but they only helped the deceased’s family in their task, they did not do
it for them.” In our era, when dying has become increasingly depersonal-
ized and commercialized, we may have forgotten that the presence of
family and friends as a loved one lay dying was once considered a sacred
obligation and that attending a deathbed was deemed to be an “instruc-
tive” privilege of high “moral value.”^2 Nowadays, says Philippe Ariès,
“death is often sanitized out of society into institutions.” Whitman’s prac-
tice of sitting by the deathbeds of the dying soldiers during the Civil War
may hark back to the importance formerly placed on these observances.
The vignette records the physician’s somber expression, the family’s vigil,
the odor of camphor in the room, the ¤nal touches and kisses bestowed
on the dying person by the loved ones, then the twitching of the expiring
body and, ¤nally, the setting in of rigor mortis. The scene is devoid of
sentimentality or terror. What the persona presumably beholds through
his preternatural powers of observation—a sight invisible to uninitiated
mortals—strikingly illustrates the poet’s belief in the possibility of an un-
broken continuity of consciousness in life and death:
Then the corpse-limbs stretch on the bed, and the living
look upon them,
They are palpable as the living are palpable.The living look upon the corpse with their eyesight,
But without eyesight lingers a different living and looks
curiously on the corpse.The spirit of the deceased individual appears to the persona as a vague,
immaterial form or essence—what the poem calls “a different living.”
This postmortal and out-of-body manifestation of the deceased looks
down “curiously” upon its cast-off carnal body—a curious relic of its just-
concluded mortal existence. Given the persona’s knack for “becoming,” or
identifying with, the individuals he observes, one can imagine that he has
momentarily “become” the deceased entity and that he shares its out-of-
body experience. The spirit-essence of the deceased person appears no
longer constrained by the limitations of space or mobility as it ®oats
freely above the corpse that is lying on the bed. Some persons who claim
to have had a “near-death experience” report that they, too, “®oated”
above the hospital beds in which their “corpses” lay, but in a different
80 / “Great Is Death”