I
n a recent phone conversation with the WITSReview editorial office, I mentioned that for this issue I’d be writing about death. There was a nervous laugh and then an awkward silence on the other end of the line. The emphasis promised by this column’s playful title is, after all, on wit (and by implication something upbeat). Readers have just made
78 Wits Review October 2023
their way through the obituaries and should not be expected to continue contemplating The End all the way to, well, the end. But when death casts a pall over life, it doesn’t keep to convenient times and seasons, never mind page numbers. It retreats and returns, it fades away but then catches us unawares. Wordsworth wrote about being
