The tragedy of Elizabeth's life comes to a close in "Death," when the reader sees firsthand the connection between Elizabeth and Doctor Reefy and their experience with loss: both characters have lived their lives in close proximity to death, Elizabeth because of her chronic illness and the doctor because of the loss of his wife. In the following passage, Anderson personifies Death as a character in its own right:
Elizabeth had put it there a week after her marriage, breaking the plaster away with a stick. Then she got one of the workmen her husband was at that time employing about the hotel to mend the wall. “I jammed the corner of the bed against it,” she had explained to her husband, unable at the moment to give up her dream of release, the release that after all came to her but twice in her life, in the moments when her lovers Death and Doctor Reefy held her in their arms.
By this beautiful characterization, death becomes not just a companion to Elizabeth but a lover, capable of the very same satisfaction that she was able to find from Doctor Reefy’s love. This is a bleak but important section of the story collection, in which Anderson invites the reader to consider death as a possible source of contentment. Passages like this serve to develop Anderson’s thematic exploration of fate and meaning in Winesburg, Ohio and place Anderson’s work neatly in the canon of literature that emerged in the aftermath of the First World War and its terrible destruction. This literature sought to understand the possible meaning—or even generative power—of death and to make sense of the brutality of human suffering.
