Reviewed by Ruth Latta
Getting to Know Death: A Meditation
by Gail Godwin
Bloomsbury Publishing
June 2024, Hardcover, 192 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1639734443
To get the most of Gail Godwin’s new book, Getting to Know Death: A Meditation, one must pay attention to the subtitle. In literary terms, a meditation is a written discourse of the author’s reflections on philosophical and religious matters, which may also guide others in their contemplations. In defining her book as a meditation, Godwin adopts the genre of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180 A.D.) whose Meditations include notes and brief paragraphs recording his effort to understand himself and the world. Later in history, René Descartes (1596–1650) the French mathematician, scientist and philosopher, wrote Meditations on First Philosophy. He’s famous for saying, “I think, therefore I am.”
Godwin is at a time of life when one thinks a lot about death. As all senior citizens know, the loss of loved ones brings home the truth of John Donne’s statement, “Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, because it tolls for thee.” Ever since reading her novel, The Odd Woman, in 1974, I have been hooked on Godwin’s novels, and have read all fourteen, as well as her two short story collections and three non-fiction books. She has also written ten libretti, collaborating with her partner, the composer Robert Starer., who died in 2001. Among her novels, my favourites are Violet Clay; The Finishing School; Father Melancholy’s Daughter; Flora, and A Southern Family. Reading Getting to Know Death, I was interested to see how her personal life has been a source for her fiction.
This latest non-fiction book does not flow like a story, rather, it reveals Godwin’s trains of thought, which, like everybody’s thought patterns, get interrupted by events, then spring to mind again. She jumps back and forth, including a scholarly essay, poems and sayings by literary figures, and tributes to significant people in her life, both past and present. Indirectly, she offers suggestions as to how to handle our loved-ones’ deaths, and ultimately, our own.
In June 2022, Godwin had a serious accident which dominated a year of her life. She went out to water a “languishing” dogwood tree in her yard in Woodstock, New York, and fell on the gravel walkway, twisting her head and neck. She then “butt-walked” the thirty feet to her house, crawled over the threshold and somehow got to the kitchen telephone to dial 9-1-1. When the rescue squad and emergency medical team arrived to put her in a temporary neck brace, she had flashbacks to her beloved Robert also leaving their home by ambulance twenty-one years earlier. Though she never thought she could live on in their house after his death, she did.
Then, in the next section of the meditation, Godwin surprises us (and furthers suspense) by switching to memories of Pat, her friend for seventy-seven years. Both women had discussed making an early exit on their own terms if their sufferings in old age became intolerable. Pat, however, died of natural causes in a care facility, and wrote a poem “Cowardly” about her decision to wait for Death. In a letter which Godwin includes, Pat wrote:
I feel that I am living in another world already…And if there is another life, fantasies of the next time fascinate me. But if there is no other, to merge with the air and the earth would be an honour too.
The most compelling section of Godwin’s meditation recounts the stories of two family members who reached a “desperate place” and committed suicide. Raised by her mother (the breadwinner), and her grandmother, (her caregiver), she saw her father only twice during her childhood. At age eleven Gail went to life with her mother and stepfather, a twenty-three year old World War II veteran who had anger issues and was controlling and abusive, in all senses of the latter term.
Godwin felt in a “desperate place” at eighteen, when she graduated with top honours from high school but with no money or scholarships for college. On impulse, she invited her birth father to her graduation, and he came and rescued her from her plight. At fifty, after a wild, unstable life, he’d remarried, found a good job, and was eager to make amends. Godwin moved to his home and attend college in North Carolina. All seemed well for three years; then he committed suicide.
In 1983, Godwin’s stepbrother killed himself. He was the troubled child of the family, who “took to heart the family’s fractures as well as the world’s,” she writes. “A modern Samaritan”, he made amusing stories out of his woes, “as a knight-errant who picked himself up, dusted himself off and set out on his next mission.”
Author W. Somerset Maugham once wrote that “The disadvantages and dangers of the author’s calling are offset by an advantage so great as to make all its difficulties, disappointments, and hardships, unimportant… Nothing befalls him that he cannot transmute into a stanza, a song, or a story, and having done this, be rid of it. The artist is the only free man.” Perhaps in an attempt to alleviate her grief and to transform tragedy into art, Godwin has written about these two deaths, recreating her father as a failed writer, “Uncle Ambrose” in Violet Clay, and revealing the pain surrounding her brother’s death in A Southern Family.
In the latter novel, two women friends in their forties, very like herself and her friend Pat, discuss aging. For a happy or tolerable old age, they concluded, one needs a “power base.” One power base is fame/legacy, which the writer friend considers undependable and fleeting. The other power bases they identify are money, a spiritual life, and finally, being “ a beloved local person.” This last is achievable by most of us.
As many of her novels indicate, Godwin’s religion (Christian, Episcopalian) has always been central to her life. Several of her books feature kindly nuns and pastors ( e.g Father Melancholy’s Daughter, Evensong and The Good Husband), and the last libretto she wrote was about St. Hilda of Whitby. In an amusing passage, she writes of her interest in the findings of the Jesus Seminar, the group of Biblical scholars who studied Jesus’s stories and sayings to distinguish the authentic ones from those modified or invented by the early church. To her disappointment, she learned that many of her favourite Bible stories were considered to be products of the storytellers’ imaginations She was glad, though, that the authors found Jesus’s voice distinctive and that his teachings were “worth a lifetime’s pursuit.”
Her partner, Robert Starer, often said that “an artist should always have one work between himself and death.” During her recovery from her accident, Godwin had to set aside a work-in -progress about a father, two daughters and a governess who live on top of a remote bald mountain for two months, learning from one another “until the dark clouds gather.” Though Godwin’s dogwood tree did not survive, one hopes that Godwin, now eighty-seven, will live long, prosper and complete this novel, which sounds intriguing.
About the reviewer: Ruth Latta’s latest novel, A Striking Woman, (Ottawa, Baico, 2023) is a story of true love and trade union organizing.