her family and friends, even as the news is gradually leaked to her six closest kin. As Laura weakens physically, her hope of remaining physically independent is relinquished to forestall the greater loss of control a hospital confinement would inevitably produce. Restricted and weakened by “Brother Ass,” her failing body, she limits her activities, accepts a nurse-housekeeper, and permits her children and sisters brief periods of hovering concern.

Despite these compromises, Laura remains true to her initial pledge—to make “a reckoning” of the significance of her life and relationships. She discovers, with growing satisfaction and comfort, that her closest ties are to other women despite historical and social restrictions against sharing the female experience. To understand her glittering, destructive mother is Laura's first challenge and final reckoning. Through advising a troubled young lesbian writer and discussing with her sisters their own youthful attachments to women—all destroyed by the girls' mother—Laura rejects the separation of women from each other but also intensifies her rejection of her own mother. Attempting to connect with her daughter Daisy, Laura experiences not only the shared confidences but also the rejection which Daisy seems to provoke in prefering her grandmother's style. All of these meetings are both satisfying and unsettling, as is the dying process itself. Not until Laura's girlhood friend, her other self, Ella, arrives from England, drawn by the same urgency which has left Laura's searching incomplete, does the pattern of women with women come into clear focus. “I couldn't let go—and I didn't know what I was waiting for” she tells Ella (249). Ella's arrival finally helps Laura bring her own life to a completed circle; she comes not simply to their college years together but to an understanding of the first women in her life—her mother, who was afraid of “communication. Something women are only beginning to tap, to understand, a kind of tenderness towards each other as women” (252). With this understanding of herself and her life, the women and the “connections” which have mattered most, Laura achieves a reckoning: “Laura knew the tide had turned and was beginning to ebb. … Then she was floating away. … She had to let go” (254).

Laura Spelman is brave enough to demand death in her own time and very much her own way. Deliberately distancing herself from the grief and the bewilderment of others, she concentrates on knowing herself. Having so little time, she honestly recognizes the need to use her physical and emotional strength in this search. Like most of Sarton's other aged or dying characters, Laura is fortunate enough to succeed in her quest.

Without these degrees of control over their situations, the characters would have felt abandoned in the face of a catastrophe they could not influence. Their insistence on regulating whatever aspects of their lives possible is a measure of their involvement in that part of life which includes dying rather than mere resignation to a fate they could not actually avoid.

The dying person's understandable need for control over the process and kind of self-centering which focuses on the essentials often creates another category of questions. In bereavement and grief, characters still living need to find some means of coping with death. For Joanna and her father in Joanna and Ulysses (1963) grieving meant keeping totally silent not only about her mother's death but also about her life. For years they had negated her existence by refusing to acknowledge her execution during the war for aiding escaped prisoners. When this denial was finally abandoned, they could begin to control their lives. Joanna begins to paint well; she and her father re-establish communications. They are no longer imprisoned by their inability to acknowledge death. Feeling his existence suspended by the death of his mother, Persis Bradford, Francis Chabrier leaves the U. S. to try becoming reconciled with himself. His love affair with Solange Bernard, with France, with his heritage, and, eventually, with his inner self free Francis to accept his mother's death in terms of both the loss in his life and the recognition of what had been between them before the death. His growing friendship with Alan Bradford, despite his dislike of his mother's second husband during the years of their marriage, is a sign of clearer self-understanding. Only his declaration of marriage seems more a leap of faith than an act of understanding. Symbolically, in Birth of a Grandfather, the new child is born only after Bill Waterford has died. The reactions of the characters to both rites of passage are similar: on his way to the hospital for his daughter's delivery, Sprig restates what he and others have felt about Bill's death: “My God, I'm not ready for this” (274). Sprig's own rebirth, for which he had not been ready much of his adult life, follows his grandchild's birth in response to Bill's order to “begin.” Suddenly, the combination of events allows Sprig to see himself clearly, finally, and to decide how he can best be true to himself. All of these grievers, in abandoning the social reluctance to acknowledge death, enrich rather than diminish their own lives.

The primary emphasis of Sarton's concern with death is the manner in which the dying and those who live on can use the circumstances of death. Dominating death is impossible; the best alternative is to come to terms with dying, to recognize it as a stage of human growth and maturation. When all other needs and demands can be set aside to concentrate on living one's last months rather than dying through them, essential concerns become obvious. To recognize what is important is the first step; to know one's own needs and demand the opportunity to explore them are not put aside but properly cherished. Coming to self-knowledge is the true way of rounding off and finishing life. With this fulfillment, death is not a negation but an affirmation of existence.

Notes

1. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (New York: Macmillan, 1969).

2. May Sarton, As We Are Now (New York: Norton, 1973), p. 10. Subsequent references are to this edition.

3. May Sarton, A Reckoning (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 7. Subsequent references are to this edition.