Premee Mohamed Guest Post
How old were you when you first met Death?
No, not death (by the way, belated condolences for Mr. Bubbles, the grade three homeroom betta fish, RIP). Capital-D Death, the skeleton in the black robe with the hourglass and the scythe. Was it in a cartoon (maybe the cigar-smoking shade from Woody Woodpecker)? A comic? A book? A trip to an art gallery or museum? Do you remember how you felt? Was it startled, frightened, intrigued?
I’m finding myself hard pressed to remember. I am guessing that sometime during my twelve years of Catholic school, my first exposure was a discussion of the Four Horsemen in Revelations—Death on his pale horse, riding out to devastate what remained of humankind. But that wasn’t really a “real thing” on the horse, it was just a representation, they explained. A metaphor for saying “There will be a lot of deaths.” The horse, too, was meant only to represent the fastest travel overland.
The inevitability and fear of small-d death has led many, if not most, cultures to respond with the idea of a big-D, proper noun Death—an anthropomorphized representation of a personal or population-scale mortality event as a character in myths, legends, folktales, songs, stories, art, and music. We can’t seem to stop ourselves. The “person” of Death is so ubiquitous that when I asked myself why I was putting Death into my stories, I couldn’t even answer. From my cultural perspective—the way I’ve been raised and educated—the choice seemed as intuitive as putting Santa Claus into a Christmas story.
I do know that I absorbed the traditional image of the Grim Reaper in paintings and sculptures while growing up; that was background noise. The first depiction I can remember being really struck by was in a comic book, though: a copy of The Infinity Gauntlet that I would have bought for around $3 back in 1991, still in a box somewhere in my parents’ basement. I was shocked by the villain’s love interest: Thanos was literally in love with Death.
On some pages she was a skeleton in a dark robe; on others, she was a conventionally attractive white woman with dark hair. Either way, Thanos constantly debased himself for her—doing anything she asked him to, calling her his mistress, his ruler, his savior, his queen. I was around nine years old and was still like, “Oh come on, you can absolutely do better than that, Thanos.” (I never understood the appeal and I can’t remember if it was explained why he was in love with Death rather than one of the large-chinned, purple-complectioned ladies of his own race.) Was that how we were supposed to regard death? As something we could love? Or just suck up to? What was the goal there, I wondered: to be loved in return and thereby what, spared from dying? Surely that was something we all wanted—to cling to life.
And yet, this was the first time I thought that Death wasn’t some disembodied natural force to fear, some icy and wordless skeleton that would come for you in the night; you could go to this Death’s throne room, you could talk to her, touch her soft cold face like a person. My mind was blown—and then blown again a few years later when I began to read Terry Pratchett and met his Death, who again was no distant biological phenomenon but a talking skeleton who kept bees, looked after his horse Binky, and eventually brought on an apprentice and adopted a child, among other adventures.
The Death we meet in Richard Adams’ Watership Down is the Black Rabbit of Inlé, who quite reasonably (thank you, Xenophanes!) is represented in rabbit culture by a rabbit. Of him it is said, “We come into the world and we have to go: but we do not go merely to serve the turn of one enemy or another… We go by the will of the Black Rabbit of Inlé and only by his will. And though that will seems hard and bitter to us all, yet in his way he is our protector, for he knows Frith’s promise to the rabbits and he will avenge any rabbit who may chance to be destroyed without the consent of himself.”
Our Death is a jealous Death… there’s an air of “How dare you” in many stories with an anthropomorphized Death. The Angel of Death in Hellboy II: The Golden Army, as conceived by Guillermo del Toro, was another clock-stopper for me. Here we had a Death that looked monstrous, though it did not set out to frighten anyone; but no one was allowed to take Hellboy at the moment of his death except his Death. I thought: Is that how we’re supposed to think about death then? As something almost comfortingly personal in a world where we’re not special or unique, where nothing belongs only to us or gives us any individual attention?
I thought: Every time you see a character in a work of imagination, they are representing something. You know they are; as readers, we have merely agreed to look past that as we read, because we want to be entertained, or to escape. We are using fake people to represent real ideas. That sordid hitman represents the socially-corrosive effects of prizing violence as a solution to problems. That happy couple represents the idea of romantic love being a force for healing and connection. They are meant to look real so that we can tell a story, but they’re not real. Death, though—Death is both. How can we write about that and why would we bother?
I’ve anthropomorphized Death in several stories; my earliest was “Four Hours of a Revolution,” beautifully read at Pseudopod by Ian Stewart. In it, the narrating Death is a cross between the Pratchettian and the Del Toro-esque: he is ancient, he is legion, he is bound by bureaucratic rules, he is meant for one soul at a time, but he is (let’s face it) getting sentimental in his old age. This is a Death with a soul of his own, somehow; he’s swayed by a noble cause, but also by a fierce young revolutionary about to be betrayed by one of her own. Perhaps once you’ve seen enough upheaval, or enough rulers rise and fall, you begin to side with those who are underneath, striving to flip the iceberg, more than those on top.
Death in that story has most of what an author might want from a character—a back story and constraints, friends, enemies, a larger structure responsible for his current personality; a human-seeming mind that changes, grows, and dissembles as needed; a job (if not a career); and enough agency to make decisions that nudge the plot where it counts. He is mostly a watcher; but he is not exclusively a watcher. He makes things move.
In my upcoming collection One Message Remains, Death appears in three out of the four stories as something else—not a watcher, not a mere courier or psychopomp, but someone who dips in and out of the lives of humans as she sees fit. In the world of the book, she is not seen as enemy, ally, or something in between; you can speak to her, but you might regret it or you might not. She just kind of… shows up to things, as it were.
In “The General’s Turn,” Death plays a role alongside the other players; I needed her to be the last obstacle standing in the way of the general’s literal turn away from the part he’s playing in this cruel spectacle. She is jealous, she is possessive, but she is also easily bored, and debating the legalities of a single soul sends her off to more interesting pastures.
In “The Weight of What Is Hollow,” she is no more than a rag-covered presence at public executions, waiting patiently to take away the soul; in “Forsaking All Others,” she appears as a ‘grand lady’ at a dangerous birth, unspeaking as to whether the mother, child, or the several other panicked attendees might be the one who dies. Our copyeditor wrote, “I thought she wore expensive clothing?” at one point in the manuscript, and I stetted it without explaining; I still wasn’t quite clear in my head on how ‘consistent’ I wanted my Death to be in this book.
It didn’t occur to me till later (when I was writing this piece, actually) that this was important to who she was. A Death that always looks the same can be fun as it tries to evade human scrutiny (as in Pratchett, where he straps a pillow to his stomach to emulate Father Christmas, which is… moderately successful if you’re not looking closely), but a Death that can change how it looks keeps people more off-balance—you might not know who you’re dealing with until it’s too late.
The unsettling of other characters is something meaningful for her. She’s beautiful when she means to be, distant and expressionless the rest of the time; a changeable individual, as we sometimes say that death is kind or merciful, sadistic or untimely, generous, mean, or irrational. People beg for death when they’re suffering, or they curse it when someone young or beloved dies. One’s experience of death, like love, will depend very much on the life you’ve been living when it comes around.
This is why the titular novella “One Message Remains” contains a lot of death but no actual Death; its main character, Major Tzajos, prides himself so much on his hyper-rationality that he wouldn’t be able to see Death even if she showed up right next to him. He chalks up everything happening in the story to fatigue, illness, or overwork even as the evidence mounts that something supernatural—explained with great detail and historical precedent by the locals whose graves he is pillaging—is occurring. You need to have a certain amount of faith that the world works in ways that you cannot understand before Death can appear to you, it seems. You don’t need much—but you can’t have none.
Sci-fi, fantasy, and horror abound with personified representations of death and other intangibles; I’ve only discussed the few that fed into depicting Death as a character in my own work. There’s also Death in Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, who appears as a fully-fleshed human, resembling the one in The Seventh Seal; there’s the stunningly well-done Death as a wolf in the new Puss in Boots movie; there are hundreds of other examples.
I still think it’s so interesting to look at this impulse to personify Death: what does it mean for us to do it? Is it a way of reducing our fear of dying, or of relating to it in some other way? Does making death a person allow us to treat it with avoidance, respect, denial, mockery instead of fear? Why do we keep doing it?
Death doesn’t have to be an antagonist in our fiction; death itself doesn’t have to be the ending of a story. We’re asking some heavy, heavy questions about life when we give a form to Death. What is life, what are the things that prolong or cut short our lives, what are ways to counterfeit life or resurrect it—these are deeply human worries about the time we’re given. And these are all questions we can present to Death in our stories, if we are not too afraid of being answered.
Premee Mohamed is a Nebula, World Fantasy, and Aurora award-winning Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta. She has also been a finalist for numerous other awards, including the Hugo, Ignyte, Locus, British Fantasy, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Crawford. In 2024 she was the Edmonton Public Library official writer-in-residence. She is the author of the Beneath the Rising series of novels, as well as several novellas. Her short fiction has appeared in many venues and she can be found on her website at www.premeemohamed.com.
