Ben Givens's fear of death

Ben Givens’s fear of death is both a physical apprehension sharpened by illness and a long-standing dread he has kept at bay through work, love, and forgetfulness. As those distractions fail, death ceases to be an idea he can turn aside and becomes the condition he must face without finding an answer or a shield.

Fear Made Present

In a brief exchange, Ben distinguishes his terror from another person’s lack of fear: “That's good. I'm terrified.” He explains that age changes the distance death seems to have; to the young, “Death isn't real at your age.” The exchange captures a central asymmetry in his experience. Death may be imaginable to the young, but Ben feels its nearness as an older man who knows that life declines.

That knowledge becomes acute while Ben lies sick in the fruit pickers' hut after Emilio has left for the night. He cannot tell whether the chill and nausea mean death is close or whether he is exhausted; marijuana further obscures his ability to judge his condition. His sensations gather into images of the Last Wind, a scythe, and a grave—not proof that death is at hand, but the fearful forms through which his uncertainty speaks. Although he has appeared stalwart and stoic, inwardly he has long trembled beneath a quiet apprehension.

The Limits of Distraction

The carabiner and ring-angle piton against Ben’s chest sharpen his thoughts. In climbing, such equipment fixes a person to rock and stands between ascent and death; in his uneasy reflection, that practical protection also makes the challenge to mortality look almost like recreation. He contrasts himself with two young people in a Volkswagen van heading eagerly for the steep faces of the Sawtooth Range: they can regard death romantically because they have not yet felt decline in their own bodies.

Ben searches for a way to make leaving the world bearable, but years of turning over the final question have yielded no revelation. He understands aging as a succession of startled encounters with passing days: denial gives way to forgetfulness, and fear briefly recedes into calm. His life has been an “ocean of fear” interrupted by islands of acquiescence, where work, love, or simple light distracts him from mortality. These intervals have not taught him how to proceed; they have allowed him, instead, to turn away from existence’s conditions while continuing to live with appetite.

Grief and the Shortening Interludes

Ben recognizes that this strategy could not sustain him to the grave, and that he had known as much since Rachel Givens’s death. The periods of ignorance have grown shorter until, in the hut, there are none: only knowledge remains, and he is not ready for it. His fear is therefore not simply a sudden reaction to physical illness. It is intensified by bereavement and by the collapse of the ordinary reprieves that once softened his awareness of death.

His memory returns to Rachel Givens dressing at her armoire: over ten thousand nights, he watched her turn away in lamplight and deftly unclasp her bra. Even after fifty years, the sight had moved him to reflect on the good fortune of their love. Their arguments and temporary divisions had not loosened his attachment; he remained turned toward her, drawn to the tranquil grace he could never fully describe. Remembering that intimacy deepens his sadness because her poise has left the world, while he has not learned to live without her or let go of mourning.

Narrative Significance

The account places Ben’s fear between bodily evidence and the mind’s inability to settle what that evidence means. Exhaustion, nausea, and illness may explain the chill, while his sense of approaching death remains emotionally real; the uncertainty intensifies rather than resolves his dread. The climbing gear offers no philosophical answer: it is a human device for holding on, not a means of escaping mortality.

Ben’s reflections also distinguish truly facing death from merely keeping it out of sight. Work and love have been genuine sources of life, but the forgetting they enabled could not carry him through Rachel Givens’s death or his own illness. His fear reveals the cost of that incomplete accommodation: when distraction no longer intervenes, grief and mortality arrive together, and he has no settled wisdom to place between himself and either one.