So Frail a Thing Is Man : Thinking the unthinkable: Today’s politics and literature consider death

A generation has passed since Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ “On Death and Dying.” That book, published in 1970, claimed that American medicine--or, more accurately, the culture of the American hospital--was in the grip of a massive denial of death.

For some, “On Death and Dying” marked an epoch. For others, it marked only an all too familiar American cycle from oblivion of death to obsession with it.

“Final Exit,” Derek Humphrey’s best-selling euthanasia manual, appearing, as it does, on the eve of the vote on Initiative 119, Washington state’s “aid-in-dying” proposition, seems a new round in the same cycle.

The ethics of the book and the initiative apart, we wonder whether they are not both part of an obscure American struggle toward candor about death. For, despite the violence of our popular entertainments and the mayhem on our streets, we remain oddly evasive about the unavoidable.

It was not ever thus. In an earlier era, death was a part of every American schoolchild’s curriculum.

Consider, for example, a 1691 bedtime prayer that many Americans still know by heart:

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray the Lord my soul to keep;

If I should die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

Though it is the cozy first couplet and the image of little sleepyheads in nightshirts that linger in most contemporary memories, the prayer has been criticized in some quarters for its ominous second couplet. And yet when first published as part of the New England Primer, “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” was preceded by a quatrain that read even more ominously:

Our days begin with trouble

here,

Our life is but a span,

And cruel death is always near,

So frail a thing is man.

In 1691, it seems, American children went to bed consciously prepared to die during the night.

The New England Primer is undeniably quaint. In 1991, it is impossible not to smile at the thought of boys in homespun and girls in gingham reading a line like:

Xerxes did die,

And so must I.

And yet the truth of which the primer wanted to remind 17th-Century children is a truth still for 20th-Century adults. If for nothing else, “Final Exit” and Initiative 119 deserve credit for serving up an effective memento mori to a culture that would rather forget.