Beatrix dies of illness

Beatrix dies of advanced stomach cancer after a final illness in which pain steadily narrows her life but new tenderness opens within it. Dr. Mukhtar cannot cure her; he can ease her symptoms and remain beside her, and over six weeks that practical care becomes an intimacy founded on books, ideas, horses, and imagined places. Her death comes amid balsam and juniper, while the family around her confronts both her absence and its own dispersal.

The Doctor’s Arrival and Diagnosis

On a cool autumn afternoon, Dr. Mukhtar arrived at the house on Penobscot Bay on a black Arabian mare that had attracted attention all the way from Boston. Elise offered to stable the horse or turn it into the pasture; he chose the shade of the maples and the brook. Though Elise found his dark face frightening and his rough voice unsettling, she led him inside. His first response to the fetid air was recognition: he suspected what awaited him before he had seen Beatrix.

In the schoolroom, where Beatrix had once served visitors tea, Dr. Mukhtar set his saddlebags on the great pine table and questioned Elise closely. He asked about Beatrix, Elise, Kuntaw, the family’s circumstances, how they came to live in the house, and even what foods Beatrix ate. He inspected her soiled sheets and learned that she particularly liked meat smoked in the chimney. His questions made Elise uneasy, but they also marked a departure from the family’s silence around the illness: he named what was happening and sought the particulars needed to care for her.

The house itself carries the weight of the family’s altered circumstances. Once the great possession of Outger and Beatrix, it had become black with age and exposed as a decaying shell after the trees around it were cut. Beatrix sold the last large pines from her woodlot to pay for repairs to the roof and sills just as she fell ill. Dr. Mukhtar entered this worn domestic world not as a visitor to the prosperous household it had once been, but as a physician summoned to a family already diminished by departure, lost timber, and sickness.

Pain, Prognosis, and Care

In Beatrix’s room, a table beneath the single window held the books she had been reading before they grew too heavy to hold. Dr. Mukhtar looked at their titles and sat beside her in a rosewood chair with a cracked leg. Beatrix woke in pain, took in his appearance, and asked whether she was in hell. He understood that pain had confused her and answered gently that she was not, then proposed that they work together to find relief. Because she could not yet converse rationally, he went to fetch a sedative.

When she was awake enough for an examination, he checked her legs and palpated the large mass in her stomach. He asked about eating and swallowing, vomiting blood, blood in her stool, and breathlessness. She fell asleep during her answers, but her breathing deepened. When she woke again in the dim room, Dr. Mukhtar was still sitting nearby, his dark clothing blending into the chair’s shadow. Her pain was temporarily quiet, and his relief at that reprieve registers the modest scale of what he can offer.

Beatrix herself knew death was approaching and asked what was wrong, whether the pain would return, and how long she had. Dr. Mukhtar told her plainly that she had stomach cancer and a great deal of fluid in her stomach. He could relieve the fluid, but it would return, as would the pain; at this stage the illness was a battle she could not win. He estimated that she might have a month or two and offered to stay so he could attend her while Elise rested. He had brought enough pain elixir, he said, to soothe elephants for a decade. The promise is compassionate but not curative: the medicines buy intervals of ease, not a way out.

A Deathbed Intimacy

Beatrix said she wanted to die, to be finished with the pain and with life. The narrative qualifies the statement: it was not entirely true. Across the next six weeks she developed deep feelings for Dr. Mukhtar as the two spoke about books and ideas, imagined places they had never seen, peace and quiet, and horses, which he knew well. Galloping horses and their silky, fluttering manes gave Beatrix an image of movement and pleasure beyond the confines of her sickroom. At first he spoke while she listened in a state between wakefulness and exhaustion; as her condition worsened, their shared talk became part of the life still available to her.

The closeness does not erase the pain or the family relationships strained by the illness. The elixir gradually became less effective, and Dr. Mukhtar tried another. Kuntaw came into the room from time to time, but Beatrix could not look at him lovingly, nor could he look at her that way. Her attachment to the doctor therefore develops not as a replacement for a recovered household life, but within the limits illness has imposed. When she tells him that her father once believed swallowing Guatemalan lizards could cure the disease, she brings a fragment of family lore into the intimate exchange between physician and patient.

Books serve Beatrix as more than a pastime. She tells Dr. Mukhtar that she cannot express affection except through teaching, offering books as tokens of love. The exchange gives a new meaning to the stack beside her bed: those volumes belong to a habit of making and communicating attachment that illness has now curtailed. At night, after the exhausted doctor goes upstairs and pinches out the candle, she asks him to leave the curtains and window open. She looks at the moon, rendered as a blood-streaked egg yolk rolling within the shell of the sky. Even as her body is confined indoors, the open window lets her remain turned toward a wider, changing world.

The Final Illness and Death

In the last week of her life, Beatrix experiences her illness as immersion in an immense bowl of water. At first she can breathe beneath its surface as easily as in air; as the mass in her stomach presses against her lungs, the water thickens like old honey. The bowl resembles the yellow crockery bowl in which she once mixed bread dough, joining a domestic object to the enclosing sensation of her dying body. At times she rises toward its pale rim; at others, pain moves through it in strong orange currents. Underwater storms and lightning strikes make the image register not as peaceful escape but as an unstable world in which she tries to draw up her legs to protect her throbbing gut.

Dr. Mukhtar continues to seek ways to make her fading existence more bearable. Francis-Outger, whose house is only a mile away, visits every day carrying balsam boughs for the sickroom. He also brings juniper berries, which Dr. Mukhtar crushes; their dry, bitter perfume makes Beatrix smile, though the smile is closer to a grimace and is all she can manage. She dies amid this cordial of forest fragrance. The balsam and juniper cannot reverse the illness, but they bring the outside world into the room and turn care into a daily, tangible act.

The death is followed immediately by the practical work of family connection. Elise weeps at the window as Francis-Outger says he will go to Josime’s camp and ask whether Josime knows where Amboise works or where Jinot is. Elise recalls that Jinot had written asking whether they were all well and said he was working for a Canada man named Marchand up north; she has not found time to answer, and she does not know where Amboise is. Beatrix’s passing thus closes her own life while exposing the distance and unfinished correspondence separating the surviving family.

Significance

Beatrix’s final days oppose the certainty of death to the persistence of particular forms of life: conversation, reading, memory, affection, and the sensory presence of the forest. Dr. Mukhtar’s diagnosis gives no false hope, and his medicines repeatedly fail to hold their effect, yet his continued presence makes care meaningful without making it a cure. Beatrix’s feelings for him arise through ordinary subjects and shared attention, not through a miraculous reprieve from her condition.

Her death also gathers the novel’s domestic and environmental histories into one room. The old house has been left exposed by the felling of its trees; its pine table, cracked chair, worn furnishings, and books remain as material witnesses to a household changed by loss. Outside, Francis-Outger brings balsam and juniper from the forest into the sickroom, where their fragrance accompanies the end of Beatrix’s life. That contrast does not undo the family’s material decline or the bodily violence of cancer. Instead, it makes the final scene depend on small acts of presence: a doctor staying, a visitor returning with boughs, a daughter weeping, and a letter from an absent son still unanswered.