It is clear from the beginning of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Rankine is going to weave death into almost every observation, anecdote, or story she provides us with. However, for brevity’s sake it is more productive to talk about a few passages that seem to bring up her more Whitmanian views on the matter. One that immediately struck me was the communal aspect of death she brings up in her statements about cancer. On the heels of discussing her friend dying of breast cancer and her witnessing of the whole morbid, slow process she proffers: “Cancer describes a malignant mass of tissue, that pulls all nutrients from the body, surprises the body first, then the owner of the body, and finally those who look on” (Rankine 11). This idea that death has agency and that agency extends beyond the person whose life it is claiming is, to me, highly Whitmanian. She then goes on to quote Gertrude Stein who herself died of cancer, and said “if everybody did not die the earth would be all covered over.” This of course expands the idea to a larger mass audience and gives Rankine the opportunity to take on a Whitmanesque voice. The second instance that caught my attention was her analysis of forgiveness in terms of death. In it Rankine examines the necessity of forgiveness, or the lack thereof stating: “For the one who forgives, it simply a death, a dying down in the heart, the position of the already dead…It is a feeling of nothingness, that cannot be communicated to another, an absence, a bottomless vacancy held by the living, beyond all that is hated or loved” (Rankine 48). I found this statement to be one of the strongest and most Whitmanian in the whole book, in its transcendent power it expresses that which cannot be adequately expressed by human beings. Whitman does this often, surrendering himself, and his poetic voice, to a higher power, usually of the soul of the individual or the soul of all mankind. Rankine addresses here and throughout the book the world of the living and the dead and the opposing and connecting qualities of each. The vacancy of the living complemented by the wholeness, the concrete inevitability of death and the mysterious yet undeniable presence of the dead. This presence of the dead is brought up quite frequently, mostly in terms of voices of the dearly departed that enter her head in times of depression or paranoia. The voices Rankine mentions range form her mother to famous poets, all given equal weight and described as coming through in perfect clarity.
I really like your attention to death in Rankine’s work. I have to agree with the fact that Don’t Let me be Lonely does revolve around death and a connection with those who we have lost. This becomes evident in the very first paragraph of Rankine’s work where she discusses how she had not yet lost someone. She does mention her mother’s abortion though, which is very interesting because she ultimately questions whether or not that should be considered a real death. She then goes on to discusses deaths she had witnessed on tv, and like the abortion Rankine did not feel these losses. However, Rankine ends her first paragraph that describes the loss of her grandmother, a turning moment in her life, where from then on in the poem she is able to feel this Whitmanian connection to death that you smartly pick up on in your blog post.