Short Stories About Dying Begin With Haunting Images From Life

“I know when one is dead.” The line is King Lear’s; the dead one, his youngest daughter Cordelia; the writer, Shakespeare. I have seen many great actors (and even actresses) read that line. And yet the performance I remember best is that of the critic and teacher Richard Sewell in a lecture theater filled with 300 college students.

It was the first class of the term. We all knew that Sewell, a gentle man with a bewildered shock of white hair, had just lost his wife over the winter vacation. “I know when one is dead,” Sewell began. “I know when one is dead.” Sewell repeated the line three times before he left the stage. We sat. Until that point, I had never known.

Later that year, I saw the premiere of Michael Cristofer’s extraordinary stage play “The Shadow Box,” which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in drama. The play is set in a hospice, a sanctuary for the terminally ill, where relief of pain replaces hope as the final treatment. The institution of the hospice was a relatively new phenomenon in the prelapsarian years before AIDS, and Cristofer, in the great dramatic tradition of Shakespeare, provoked a great deal of talk about the untalkable.

Twenty years later, we are individually fatigued and collectively Kevorkianized to a point where we no longer can dredge up the strength to talk about death with originality. Yet A.G. Mojtabai tries.

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After working for many years in a Texas hospice, Mojtabai, the author of six novels, including “Called Out” and “Ordinary Time,” has translated her experience into “Soon,” a collection of 16 short stories, each a flight of the imagination, departing from an image Mojtabai witnessed only through a glass darkly--”a woman in a turban, sitting up in bed, writing one letter after another . . . a woman combing her mother’s hair . . . a woman with an orchid pinned to her pillow. . . .”

Separated from the dying and their families by force fields of dignity and discomfort, Mojtabai was drawn to invent the letters, the conversations beneath the brush, the provenance of the orchid.

Sadly, the invention rarely soars above the initial image. She writes in a quiet prose that seems to flutter around the candle without ever burning its wings--which is what we want. What remains are ordinary stories about ordinary people--a steady cast of nurses and workers and volunteers along with the transient passengers--with only the barest residue to remind the reader why death and all its trappings can stir the passions.

The most compelling of the scenes features a man who is determined to chronicle his own passing. In “Zone,” Mr. Straughn treats his impending death as a unique journalistic opportunity and outfits himself with an array of tools to aid him in his reportage--pens, tape recorders, even an alphabet board that he can point to when too weak to speak. “I want to tell it fresh. I mean to. If it’s at all humanly possible, I’ll do it.” The impossibility of the task is the most potent message of the book.

And yet, like Mr. Straughn, we all turn to the videotape. As we rage, weep, smile and howl, we share Mojtabai’s need to invent stories to guide us, especially as we watch others shuffle off this mortal coil. There is no greater knowledge, the king tells us, and perhaps no greater madness, than to know when one is dead.