Death with Interruptions by José Saramago

APART FROM A FEW RARE INSTANCES, AS WITH THOSE UNUSUally perspicacious people whom we mentioned before, who, as they lay dying, spotted her at the foot of the bed in the classic garb of a ghost swathed in a white sheet or, as appears to have happened with proust, in the guise of a fat woman dressed in black, death is usually very discreet and prefers not to be noticed, especially if circumstances oblige her to go out into the street. There is a widely held belief that since death, as some like to say, is one side of a coin of which god is the reverse, she must, like him, by her very nature, be invisible. Well, it isn't quite like that. We are reliable witnesses to the fact that death is a skeleton wrapped in a sheet, that she lives in a chilly room accompanied by a rusty old scythe that never replies to questions, and is surrounded only by cobwebs and a few dozen filing cabinets with large drawers stuffed with index cards.

One can understand, therefore, why death wouldn't want to appear before people in that get-up, firstly, for reasons of personal pride, secondly, so that the poor passers-by wouldn't die of fright when, on turning a corner, they came face to face with those large empty eye-sockets. In public, of course, death makes herself invisible, but not in private, at the critical moment, as attested by the writer marcel proust and those other unusually perspicacious people. The case of god is different. However hard he tried, he could never manage to make himself visible to human eyes and not because he can't, since for him nothing is impossible, it's simply that he wouldn't know what face to wear when introducing himself to the beings he supposedly created and who probably wouldn't recognize him anyway.