Em’s death comes after an illness that Ish cannot cure and makes the loss of his wife inseparable from the passing of their generation. As she weakens, he considers surgery and stronger medicine but cannot bring himself to risk harming her or end her life. At her bedside, Em continues to comfort him, turning his fear toward the children and grandchildren who will live on after her. Her death leaves Ish alone with his grief and the recognition that, though the years will continue to be marked, something great has passed from the Tribe.

Illness and Ish’s Helplessness

The change first appears in Em’s face and bearing. She no longer walks with her former regal grace; Ish sees lines of pain rather than age, and an ashy grayness where he remembers a red glow beneath her dark cheeks. The signs bring a chill and fear: he senses that her life is nearing its end, though he does not yet know what is wrong.

For a time, Ish wonders whether the illness might be appendicitis. He can read medical books and imagines that he might learn to operate, with one of the boys managing the ether. He even tells himself that the worst outcome would be to end her pain. But the thought of cutting into the side of the woman he loves exposes the limits of his knowledge and nerve: his hands are no longer young and sure, and he cannot make himself perform the operation. He understands that Em must face the future without his being able to save her.

As the sun swings south again, he realizes that it is not appendicitis. Em grows weaker until she can no longer walk. Ish searches ruined drugstores for powders and syrups, finding medicines that ease her suffering for a time: after taking them, she sleeps or lies quietly and smiles. When pain returns and makes her toss, he considers increasing the dose enough to end it altogether. He does not do so. He knows that Em has always reached toward life and that her courage has not failed; his restraint follows his recognition of that will, even as he watches her suffer.

At the Bedside

Ish sits beside Em for long hours, holding her hand. Their conversations do not reverse the illness, but they reveal the established direction of their care for one another: although Em is the one in pain and dying, she is still the one who comforts him. Ish recognizes that she has been a mother to him as well as his wife. Her tenderness in these final exchanges makes the bedside a place where the roles of caregiver and comforter are gently reversed.

Em directs Ish’s attention beyond his own impending loss. She asks him not to worry about the children, the grandchildren, or those who will come after them. She believes they will be happy, or at least as happy as they might have been in the circumstances, and tells him not to care too much about civilization: the descendants will go on. Her reassurance does not promise the return of the old world. Instead, it places the future in the persistence of people who will live without it.

The family gathers at the bedside: tall sons, strong daughters, and grandchildren. The oldest grandsons are already growing tall, while the granddaughters show the fullness of adulthood. Looking at them pass by, Ish sees that Em is right. His thought that the simple are also the strong gives her confidence a visible, living counterpart: the family’s continuance is present in the generations surrounding her, not merely imagined as a distant hope.

Death and Burial

At last, while Ish again holds her hand, Em is very weak. He senses a third, dark presence beside them. She no longer speaks; the only movement he feels is a light flutter of her fingers within his hand. Ish’s thought turns to her descendants praising and blessing her, an image that honors the life she has sustained without changing the quiet facts of her final moment.

Then the three who had been present—Em, Ish, and Death—become only one. Em is gone, and Ish sits bowed and dry-eyed. The Tribe will bury her without a marker, as its custom requires. The unmarked grave does not diminish the intimacy of Ish’s vigil: he remains with his dead, in a pattern the narrative associates with love and sorrow reaching back to the beginning of the world.

Aftermath and Significance

Ish understands Em’s death as more than the loss of his wife. He recognizes that greatness has passed from them. The word gives the private bereavement a generational weight: the children and grandchildren may endure, as Em believed, but their survival is not the same as preserving the greatness Ish associates with the generation now ending.

The years nevertheless continue. The sun swings north of the mountain, south past the Golden Gate, and back again, while more years are carved into the rock. The Tribe’s record of time goes on after Em’s burial, setting recurring natural cycles and communal record-keeping against a loss that cannot be reversed. In the same year as one later turn in this sequence, Molly dies suddenly of what the family takes to be heart failure; Jean develops a rapidly growing tumor, and, after no one can help her, dies by her own hand. These later deaths do not explain Em’s illness, but they extend the sense of mortality surrounding the surviving family. Em’s death is the intimate ending Ish witnesses at her bedside and also the moment he names as the passing of a greatness that the continuing years cannot bring back.