By Victoria Hudson Hayes

but if a living dance upon dead minds
why, it is love;^[1]

Camille Saint-Saëns’ Danse macabre, Op. 40, opens with a D struck twelve times for midnight, inviting death to emerge from its grave and dance.^[2] Its earliest iteration, for orchestra and voice, featured the text of a poem by Dr. Henri Cazalis — Zig zig zig on his violin/The winter wind blows and the night is dark^[3] — but audiences objected on the grounds that it made them feel weird, so Saint-Saëns replaced the voice with a violin, Franz Liszt transcribed the piece for piano, and pretty soon it was 1929 and Walt Disney’s skeletons were absolutely cranking it all over the cemetery.^[4]

Danse macabre has since scored figure skating routines, whiskey commercials, and a short scene in the first episode of “What We Do in the Shadows.” You can catch it near the end of Shrek the Third and install it as your vehicle’s horn in Grand Theft Auto Online under the title “Halloween Loop 2.” In 1872, it was an appeal: remember death. Now it’s the quintessential spooky jingle.

but at the earliest spear
of sun perfectly should disappear
moon’s utmost magic, or stones speak

I didn’t finish Sherwin Nuland’s How We Die because my grandfather was dying and I got busy scrubbing the mouth of the garbage disposal — I was worried about some smell I couldn’t identify, vaguely warm and nutty, emanating from the bowels of the sink — the hospice aides came and went, bathed him twice a week. He had stopped talking and eating (his face thin in a way I recognize now) but when asked how he felt he’d hold up forefinger circled to thumb — okay. Satisfied that the sink was clean and the smell intractable and the gist of how we die was incomparably, no matter how common, I moved on to the cabinets and the floors. His nurse, young and lovely with a sweet Mississippi drawl: “We never really know for sure how long,” and I stopped dusting the baseboards to listen, “but my best guess is a few days from here.”

or one
name control more incredible splendor than
our merely universe, love’s also there:

The history of the dance of death is much older than Saint-Saëns, dating back to the fifteenth century at least, to a mural painted on a charnel house in Paris (a vigorous procession of skeletons grinning and gamboling),^[5] to a time when death was immediate, visceral, indiscriminate. In our homes, our beds.

Paul-Louis Landsberg argued that our understanding of death’s finality and necessity requires la mort du prochain — the end of some fellow creature we’ve loved, with whom we’ve formed an “us” — such that death is felt personally, in our own hearts.^[6] Today, about a third of Americans die in hospital beds, and another quarter or so in nursing homes or hospice facilities.^[7] An undertaker whisks away the body before it’s quite cold; wakes are held as a matter of tradition, not of public mourning and rum consumption and reassurance that the decedent is really dead. We go home to houses untouched by the whole affair, wearing our most regular clothes.

and being here imprisoned, tortured here
love everywhere exploding maims and blinds

Dudley Murphy’s 1922 short film Danse Macabre, set to the composition bySaint-Saëns, sees Youth and Love do their best to ignore the translucent presence of the Black Plague playing the violin.^[8] They sweep about the room pulling dramatic faces, flinging limbs. This, in my experience of people who hear death’s dulcet tritones, is not far off the mark. They reach toward the window, the door. Drop jaws. Shake heads, no. Cheeks sink and eyes grow huge sometimes, as if looking into a dark room.

Occasionally, people come to the hospice inpatient unit with full code status, meaning they want to be manhandled, shocked, carted to the nearest emergency department when their heart quits. Our nurse practitioner carries a clipboard and initiates a frank conversation: Resuscitation at this point is not likely to get you back to functioning. You could wind up on a vent. Most opt for a DNR.

Then I bring in dinner. Casserole, I say. Smells good. Do you want me to butter this roll?

(but surely does not forget,perish, sleep

One of my residents, Ms. Mary, is alert and oriented and exploding. Every evening around five she gets frantic. She calls her husband over and over, hair limp across her hot forehead. Closes her eyes to the sound of his voicemail. Why doesn’t he answer? I empty her Foley into the toilet, take my gloves off, rub on sanitizer, smooth her hair back. I’m so sorry, Ms. Mary. I ask the nurse to give her some Ativan, which does not answer her question but does let her sleep.

cannot be photographed ,measured; disdains
the trivial labelling of punctual brains…

Thomas Jefferson suggested a “ripeness”—that death, finally, was a reasonable thing, a correct and rational development in any fruiting body. That we must “drop off” to make room.^[9] In “Death’s Echo,” Auden paints a death that crescendos against the mountain bivouac and the singing stream: dance while you can. But critics are reluctant to read this as a memento mori or carpe diem.^[10] Dancing, after all, is what the dead do.

—Who wields a poem huger than the grave?
from only Whom shall time no refuge keep

Ms. Mary brightens when I come in this morning, belly-first. Seven months pregnant, I have to stand back from her bed to bend over it. “It’s a joy to see you,” she says, referring to my part in the dance (the part my belly is playing, rotund, straining the seams of my scrubs). I help her lean up and pull a fresh gown over her head. This one is pink with lace at the cuffs. She asks if we’ve chosen names and I tell her we’re keeping them a surprise, but then I tell her the girl name anyway. Chill bumps spring up on my arms. “Mm,” she says approvingly. “That’s unusual.” With arthritic fingers she fumbles at buttons. “I like uncommon names.”

though all the weird worlds must be opened?

Lucretius, too, spoke of fruit and seasons in an effort to render death both palatable and necessary. “The worst that can befall thee, measured right/Is a sound slumber and a long good-night…/One being, worn, another makes;/Changed, but not lost; for nature gives and takes:/”^[11]

And Ms. Mary dies a few days later, taking my baby’s name with her, and a little world opens I guess, and time, huge, grows huger.

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[1] E.E. Cummings, “but if a living dance upon dead minds.”

[2] Collins, Cynthia. “Saint-Saëns and His Danse Macabre for Halloween.” CMUSE, July 1, 2018.cmuse.org/saint-saens-and-his- danse-macabre-for-halloween/.

[3] Hollywood Bowl. “Danse Macabre, Camille Saint-Saëns,” hollywoodbowl.com/musicdb/pieces/284/danse-macabre.

[4] Warner, Andrea. “Danse Macabre: A Brief History of Halloween’s Haunting Anthem.” CBC, October 28, 2019. cbc.ca/music/ read/danse-/macabre-a-brief-history-of-halloween-s-haunting-anthem-1.5062586.

[5] Gotschall, Bethany Corriveau. “A Brief History of the ‘Danse Macabre’” Atlas Obscura, August 2, 2024. atlasobscura.com/ articles/danse-macabre-david-pumpkins-art-history.

[6] Choron, Jacques. Death and Western Thought. Macmillan Publishing Co., 1963.

[7] “QuickStats: Percentage of Deaths,* by Place of Death† — National Vital Statistics System, United States, 2000–2018.” MMWR Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 69, no. 19 (May 14, 2020): 611. doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm6919a4.

[8] “Light Cone – DANSE MACABRE,” lightcone.org/en/film-10388-danse-macabre.

[9] Nuland, Sherwin B. How We Die. Vintage Books, 1997.

[10] Bús, Éva. “‘Death’s Echo’ and ‘Danse Macabre’: Auden and the Medieval Tradition of Death Lyrics.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS), vol. 14, no. 1, 2008, pp. 83–93. JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/41274409. Accessed 28 Sept. 2024.

[11] Choron, Death and Western Thought.

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Victoria Hudson Hayes lives in Arkansas with her husband and son. She likes to look at deer and snow. To make a living, she edits things, butters rolls, changes briefs. You can find her work in jubilat, Passages North, Prairie Schooner, and Pleiades.