There are only a couple more stories from Winesburg, Ohio that I want to share in this literary series. There are other stories in the book, and hopefully this simple look at my favorite ones will inspire you to buy the book and read the entire thing. The story I want to cover in this post is titled, “Death.” It is about the death of Elizabeth Willard, George’s mother.
Death: An Overview
In two of the previous stories in Winesburg, Ohio, we learned about Dr. Reefy (in the story “Paper Pills”) and Elizabeth Willard (in the story “Mother”). Here in “Death,” we learn about the unique friendship between the two.
At the beginning of the story, we learn that the friendship between Dr. Reefy and Elizabeth Willard began when George was around 12-14 years old. Dr. Reefy was a middle-aged man at that point—clearly this happened before his marriage to the beautiful girl from the story “Paper Pills.” We are told, though, that when he was married to the beautiful girl (during that winter they were married, before she had died in the spring), Dr. Reefy told her about Elizabeth. He described their friendship in the following way.
He said that by that time, he had “come to the time in my life when prayer became necessary, and so I invented gods and prayed to them.” With his talks with Elizabeth, he said he had finally found a woman who “worshipped also the same gods.” Simply put, the two really connected. As far as Elizabeth was concerned, after every time she went to talk with Dr. Reefy in his office, she always went back home feeling renewed and strengthened. Talking with Dr. Reefy made her feel young again and reminded her of all her hopes she once had. In particular, she remembered one man from her younger days who had been her lover who would exclaim, “You dear! You dear! You lovely dear!” and those words crystallized something that she had always hoped to achieve in life.
By the time she got back to the Willard hotel, though, she was once again the sickly, defeated woman. She would weep while thinking about something Dr. Reefy had said about love: “Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night. You must not try to make love definite. It is the divine accident of life. If you try to be definite and sure about it and to live beneath the trees, where soft night winds blow, the long hot day of disappointment comes swiftly and the gritty dust from passing wagons gathers upon lips inflamed and made tender by kisses.”
With that picture of Elizabeth back home, the scene shifts, and we learn more about her childhood. Her mother had died when she was five years old, and she had been raised by her father who ran the hotel. He was very much an introvert and did not like having to deal with people as he ran the hotel.
As a young woman, Elizabeth dreamed of adventure and wanted to find a real lover. She lost her virginity at eighteen and had a half dozen lovers before she ever met Tom Willard. But she was never motivated by sexual desire alone. She was looking for true love and a “true word.” Basically, I take that to mean that she just wasn’t sleeping around for kicks. She was yearning for true acceptance and true love. Ultimately, I think that what lies beneath the basic sexual urges within people is that longing for true acceptance, true connection, and true love. The sexual ecstasy is meant to be a reflection and manifestation of that true acceptance, connection, and love. And when it isn’t, when it is reduced to a mere physical sensation and release, it oftentimes ends up tearing away at a person’s soul instead of fulfilling and building it up. In any case, sadly, Elizabeth’s searching for true love through sexual encounters ended up sucking the life right out of her.
Tom Willard was a clerk in her father’s hotel. After yet another broken and meaningless relationship with another man and seeing that her father was getting closer to death, Elizabeth looked around at the other young women in town who had recently gotten married and seemed happy and fulfilled and decided that perhaps marriage would fill that void within her…and Tom was there.
On the night before the wedding, though, Elizabeth’s father advised her not to marry Tom, or anyone in Winesburg for that matter, so that she would be “led into another such muddle.” He told her he had stashed away $800 and told her never to give it to Tom, but to take it and get out of Winesburg. She didn’t take his advice. She married Tom, and her life had turned out like we’ve seen—a sickly, defeated middle-aged woman in a loveless marriage.
The story then shifts back to one of her talks with Dr. Reefy in his office. She spoke of how foolish she had been to marry Tom. She then told Dr. Reefy of another incident that happened months after she had married Tom. Basically, she was already unhappy and wanted to leave everything behind. One rainy day, she actually did drive her buggy out of town and intended to leave, before she gave up and went back.
In that moment, Dr. Reefy muttered, “You dear! You lovely dear! Oh you lovely dear!” He didn’t see the worn-out middle-aged woman but a young, lovely, innocent girl. They embraced and, as the story tells us, were on the point of becoming lovers. But when a clerk from the Paris Dry Goods Store walked up the steps and threw down an empty box were all the other junk was thrown, the noise startled them and Elizabeth rushed out of the office and back home.
They never talked again because Elizabeth soon became overcome with sickness. She spent the last few months of her life “hungering for death.” She would stay in her dark room and whisper, “Be patient, lover. Keep yourself young and beautiful and be patient.”
She died one day in March when George was 18 years old. At first, he couldn’t really grasp the significance of what was happening. When he was told of her death, at first he was a little resentful because he was planning to see Helen White that night. When Tom came in to see Elizabeth, despite the fact he had resented her during most of their marriage, he wept. His tears ran down his face and lodged in his mustache which, even though it had gone grey, he had colored it. We are told, “In his grief Tom Willard’s face looked like the face of a little dog that has been out a long time in bitter weather.”
Later, when George summoned the courage to go into his mother’s room, he was surprised to find Dr. Reefy sitting there. It was an awkward encounter, and soon Dr. Reefy left.
George had decided that he would definitely leave Winesburg. Strange at it may sound, as we was sitting there next to his dead mother, he began to think about kissing Helen White. He then was suddenly overcome with an urge to pull back the sheet and look at his mother’s face again. In fact, he became convinced that it wasn’t his mother under the sheet, and that the woman under the sheet was young, lovely and wasn’t dead, and would soon get up and confront him. He muttered, “That’s not my mother in there.” As soon as he was about to lift the sheet, he rushed out of the room and finally accepted the fact his mother was dead. In his grief, he was saying, “The dear, the dear, oh the lovely dear.”
As for the $800 her father had left Elizabeth. She had hidden it in a tin box in a hole in the wall by her bed that was plastered over. She had intended to tell George about it, but for the last six days of her life, she had been paralyzed and wasn’t able to speak. And so, when George finally did leave Winesburg, the $800 remained hidden.
That $800 symbolized Elizabeth’s dream of release and freedom that she never was able to fully obtain. The story ends by saying the release she longed for “came to her but twice in her life, in the moments when her lover Death and Doctor Reefy held her in their arms.”
Death: My Thoughts
As I said when discussing “Mother,” Elizabeth Willard’s story is extremely sad and tragic. Here in this story, we learn a little bit more of Elizabeth’s past that helps put what we learned about her in “Mother” into better perspective. We also, obviously, learn a bit more of Dr. Reefy. In any case, there are a few specific things about “Death” that have always stood out to me.
First, although it isn’t explained any more than the odd comment that Dr. Reefy found in Elizabeth Willard someone who “prayed to the same gods” he did, it is clear that both Dr. Reefy and Elizabeth Willard found a special bond existed between them. It was inexplicable, to be sure, and it is, in my opinion, extremely rare. But what do I know? I doubt I’ve ever experienced that kind of bond with someone, so of course I’m going to think it is extremely rare.
Second, I think Dr. Reefy’s comments on not making love definite, and his metaphorical description of love being like wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night is extremely poignant and haunting. I think his point is simply this: love is ultimately a mystery and has a life of its own. You cannot shackle it down and you’ll never be able to conclusively define it. If you try to do that, you’ll find yourself in that “hot day” of disappointment. Since love must be freely given and freely received, we must allow it to say free. As Sting sang in his song of the same name, “If you love somebody, set them free.”
Third, and related to that, is that we see that the big mistake in Elizabeth’s life was that she was searching for “one true word”—that definite thing that would give her life meaning and purpose. She thought it would be marriage, because her past choices to have lovers left her empty. By clinging to that desire for a definitive love that would make everything okay in her mind, she became imprisoned in a loveless marriage—or as Dr. Reefy said, experienced that kind of disappointment that feels like the “gritty dust from passing wagons [that] gathers upon lips inflamed and made tender by kisses.” Perhaps we can see her past lovers as those “passing wagons” that gathered upon her inflamed lips.
Furthermore, we can speculate that perhaps, if circumstances had been different, that she and Dr. Reefy could have found true love together. But, life has a way of not letting us go back and live it under different circumstances. That fleeting moment they shared together was only going to be just that—a fleeting experience. Did Dr. Reefy and Elizabeth feel true love for each other? I think they did. But love doesn’t always end in marriage—sometimes it doesn’t even end up as a relationship at all. When that happens, all one can do is look back and think, “What if…?”
Fourth, it is quite obvious that the $800 her father gave her represent her freedom—and it is something she never grasped. Granted, she didn’t give the money to Tom—it was always there in the wall, serving as her hope of freedom and a new life. Since she was beaten down and stuck in her loveless marriage, she intended to give it to George, so he could use it to find his own life and freedom. The irony is that George has already decided to leave Winesburg, and by the end of the book, he does. Still, he was never aware of the $800. In that sense, he didn’t “fulfill” his mother’s unfulfilled hopes of freedom, just as he chose not to do what Tom was wanting him to do. In the end, George takes nothing from either Elizabeth and Tom and sets out to make his way in the world.
Finally, it is haunting and sad that the only two times Elizabeth Willard felt that sense of release and true freedom where she was finally herself, was in those fleeting two moments when both Dr. Reefy and Death “held her in their arms.” Dr. Reefy gave her a temporary feeling of release from her defeated life, and Death itself, whom she called her lover, gave her that final release from her defeated life. In both cases, in the way Dr. Reefy saw her and in the way George essentially hallucinated about her under the sheet, she became that young, vibrant girl again, full of hopes and dreams. That is why both Dr. Reefy and George ended up calling her a “Lovely dear”—exactly what one of her lovers once said.
That is what she longed for—someone to see her and embrace her for who she was. Sadly, partly because of her own poor choices, she never experienced that, except with Dr. Reefy on the last day she ever talked to him. Still, somehow, George was able to get a glimpse, after her death, of who she used to be.
Life is full of poor choices and disappointment and missed opportunities. Much in life ends up in tragedy. In the case of Elizabeth Willard, it is a beautifully sad tragedy…with a glimmer of hope for those who go after her.
