THE ART OF ... book series from Graywolf Press focuses on writing craft and criticism. In each compact volume an accomplished writer takes on a single element or theme. The most recent entry in the series is The Art of Death, by Edwidge Danticat.
Danticat’s reflections on a wide variety of literature that wrestles with death—from Taiye Selasi’s debut novel, Ghana Must Go, to C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed—offer insights for readers as much as for writers. She explores the complicated emotional landscape of death and mourning, but also the myriad ways, tangled in questions of both justice and mercy, that death comes: accident, illness, deadly disasters, suicides, executions.
Danticat frames the book with the experience of accompanying her mother as she died from ovarian cancer. She is unflinching, yet tender, as she describes the indignities visited on a dying body, reading the Bible and praying with her devout mother, and the specific intricacies of their love, shaped in part by immigration (from Haiti) and a long separation when Edwidge was a child. Every death, every grief, is different, but in a well-told story of one woman’s loss is universal wisdom.
IN PILGRIM at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard wrote, “I think that the dying pray at the last not ‘please,’ but ‘thank you,’ as a guest thanks his host at the door.”
Before his death in May from a brain tumor, Portland magazine editor Brian Doyle wrote about the quick and the dead (including, more than once, road-kill squirrels), about the beauty of basketball, hawks, and his elderly parents, about growing up and staying Catholic, all imbued with unsentimental gratitude and self-deprecating humor. So it is true to form that Doyle’s “Last Prayer” begins, “Dear Coherent Mercy: thanks. Best life ever.”
Doyle was prolific, writing novels, essays, and prose-poems as well as editing several anthologies. The Kind of Brave You Wanted to Be is his second collection of “proems.” They are snapshots of regular life and memories, often funny, all testifying that “Whatever we think is quotidian isn’t,” with nary a use of words like “holy” or “God.” If you’re unfamiliar with his style, it can take a few pages to enter the flow of his untraditional form. It’s worth the small effort, and maybe will change, at least a little, the way you see and live the mundane, sacred moments of your own life.
In an essay in Sojourners’ pages, Doyle made this simple-not-simple observation, a philosophy borne out in his writing: “You either walk toward love or away from it with every breath you draw.”
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