Inertia torments George, too, the protagonist of the collection’s longest story, “Seeing Leah.” Looked after and financed his entire life by his older sister, Leah, who is now slowly dying following a stroke, George has accepted the fate of living the rest of his life alongside his stoic brother-in-law in an assisted living facility whose greatest perk is the weekly grocery trips where he can purchase just enough wine to get him through the next week. A group of well-meaning high schoolers visit the seniors regularly to collaborate on a project together, and George is equally unnerved by their innocence and encouraged by the possibility that they may be able to buy him some pot. He is haunted by a pair of past mistakes, two poor choices that seem to have dictated the path of his entire life: a night of drinking as a young teenager that resulted in his near drowning, and a day of drinking as a young man that put his infant nephew in great danger. In both cases he was saved by his sister, and in both cases catastrophe was avoided. In this way, George knows that the greatest achievement of his life has been not ruining hers: “This was the best he could offer Leah—the sight of himself not drowned, not choked, whole and not lost.”
Moore moves fluidly between brother and sister, past and present, to show the poignant complexity of a life evidently wasted. George seems a failure to all but the person who he has failed the most. When Leah finally dies, George feels a sort of relief for her:
“…whatever happened to Leah in death could not be bad because it had happened to billions of people before her, and animals and insects and plants. No one had asked for any part of it, but shouldn’t there be solace in inevitability?”
There is a sort of inevitability for George, for with Leah’s passing also comes the first real freedom of his life: “From here on to the end, it wouldn’t matter what he did because he had stayed saved just as long as he’d needed to.” To George, living has just meant surviving, and now living means allowing himself the excesses that will bring him contentedly to his death.
Death is confronted directly in other stories in the collection: in “Ordinary Circumstances,” a wife is so impacted by the death of a relative’s child that she turns toward religion and away from her family, and in “Last Things,” a young widow first competes in grief with her husband’s mother, then shares in it. In the short title story, “Not Dead Yet,” a man’s second wife is diagnosed with the same cancer that killed his first wife, and he grapples with the reality of the time they have left, thinking, “The doctor had said two years at most, but they all knew that didn’t mean twenty-four good months.” Faced with this awful truth, they have little option but to wait, to sleep, “and tomorrow they would wake up, still two complex organisms, big animals with too-big brains, aware of the pointlessness of everything but willing, or at least not yet unwilling, to attend to it all anyway.”