The death scene I was ashamed to cry about

I’ve always really liked a good death scene. Maybe because I was constantly rehearsing my own: first showily, as a morbid, dorky preteen who skulked around reading Anne Rice novels and planning my own funeral, and then as a matter-of-factly depressed teen and young adult who thought often and seriously about suicide. I had a lot of feelings about what constituted a “good” literary death scene.

I used to think it needed to have a purpose, some formal or structural aim. For example, Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (nobody loves a good death like Tolstoy), and Hamlet all contain useful deaths; they illustrate something about character while giving a necessary shape to the plot. I would usually say my favorite death scene was the one at the end of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. It’s a horrible and fitting conclusion; despite the fact that Flaubert’s hapless antiheroine has brought her dismal fate on herself, he claimed to have wept inconsolably as he wrote it.

Recently, I’ve started reevaluating my criteria. In March 2026, I was diagnosed with multiple system atrophy-C, a rare neurodegenerative disease (don’t Google it; you’ll become convinced you have it, but you probably don’t). It’s basically what it sounds like. Your body shuts down bit by bit starting with the autonomic nervous system and brain. For now, I can still type and talk, but who knows how long these writerly functions will last. I started having symptoms when I got COVID for the first time in June 2022, and according to the Cleveland Clinic, the average lifespan of this fatal condition is six-to-ten years from the onset of symptoms, though my doctors have all been optimistically vague when it comes to prognoses. It’s been four years, and I have no illusions about what the next few will hold.

Ever since my diagnosis, I’ve been finding myself thinking about the death of Beth March in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Specifically its interpretation onscreen in my formative Little Women, the 1994 Gillian Armstrong film version. Her death is moving and sweet — a little too moving and sweet. I was embarrassed by Beth’s over-the-top saintliness and by the fact that I cried every time I watched it (every year at Christmas). Wasn’t I, a wisecracking literary critic, too smart for sentimentality?

I’d prided myself on being a perspicacious reader. I felt the need to prove that I was not simply a credulous one, like Emma Bovary herself. I could both weep and laugh at poor Emma, discerning the pathos along with the darkly funny bathos of her death. Emma, who dies so cruelly and horribly, but whose prolonged death is comically interrupted by the delayed appearance of a famed doctor and the clumsy machinations of the town’s scheming pharmacist. When the grotesque convulsions of her eventual demise are accompanied by a crude song sung by the Blind Man, a local beggar who appears to Emma like a specter of judgment, the canny reader might be struck at once by the dark irony of the situation as well as by pity for the dead Emma, victim of her own desires; her bovine, adoring husband; and their innocent child. Emma is further punished for her sins and stupidity in life with the indignity of physicality after death; when she is laid out and looking her most beautiful in her casket, “a stream of black liquid ran out of her mouth like vomit.” I, a bloodthirsty young comp-lit student, relished teaching Flaubert and seeing students blanch at this scene; I thought it showed how advanced my ability to read intellectually was, using my brain and not just my heart.

Beth’s death, on the other hand, is mercifully quiet and peaceful. Throughout the novel and especially its various filmed versions, she is a saintly Debbie Downer whose endless good works only make her eventual illness and death more sickly sweet when they come. She is a shy homebody who stays behind as Meg, Jo, and Amy make their various ways in the world. Her death is a gentle tearjerker. In the movie version as I recalled it, Winona Ryder, as Jo, hears Beth’s final thoughts, uttered tearfully and snotfully by Claire Danes in an early example of her now-famous cry. Danes is unembarrassed at how much she feels and how much it shows. It’s so goddamn earnest. Jo goes to shut the open window as a gust of wind blows in; this signals to her and us that Beth has died. She crawls into bed with her sister’s lifeless body. I cry like a baby and hope no one sees. My heart wins out over my head.

These scenes can feel manipulative, as if they’re trying too hard to make us feel something. This kind of earnestness, though, is embarrassing not because it’s fake but because it allows itself to approach the real. It’s trying so hard to get there, but it doesn’t, exactly. The imitation of sadness cannot get all the way there; it cannot capture the cruel randomness of death. That sometimes people just die: not as an ironically fitting punishment, not as a judgment, not as a literary device. It’s not fair. It’s not appropriate. People just die.

For me, the closest cinema has come capturing that randomness and unfairness is Jane Campion’s beautiful and meditative Bright Star, which tells the love story of Romantic poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne and of Keats’ death at 25 of tuberculosis. At the film’s end, Abbie Cornish as Fanny hears secondhand about Keats’s death and utters a cry that is almost too much to bear — a cry that feels too real. It’s not a tragedy mask letting us know that we should be sad but sadness itself. This is the kind of sound I make now when I think of those I love and am leaving behind. It’s an animal sound, primal, raw, horrible. That sound feels like life.

I watched Beth’s deathbed scene again after getting my own diagnosis and realized that it is not Danes who cries at all, but Ryder. The real version rings truer to me now. Winona’s tears feel right. After all, it is not the death itself that’s the sad thing; it’s what happens to those who are left behind. In 1858, Louisa May Alcott’s younger sister, Elizabeth, died from complications of scarlet fever, just as the fictional Beth would in the novel, published a decade later. Hallmarks of the real Louisa’s ongoing mourning of the real Elizabeth are part of what make Beth’s fictionalized death so upsetting to readers young and old. I don’t know if it’s the fact that I’ve received a terminal diagnosis at a relatively young age or simply that I’m getting older and have had my own experiences of loss. But Jo’s pain feels all the more real to me now, as does Beth’s heartbreaking declaration that, despite her readiness, “I should be homesick for you even in heaven.” I know what she means; I feel it, too. I don’t believe in heaven, or any kind of afterlife, but a part of me is sure that I will miss my husband, my friends and family, my cat. My life.