Summary
Don't Let Me Be Lonely is divided into 18 parts, each one separated by a page with a picture of a TV on it. The TV is showing nothing but white noise. These images draw a parallel between the process of reading Don't Let Me Be Lonely and the experience of watching TV. As the reader flips through each section, they are met with a moment of static, as if they were switching the channel.
The first section opens on a scene with the speaker's mother and father. The speaker explains that her mother went into labor and was taken to the hospital but that she came home without the baby. The speaker says that losing her sibling didn't feel like someone close to her had died to her at the time. She then goes on to say that throughout her childhood the only people who seemed to die were the ones that she saw on the TV. The speaker goes on to recall watching her father grieving his mother's death back in Jamaica. This is another death of a person that the speaker did not know well. Because her father had immigrated to the United States, the speaker had never met her grandmother. Her father had to fly to Jamaica for her funeral. In this scene, the speaker witnesses death secondhand, seeing her family members suffer its aftereffects and mourn. The look on her father's face at this moment affects her. She can't place the expression on her father's face, and it unnerves her. She moves further away from him on the stoop in front of their house.
The speaker goes on to say that when she was in the third grade she always wondered whether or not the characters she saw on TV were dead in real life. She recounts that because the characters seemed to survive impossible situations, she was more concerned about the actors themselves. If an old black-and-white movie was playing, then whoever was with the speaker would tell her that they were dead. The speaker would then accuse their family member of lying when, months later, that actor would appear on the television again. This would often lead to arguments.
Next, the speaker begins to discuss suicidal thoughts, which begin with the question of whether or not she is alive. Because of this question, the speaker calls the suicide hotline after its phone number flashes across her TV screen. The speaker then has a conversation with the person who works at the hotline. She tells him that she feels like she isn't necessarily suicidal—she already feels dead. After this, the person from the hotline asks where she lives and sends an ambulance attendant to go check on her. When the ambulance attendant arrives 15 minutes later, the speaker tries to explain that she is not suicidal and instead is experiencing a lapse in "happily." Despite her explanation, the ambulance attendant warns the speaker that if she does not come with him quietly to the hospital, he will have to restrain her and that he will be forced to report it. The speaker climbs into the ambulance with him even though she continues to insist that she is fine.
To close Part 1, the speaker tells the story of a friend of hers who was diagnosed with breast cancer. The friend tells the speaker that she will be dead in five years. The speaker tells us that the friend's tumor was misdiagnosed by doctors a year before her eventual diagnosis. She questions whether this is what condemned her friend's life. There is an image on the page beneath these questions: an X-ray image of the speaker's friend's tumor. Next, the speaker tells us what happened during the friend's mastectomy. A mastectomy is a surgical procedure in which a breast is removed. After the friend underwent a mastectomy and chemotherapy, she was told that cancer had entered her bones, and she did not have long to live. The speaker recounts seeing her friend before she dies and watching movies with her: Boogie Nights and Magnolia. The friend also reveals to the speaker that she has signed a "Do-not-resuscitate" (DNR) form. This means that no one is allowed to save her friend should she enter cardiac arrest.
Part 2 begins with a statement that the speaker leaves the TV on all day long, even when she is not in her room. If she ever goes into her room in the middle of the day, she will hear people talking from the TV. The speaker reveals that sometimes she listens to them but only for a few minutes. She then records a conversation she overheard between a young person in the penal system and a man interviewing him. The conversation between the man and the boy is printed inside an image of a TV, to further show the reader where this material is coming from.
Following the image of the TV that contained the conversation, the prose breaks up into lyric form for the first time in Don't Let Me Be Lonely. It begins with a meaningless phrase that conveys a change, a shift in rhythm: "umm pa pa" (16). The lyric poem is introduced as a "dialogue" by the speaker.
After this moment, the speaker recounts the story of her friend with Alzheimer's. She reveals that once the friend learned of his diagnosis he scratched the words "This is the most miserable in my life" into a chalkboard. She tells the reader that her friend went to two different nursing homes before he died. The speaker took the chalkboard and hung it on the wall in her study at home. The words he etched into it loop on a repeat in her head. In the final scene of Part 2, the speaker tells us that her friend entered an alternate reality once his memory began to fade. She recounts a time when he pointed to the television and demanded to watch "the lady who deals with death" (18). It took the speaker a while until she understood he wanted to watch the TV show Murder, She Wrote.
Analysis
Don't Let Me Be Lonely opens with a theme that will haunt the book: the gray area between life and death. The first sentence of the work—"There was a time I could say no one I knew well had died"—foreshadows this theme (5). Since the sentence is in the past tense, the reader can safely assume that this period in the speaker's life has ended. (By the end of the book, the reader will learn that many people that are close to the speaker have died.) The speaker's description of her mother's miscarriage works within this theme as the reader is not explicitly told that the baby had died: "Where's the baby? we asked. Did she shrug?" (5). The "shrug" at death evokes death's uncertainty in this work. It is always evolving; never static. In this way, we can understand the character of the mother as a device that Rankine uses to show the introduction of an overpowering drive to question death and life in this book. This theme appears again when the speaker tells the story of her friend who died of breast cancer. The speaker tells us that the tumor that would eventually kill her friend was misdiagnosed by doctors a year before. The speaker asks, "Can we say she might have lived had her doctor not screwed up? If yes—when does her death actually occur?" (8). The speaker wonders whether death can extend beyond the moment when the body stops living; whether it can be a kind of state that one must exist in when their days are numbered. The theme of the uncertainty of death is furthered by the conversation that the speaker overhears on her television. Even though the man wants to know whether someone else is dead, all that the boy can say is "He is dead to me" (15). This furthers the idea that there are multiple ways that a person can be "dead," even if their physical life has not yet ended.
Part 1 and 2 also introduce the theme of television and its reverberances in our life. For a long time, the only knowledge that the speaker had about death was acquired by the television: "The years went by and people only died on television—if they weren't Black, they were wearing black or were terminally ill" (5). This sentence shows how racial violence portrayed on TV has affected the speaker. The speaker learns the suicide hotline phone number from the television: "You are, as usual, watching television, the eight-o'clock movie, when a number flashes on the screen: '1-800-SUICIDE'" (7). Additionally, the speaker watches movies with her friend who is very sick from cancer. The speaker and her friend indirectly use these movies to talk about life: "Though the subject of cancer did not come up in our late-night conversation about the two movies, it did for him, for Tom Cruise's character in Magnolia" (10). The TV can also be a means through which one can digest their life and the events around them. As the speaker's friend with Alzheimer's is dying, he requests that the speaker put "the lady that deals with death" on the TV.
We also get a sense of loneliness and sadness in Part 1 and 2. Upon witnessing her father's response to his mother's death, the speaker introduces the theme of loneliness: "he looked to me like someone understanding his aloneness. Loneliness" (5). Thus, from the very first page of Don't Let Me Be Lonely, loneliness and death are closely related. Death and loneliness are also intertwined in Part 2, at the end of the lyric section: "You'd let me be lonely? / I thought I was dead" (16).
We see a shift in the speaker's voice in Part 1 and Part 2. For most of these early sections, the narrative is in the first person. The speaker is an "I" who seems to be telling the story of her life. However, the passage about the suicide hotline switches into the second person. Instead of an "I" acting in this passage, it is a "you": "You tell him, I feel like I am already dead" (7). This shift in the voice is important because it implicates us as readers into the narrative; it is as if we are a part of the scene, dialing the hotline on the phone. It also shows us that the voice in Don't Let Me Be Lonely is not fixed or changeless. It should not be understood as one specific person. Instead, we have to approach Don't Let Me Be Lonely as if it were made of a collage of voices—the "I"s don't necessarily represent one person, especially if that person is the poet herself. The speaker's voice also shifts into the second person at the very end of Part 2.
Claudia Rankine also introduces images into her text to help to make the scenes jump off the page. The x-ray of the friend's tumor and the logo on the DNR form are visceral elements of the account of her death. The image of the friend with Alzheimer's chalkboard is meant to be very emotionally evocative. It is included four times. In the last time, close-up pictures of an older person's face are posted above it.
There are several interlocutors throughout the work. The inclusion of outside voices in Don't Let Me Be Lonely adds to the effect that the book is comprised of a patchwork of voices. It also adds different points of view through which the speaker can digest the events of the work. The first interlocutor is Gertrude Stein. Rankine uses a quote from Stein about death and notes that she also died of cancer, like her friend. Additionally, Rankine includes Joseph Brodsky's voice: "What's the point of forgetting if it's followed by dying?" in the scene about her friend with Alzheimer's (17). In each of these cases, the interlocuters help the speaker deal with the death of her friend. They add insight and sympathetic voices. Additionally, these interlocuters add to the uncertainty of death—even though both Stein and Brodsky are physically dead, their voices live on in this work: "Joseph Brodsky is dead, but this fact does not stop his voice from entering the room every time I look up" (17).
