"Death with Interruptions" by José Saramago, contributed by Sarah Borges (2025)
And that’s exactly what happens. Death—yes, capital-D Death—suddenly stops doing her job in an unnamed country. People keep aging, getting sick, getting into accidents... but no one dies. At first, everyone is thrilled. Eternal life! But it doesn’t take long for things to spiral: hospitals overflow, families are stuck caring for loved ones who should’ve passed peacefully, the Church panics (because no death means no resurrection), and even the mafia gets involved in smuggling the terminally ill across the border to countries where death is still functioning. Saramago leans fully into the absurdity—bureaucracy, theology, ethics, capitalism—everything gets tangled in the mess.
Eventually, Death writes a formal letter announcing her return, adding that from now on, everyone will get a week’s notice to prepare. This is meant to allow for final preparations before the end. Some actually use this time wisely, others try to lose themselves in complete debauchery, and some commit suicide to show death that they can die on their own terms. And then the story shifts.
In the latter half, we follow Death closely as a solitary woman working from a dusty office somewhere underground, sending out her signature violet envelopes. Everything’s back to “normal,” until one letter keeps getting returned unopened. Intrigued, Death decides to investigate, and becomes more human than we would ever expect. She follows the man whose death keeps getting deferred, and instead of enforcing the rules, she begins to question them. In the end, moved by her experience of life and the quiet beauty of the world he inhabits, she makes a decision that defies everything she’s done up to that point, and the book closes with: “Even death, faced with the option of death or life, would choose life.”
I read Death with Interruptions in high school, and it was the first time I really thought about how deeply embedded death is in the fabric of our societies. Before that, I’d mostly heard the idea that “we need death to appreciate life”—which is definitely in the book, but Saramago goes further. The narrative comically shows that everything from hospitals to religion to the economy relies on people eventually dying. We talk about death as something tragic or meaningful or to be feared, but rarely as something so structurally necessary that its absence would cause full-on collapse. Saramago somehow makes that point hilarious and genuinely moving at the same time. In the end, as necessary as death may be, the experience of life—even in the simplest forms—wins Her heart.