Truths

Published in 2017 in the New York Review of Books, the story's major conflict is death: how we dance around the topic, how we interpret its meaning, and how that meaning changes as we — or as others — approach the end. The notion, for instance, that the avoidance of death leaves us woefully unprepared to die, is only a slight dovetail from the concern, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, that we have not paid proper attention to end-of-life care among our aging population. Paired with the ultimate plea to his wife — about life getting worse, and going on getting worse, “until it is the very worst” — his urging to “to make the best” of death seems the promotion more of a passive sadness than a warm-blooded action. Sorrow and discomfort are “honest and real” and “a powerful sign of life,” reminding us that our lives are limited and that those limitations are, as W.H. Auden writes, “What give life and warmth to / An actual character” Auden (1991).