Maurice Sendak on Death

Maurice Sendak was born sickly, to a Brooklyn home where the adults were keenly aware of how close his death stood to his bedside. From his mother’s whispered exhortations to his grandmother dressing him in all white, head-to-toe, and bringing him to sit on their front stoop in the hopes that the Angel of Death would think he’d already claimed young Maurice and pass right on by, young Maurice came to know the world and his place in it, with death as a constant companion.

Maurice was also a child born of Polish-Jewish parents growing up in the midst of the Holocaust. His complaints were commonly met with: your cousin didn’t get that option, he was burnt in an oven in the concentration camp.

This darkness fertilized his rich inner imagination, a place where fantasy intertwined with scary. After sitting shiva and watching his old aunts hover over him, yellowed teeth bared as they pinched his cheeks and confessed their love, the prototype for his “Wild Things” was born.

Maurice watched his father die, his beloved brother, his long-time partner and many dear friends. He would sit at their bedsides and sketch as they journeyed from life to death, as if trying to capture the difference in a life on the brink and a life ended. This incredible intimacy with death brims in his work and compels his readers to do something similar: roll up your sleeves and wrestle with that which scares you.

Maurice peppered his art with mementos of his grief too (“In the Night Kitchen”) as well as the heavy reckonings of his dance with death (“Bumble-Ardy”). Perhaps this is why his books are beloved by children and their parents alike: there is a reality in the fantastic-ness of Sendak’s art that we are hungry for.

At the end of his own life (2012), Sendak shifted radically from Zen-like acceptance to snarky taunting to abject fear, of his own mortality. I’ve recently found myself wondering which was the truest and most authentic of his attitudes toward death. Perhaps for Sendak, as for us all, the truth lies in the merger of all three. And that too is a truth that we are hungry for.