“Cast a cold Eye On Life, on Death. Horseman, pass by.”

“Cast a cold Eye On Life, on Death. Horseman, pass by.” is a remembered inscription from Yeats’s grave that Yolandi summons as she and Lottie struggle through a hospital tunnel to reach Elfrieda. In the scene, the line is less a declaration of indifference than a form of endurance: faced with exhaustion, uncertainty, and the possibility of death, they can only keep taking small steps toward what may lie ahead.

The Inscription in the Tunnel

Yolandi and Lottie are trying to find the door leading to the Psych 2 ward, where Elfrieda is being cared for. They have descended to the basement and are moving through another hospital tunnel. Lottie is exhausted, yet continues speaking about the water used by mining companies; Yolandi walks ahead, frantic to find the way up. When Yolandi admits that she does not know where the door is, Lottie nods and smiles. Yolandi imagines her as a mortally injured field commander silently urging her people onward, then recalls the words on Yeats’s grave at the foot of Benbulben in Sligo County: “Cast a cold Eye On Life, on Death. Horseman, pass by.”

The quotation arrives at a practical impasse. The two women do not know where the exit is, and Lottie must stop repeatedly to catch her breath. Yolandi eventually sees a door marked Exit; they climb several flights of stairs and take an elevator to the fourth floor. The inscription does not solve the immediate problem or make the journey easy. Instead, it gives shape to the only action available to them: continue, slowly, toward a door and toward Elfrieda.

Composure and Care

The phrase’s command to look coldly at life and death is complicated by the scene around it. Lottie’s brave responses cost her effort, and Yolandi stops speaking because each answer seems to tire her mother further. The image of the commander conveys resolve, but the women’s pauses and small steps keep that resolve grounded in physical limits. The quotation therefore holds composure and vulnerability together rather than presenting courage as freedom from fear or fatigue.

Its placement also makes the line a pivot between scale and circumstance. The inscription offers a stark, formal address to life and death; the narrative immediately returns to a daughter watching her exhausted mother, a confusing hospital passage, and the search for her sister. The large question of mortality is not separated from ordinary acts of care. It is encountered while finding a route through the building and helping one another keep going.

Retrospective Resonance

Later events sharpen the line’s place in the book’s treatment of death without repeating it. Tina dies after a surgery that had initially appeared to go well, and the family must make arrangements for her cremation and memorial. Elfrieda also dies; afterward, Yolandi and Nic disagree about how her ashes should be handled and where she should be buried. These events give the earlier invocation of the inscription a wider frame: death is not something the family can simply pass by, but a reality that returns through loss, decisions about the dead, and the work of remembering.

The quotation’s force rests in that tension. It lends Yolandi a brief language of forward motion, while the narrative preserves the fear, care, and grief that such a posture cannot remove. The door in the tunnel is eventually found, and the women reach Elfrieda; the line marks not an escape from uncertainty, but the effort to move through it together.