A man lies in bed, in pain, dying. What is he thinking about? Does he have any regrets? Is his life flashing before his eyes? Death is the great equalizer—it cares not if one was great or small, a hero or a villain, loved or unloved, famous or infamous or utterly unknown. But we care about these things. Really, we all care deeply about the meaning of our lives, so an assessment of this meaning rightly comes up in literary and cinematic reckonings with death.
In the novella The Death of Ivan Ilych, Leo Tolstoy famously reflects on this question through the story of the life and death of an ordinary man obsessed with social and professional advancement—but what for? “Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible,” Tolstoy remarks. Only as he is slowly dying—aged just one year older than I am at the time of this writing—does Ivan Ilych see the misplaced affections that have governed his life and drained it of any real meaning. His lifelong workaholism and striving for promotion have earned him nothing beyond economic reward and some degree of respectability. Upon learning of his death, his colleagues merely mutter polite niceties and begin thinking of how to take advantage of this vacancy to achieve a promotion for themselves or a relative. As for his family, there is little love there, too.
In his new novel Vigil, George Saunders picks up on this old theme with a new tale that can perhaps be best summed up as: Clarence, the angel from It’s a Wonderful Life, meets Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych. While Ilych discovers too late the lack of meaning in his life as he nears death, Clarence averts George Bailey’s suicide by showing him that the meaning of his life has been much greater and more positive than he previously realized.
In Vigil, we have a supernatural Clarence-like being trying to help a man on the verge of death. More ghost than angel, Jill “Doll” Blaine is the narrator of the tale, and her purpose, in her own words, is: “To comfort whomever I could, in whatever way I might. For this was the work our great God in Heaven had given me.” In this case, her assignment is to comfort an elderly oil tycoon, slowly and painfully dying of cancer. The titular vigil is that of the various ghosts who visit the dying man, as well as his living wife and daughter who are nearby and unaware of anything unusual or supernatural. In addition, peripherally part of the vigil is a large wedding celebration that proceeds at the house next door on this very same night, its participants well aware of the important stature of their wealthy and successful neighbor but blissfully ignorant of his looming death.
The dying man, it seems, is a true all-American rags-to-riches story personified. He is from a poor farming family. He is also quite short. Both of these features seem to have weighed greatly on him all his life. But he overcame these hurdles through hard work to become extraordinarily successful in the oil business, which has made him very wealthy. And yet, can wealth be justly earned through an industry that involves environmental damage and destruction? That is the question one of the other ghosts poses, as he confronts Jill and her purpose: “To comfort one who remains willfully ignorant of what he has done is to provide no comfort at all, he said. If you truly wish to comfort him, bring him to admit his sin, then repent of it.”
As the evening continues, the visits from successive ghosts fail to induce the dying man to repent or apologize for anything he has ever done. Jill, however, becomes increasingly agitated and begins dwelling on her own life and the death that had ended it a half century earlier when she was 22 and a newlywed. The injustice of her death increasingly troubles her and makes it difficult for her to focus on her task at hand. In a moving detour in the novel, she uses her supernatural powers to briefly visit her own hometown and revisit the places and people that meant so much to her in her life. Her tragic story, which the reader gradually gathers over the course of the novel, places her in contrast to the dying man whom she seeks to comfort. He, it seems, has no regrets and requires no comforting. She, however, grows only more distressed over her own death. Her regret is not so much over anything she had done in life, but over the fact that she had died so young, just when her married life was beginning.
George Saunders is one of the greatest novelists and short story writers in America right now—three of his previous books have been recognized on the New York Times top 100 books of the century so far, and one of these, Lincoln in the Bardo, won the Booker Prize. But there is another reason to reflect on his previous works while reading this one. Thematically, he develops in Vigil ideas about death and the process of dying that he has broached repeatedly before. In his short story “Tenth of December,” another man who is dying of cancer takes a walk in the snowy winter woods, shedding his coat in the hopes of a peaceful death by freezing. Instead, an unexpected companion interrupts his plans as a most unusual kind of deus ex machina—along with quite a few ghosts in his own mind. Meanwhile, Lincoln in the Bardo is populated by ghosts in a cemetery. The unseen world, for Saunders, is repeatedly a place of inspiration and reflection.
We live in an arrogantly materialistic age, Saunders mused in a 2016 interview with Image Journal about his art and faith, published shortly before Lincoln in the Bardo came out. Modernity keeps trying to reject anything that science cannot prove. But the world we see is not all there is. Rather, in a manner reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor, Saunders sees this world as spiritually haunted, even as he does not aim to present a coherent theology in his fiction. “Smarter generations have known that we are just sensing little bits of whatever the ultimate reality is,” Saunders told Image Journal. “They treasured those little bits, and they didn’t overanalyze them or discount them. The spiritual life acknowledges that those little glimpses are real. I can’t get back to them all the time, but I can at least not forget that they exist.”
To this spiritual reality and an exploration of the unseen world, both the ghosts of Lincoln in the Bardo and now the ghosts of Vigil belong. Ultimately, the comforter-ghost Jill feels convinced that her task of comforting the dying is good, and blaming this particular dying man, as some other visitors insist on doing, is unjust: “My charge had been born him. But had never chosen to be born him. That had just happened to him. Then life had happened to that him, exerting upon it certain deleterious effects. … It had all unscrolled just as it must. It did not seem strange to me, but inevitable. An inevitable occurrence upon which it would be ludicrous to pass judgment.” Yet Jill admits, seeing the parade of visitors, that “judgment was being passed.” Indeed, judgment was being passed on the dying man all his life. Our actions are continually judged by others, on whom they reverberate, for good or ill.
No man or woman, after all, is an island. Every person’s life touches many other lives—more, perhaps, than we all readily realize.
