“The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” was originally published in the February 1929 issue of transition. It was collected in The Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1930). It is currently most readily available in Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories and Other Writings (Library of America).

An old woman lies dying. Her daughters, her memories, the chipped flint and bone of her life, appear to her and then disappear, like glimpses of the past, like false promises.

I first read this story as a young man, and was struck by its tough language, its brevity, its look-you-in-the-eye truth. Now, so many years later, I ask myself, why do I like this story?

First, listen to the language, to the opening sentences:

“She flicked her wrist neatly out of Doctor Harry's pudgy careful fingers and pulled the sheet up to her chin. The brat ought to be in knee breeches.”

The sentences are short, hard. The central mind of the story, Granny Weatherall herself, contrasts immediately with the younger doctor's “pudgy careful fingers.” As communicated so directly by her name, Granny Weatherall is accustomed to toughing her way through the countless nagging annoyances of life. But now, in the present of the story, her toughness is unraveling. She is like a tough braided rope coming apart, like a hard thing coming loose:

“Her bones felt loose, and floated around in her skin, and Doctor Harry floated like a balloon around the foot of the bed.”

Katherine Anne Porter finds the right objective correlative for Granny's lightheadedness—the doctor floating over the bed. Perhaps as well as any story I know, “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” captures immediate experience—what it means to be in the face of approaching death.

I have often thought that the highest purpose of serious literature is ontological: to help articulate, and to help us understand, what it means to be. The defining moments of ontological reckoning are instances of realization, what James Joyce called epiphanies, what Virginia Woolf experienced as enduring flashes, fixed eternities. And in many ways the most defining of these moments is the moment of death. Death is a true thing—no one can bluff it; no one can escape it.