Getting to Know Death
Gail Godwin
Bloomsbury, 2024, $27
Let’s face it: Most of us actively avoid confronting mortality until it looms so large that we simply can’t avoid it. In Getting to Know Death—A Meditation, celebrated Woodstock author Gail Godwin recounts falling in her garden at 85 years old while attempting to water a newly planted dogwood tree, and fracturing her neck (the C2 bone, or the colorfully nicknamed “hangman’s break”). The book recounts, in lucid prose, her moment-to-moment decisions after the fall—calculating the distance needed to reach the house after finding herself on the ground, baking in the sun, head and neck twisted to the left, blood dripping. She butt-walks to the steps, managing to reach the phone and dial 911.
As it turns out, there are too many potential complications to first consider operating, so Godwin wears a hard collar for a spell, and is admitted into a rehab/nursing facility. Such an experience can summon dread—a cold, sterile environment; sharing a room with a stranger in decline; being tended to by heartless functionaries—but Godwin finds some light. She befriends her roommate, Agnes, and softens to the rule-bound attendant. She also finds a caregiver, Rusa, who becomes a happy part of her ensuing life. She returns home, but after six months another scan reveals the unwanted news that the break has widened and surgery is required.
Godwin enriches a medical/aging procedural by weaving in the stories of key relationships in her life, brushes with mortality, and pressing sociopolitical topics. As a child, her friend Pat was brave enough to drink from a water fountain labeled “BLACK,” disproving a widespread myth that your skin would turn black after doing so. The water fountain locale: Pack Square in Asheville, North Carolina, is where the Vance monument was situated—a memorial to a three-time Civil War governor and a slave owner. The monument was removed in the wake of Black Lives Matter, but it may yet be restored. (See recent news about the restoration of Confederate names to two Virginia schools.)
Death has played a prominent, ominous role in her life—her father and brother committed suicide. Raised by her mother and stepfather, Godwin had seen her father twice before inviting him to her high school graduation; he then invited her to spend time at the beach with him and his new wife. He rustles up a scrap of paper with the doctor’s diagnosis of his ailment to show his daughter: “Psychoneurotic, with compulsion to drink.”
The day after celebrating their mother’s birthday, her brother shot his girlfriend and himself after a fight in her car, where a gun lay in the glovebox for protection. Godwin links their death to the NRA (to which her brother belonged), which pushed for ease of arms access, positing that if no gun had been present, they would not have died.
Godwin weaves in quotes and concepts from other writers such as Kevin Powers, E. E. Cummings, Henry James, and Samuel Beckett, whose terseness inspires her. She also includes a poem by her friend Pat with this stanza: “How to climb down / Into my death.” It’s about ascending and descending a high dive platform via a ladder as a youngster, then the Eiffel Tower at an advanced age and finally asking for help.
The final page tells of the felling of the dogwood tree that caused her to break her neck. Godwin’s volume proves the lasting power of the writer, deploying her skill as a weapon, even while staring down death.
This article appears in June 2024.
