Ellen James’s death comes after a life shaped by the loss of speech, poetry, and chosen connections: in old age, she becomes a long-distance swimmer, but one cold fall day the undertow catches her when she is too tired to resist. The account links her death to the sea that had entered her poems and to the friendships and work she had built around speaking for herself and others.

The Life Before Her Death

In the years after Jenny Fields’s death, Ellen seeks out and befriends other Ellen Jamesians. She regards this as something Jenny would have done. At poetry readings, she sits beside Roberta Muldoon, whose booming voice carries Ellen’s poems aloud. The arrangement gives a public voice to work Ellen cannot read herself and helps draw other self-silenced women out of hiding; a few become her friends.

Ellen never marries. The account allows that she may have known men, but describes those connections as grounded more in shared poetry than in their being men. She is both a good poet and an ardent feminist: she believes in living as Jenny Fields did and in writing with the energy and personal vision of T. S. Garp. The combination makes her, in the account’s terms, stubborn in holding personal opinions and kind to others. She also maintains a lifelong flirtation with Duncan Garp, described as her younger brother, really.

Swimming and the Sea in Her Poetry

In old age, around the time she succeeds Roberta as director of the Fields Foundation, Ellen takes up long-distance swimming. She trains by swimming several times across the wide neck of Dog’s Head Harbor. Swimming becomes more than a physical pursuit: her last and best poems use it and the sea’s pull as metaphors.

A letter to Duncan makes that imagery intimate and playful. Ellen compares swimming to the strenuousness and gracefulness of arguing with his father, and imagines the sea eager to reach her landlocked heart. She then turns the thought into teasing banter, suggesting that Duncan would call swimming her substitute for sex. The letter shows her keeping a lively connection to Duncan and to Garp’s presence through argument remembered as something both difficult and graceful.

The Fatal Swim

Ellen’s death occurs on a cold fall day when she is too tired and the undertow takes her. The narrative presents the outcome plainly: the long-distance swimmer who had repeatedly crossed the harbor does not overcome the water on this final occasion. Her death is not described as a deliberate act; it follows exhaustion and the sea’s pull.

The ending darkens the metaphor that had sustained her later poetry. Ellen had written of teasing with the sea, but she had never fully understood the undertow. The water that supplied her poems with images of attraction and resistance becomes an actual, irreversible danger.

Consequences and Significance

Ellen’s death causes Duncan much sorrow. That consequence gives her final episode a personal measure beyond the circumstances of the swim: the loss is felt by someone with whom she had maintained a lifelong, affectionate flirtation and to whom she had written about both swimming and Garp.

The account closes Ellen’s life amid continuities rather than a simple resolution. Her work at the Fields Foundation follows her friendship with Roberta; her poems carry forward the sea imagery of her swimming; and her letter preserves a teasing voice and a family bond. The fatal undertow turns that recurring imagery into the condition of her death, while the sorrow it leaves behind underscores the cost of losing a person whose life had joined artistic independence with care for others.