Turning the Bed: Godfather Death and the Costs We Refuse to See

“There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”— Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell’s much-repeated sentence has the force of cold water. It cuts through a particular kind of political and institutional fantasy: the belief that, if only the right people were in charge, the difficult thing could be made uncomplicated and every important good secured at once. Climate change will not arrive at a final state marked solved. The NHS cannot provide every possible treatment, immediately, everywhere, without choices about taxation, staffing, thresholds, time and what receives less. Poverty can be reduced (sometimes substantially) but no intervention is without effects on other parts of the social system. Free speech cannot be protected without tolerating expression that some people experience as offensive or harmful; attempts to prevent that harm, in turn, place power in somebody’s hands to decide what may be said. Every policy distributes benefit, frustration, risk and loss. The real work is not finding the choice that costs nothing, but deciding which costs can be borne, by whom, and for what purpose.

There is something bracingly adult in this. In clinical work, as in ordinary life, maturity involves discovering that we cannot preserve every possible future. To choose one thing is to relinquish another. A boundary protects something partly by refusing something else. Time given here is time unavailable there. Even care has a shape, and therefore an edge. Much political speech asks us to forget this. It offers more care with no additional burden, greater safety with no loss of liberty, endless growth without depletion, transformation without grief. The promise is not simply that life can be improved, which it often can, but that improvement can be detached from sacrifice.

Yet I am also wary of Sowell’s sentence. “There are only trade-offs” can become its own form of evasion. It can make avoidable suffering sound inevitable, or present arrangements appear as though they were facts of nature rather than the outcomes of earlier decisions. A cost named in the abstract may still be disavowed in practice. It matters whether it falls on the person choosing or on somebody with less power; whether the scarcity is truly unavoidable or has been politically produced; whether the loss is temporary or irreversible; whether those who will bear it have any voice in the decision. Doing nothing also has costs. So does preserving a familiar system. Trade-offs are real, but they are not morally self-interpreting.

Several years ago, someone placed a story into my hands (or perhaps into my mind) and I have not quite shaken it since. It was Godfather Death, a Grimm tale first published in 1812, although the Grimms pointed to older forms, including a song from 1553. It is a short story about a father, a physician, a road and a cave full of candles. It has preoccupied me because it seems to understand both the necessity of limits and the danger of making a religion of them. It asks not only whether every choice carries a cost, but who keeps the account, who is permitted an exception, and what happens to the costs we arrange not to see.

The Father on the Road

The story begins in exhaustion. A poor man already has twelve children and must work day and night simply to feed them. When a thirteenth child is born, he goes out onto the highway to find a godfather. The first figure he meets is God, who promises to care for the child and make him happy. The father refuses. God, he says, gives to the rich and lets the poor go hungry. The Grimm narrator hastily adds that the man speaks this way only because he does not understand how wisely God distributes wealth and poverty, but the father’s accusation is allowed to remain. He is not making a theoretical objection. He is speaking from inside a life in which labour has not produced security and providence does not look evenly shared.

The Devil comes next, offering gold and all the pleasures of the world. The father refuses him too, because the Devil deceives and leads people astray. Then Death approaches on withered legs and declares himself the one who makes everyone equal. The father accepts at once. Death takes rich and poor without distinction. Here, at last, seems to be a power that cannot be bribed, flattered or morally persuaded.

I grew up in a family of seven children—not thirteen, but enough to know that fairness is never as simple as giving everyone the same thing. Different ages, vulnerabilities, capacities and needs make equality a moving relational task rather than a clean division. The father’s mistake is not that he cares about fairness. His hunger for it is entirely understandable. It is that he accepts Death’s narrow definition: everyone is equal because everyone dies. This is equality at the vanishing point. It says nothing about who is fed while living, who is protected, who has time, whose suffering is noticed, or how long each person’s candle is permitted to burn.

Under pressure, individuals and groups often reach for one organising principle that will make a morally complicated world feel coherent. Fairness becomes sameness. Safety becomes control. Care becomes rescue. Freedom becomes the absence of restraint. Activism becomes authoritarianism. Each contains a truth, but the truth hardens when it is asked to carry everything. The father chooses Death because Death offers a principle with no apparent ambiguity. Yet the clean answer is purchased by collapsing the distinctions between equality, justice and inevitability. Everyone reaching the same ending is not the same as everyone having been treated justly along the way.

The Gift and the Rule

Death keeps his promise. When the boy comes of age, his godfather takes him into the woods and shows him a herb. The young man is to become a physician. Whenever he is called to a sickbed, Death will appear. If Death stands at the patient’s head, the physician may administer the herb and the patient will recover. If Death stands at the feet, no treatment can save them and the physician must say so. The gift is extraordinary, but it is inseparable from a limit.

I was initially tempted to read the herb as a crutch: magical power mistaken for earned capacity. I now think that is too simple and perhaps too punitive. None of us invents our knowledge alone. A physician works with inherited science, teachers, institutions, colleagues and forms of trust built by people they will never meet. A psychotherapist also depends upon traditions of thought, supervision, patients who teach us, and the often-unseen labour that makes clinical work possible. Receiving a gift is not the problem. Dependency is not a moral failure.

The danger begins when the source and limits of the gift disappear from view. The physician becomes rich and famous because people believe he needs only to look at a patient to know whether they will live or die. His judgement appears self-generated and almost infallible. What the world calls his genius is actually a relationship with Death that nobody else can see. He does possess knowledge, but it is borrowed sight. His task is not to defeat mortality. It is to discern when intervention is possible and when the boundary has been reached.

As a clinician, I can feel the seduction of Death’s arrangement. How much easier it would be if the limit stood visibly at the end of the bed: treat here, stop there; this person can be helped, that person cannot; this intervention is care, that restraint is neglect. Real practice offers nothing so clear. We act with partial knowledge, and both action and inaction have consequences. Sometimes the most skilled act is intervention; sometimes it is restraint; often we only understand the difference afterwards. The fantasy of the perfect solution is also a fantasy of exemption from uncertainty, responsibility and grief.

Turning the Bed

The test arrives when the king becomes ill. Death is standing at his feet, but the physician decides to deceive his godfather “just once”. He turns the king around in the bed, so that Death is now positioned at his head, administers the herb and saves him. Death is angry but allows the breach because the physician is his godson. He warns that a second offence will cost the young man his own life.

Soon afterwards, the king’s only daughter falls ill. The king promises that whoever saves her may marry her and inherit the crown. Again Death stands at the feet. Captivated by the princess’s beauty and by the future opening before him, the physician turns her in the bed and restores her to life. Death then takes him by the hand and leads him underground.

The image of turning the bed feels startlingly contemporary. The physician does not abolish the limit or openly contest it. He changes the position of the patient so that the forbidden action can appear to meet the rule. Institutions do this whenever they preserve the appearance of success by moving the point from which something is measured: a need is reclassified, a threshold altered, a waiting period counted from a later date, a risk moved to another service, a burden returned to a family, a cost deferred to a future generation. The bed turns; the underlying reality does not. The benefit remains visible, while the cost travels out of sight.

It also matters whose bed he turns. The story begins with a father protesting that the poor are left hungry while the rich receive more, but the physician uses his exceptional power first for a king and then for a princess whose rescue will make him royal. We are not told that he bends Death’s rule for an unknown labourer or an exhausted mother. The man chosen because he supposedly treats rich and poor alike becomes the source of a gift used to create exceptions for those closest to power. The son does not resolve his father’s protest against inequality. He repeats it in another form.

This is one of the questions hidden inside every appeal to exceptional circumstances. Whose life becomes exceptional? Whose distress acquires enough emotional or political traction to overturn the rule? And when we spend beyond a limit for the person whose face is before us, where does the unmet need go? Compassion is real, and rules can be cruel. But compassion that can imagine only the visible person may quietly transfer suffering to someone absent from the room.

The Cave and the Hidden Ledger

Death brings the physician into a cavern where thousands upon thousands of candles are burning. Each is a human life. Some are tall, some half consumed, some already little more than stubs. Flames go out and new ones appear. Death explains that even children and young people may possess only a tiny light. The physician asks to see his own and finds it almost extinguished.

The scene exposes what the father’s agreement with Death had concealed. Death may take everyone in the end, but he does not give everyone equal time. The candles are radically unequal. Mortality is universal; its distribution is not. The cave is less a picture of fairness than of contingency, and perhaps this is why it is so difficult to look at. We can understand the fact that all human beings die more easily than we can accept that some die before a life has properly begun, that time is allocated without reference to merit, and that no moral account reliably explains the length of the flame.

The terrified physician begs Death to give him a new candle so that he can marry the princess and become king. Death replies that one light must go out before another can be lit. The physician then asks him to place his dying stub onto a new candle, carrying the flame across. Death appears to agree, but deliberately lets the small candle fall. The flame goes out, and the physician dies.

This is important because Death is not, finally, the dispassionate accountant the father believed him to be. He is angry, personally aggrieved and capable of deception. The figure who claims to represent an impartial law also enforces it through revenge. Even the keeper of the ledger has a position within the story.

The textual history deepens this uncertainty. In the Grimms’ 1812 edition, the tale ended with the physician being shown the human life-lights. The familiar conclusion in which Death pretends to transfer the flame and extinguishes it was added in the second edition of 1819. The earlier ending leaves the physician (and the audience) before the unbearable fact of finitude. The later ending converts that confrontation into punishment. Death ceases merely to reveal the limit and becomes the hand that executes it. Neither version cancels the other. Together they leave us with a more difficult question: are we looking at an unavoidable boundary, or at a punishment presented as though it were one?

The Bypasses on Either Side

I first thought of Godfather Death as a story about spiritual bypassing. John Welwood used that term for the way spiritual ideas and practices can be used to avoid unresolved wounds, developmental tasks and the raw difficulty of ordinary human life. We recognise it in phrases such as “everything happens for a reason” when they are offered too quickly, not as faith but as a way of escaping grief, anger or helplessness. A transcendent explanation closes the space in which painful reality might otherwise have to be felt.

Something like that is happening in this tale, although “spiritual bypassing” is not quite sufficient. The father uses the ideal of absolute fairness to bypass the more difficult knowledge that justice consists of competing claims which cannot be purified of dependency, difference and power. The physician uses miraculous rescue to bypass the limit within his own gift. But the language of trade-offs can also bypass. “There are no solutions” may become a sophisticated way of telling those who bear the worst costs that nothing substantially different can be done.

These are opposing fantasies, but they perform a similar psychological function. One insists that nobody need lose: with enough will, virtue, expertise or money, every candle can be kept burning. The other treats existing losses as inevitable: a candle had to go out, and there is no value in asking why it was this one. Utopian solutionism avoids limitation; fatalistic realism avoids responsibility. One sacralises hope and the other sacralises constraint. Both can prevent us from thinking about how the cost was distributed.

This is why the honest recognition of trade-offs must be the beginning of thought rather than its conclusion. It is not enough to say that every policy has a cost. We need to ask which goods are genuinely in conflict, which scarcity is unavoidable and which has been created, who receives the benefit, who absorbs the loss, how certain we are, whether the decision can be revised, and what forms of repair remain possible. A trade-off made visible can be argued with. A cost presented as fate cannot.

Climate policy requires choices about present consumption, energy security, landscape, industrial change, taxation and risks passed to future generations; recognising this should sharpen action, not abolish it. The NHS will always work within limits, but those limits do not tell us by themselves how much resource to provide, which needs to prioritise or whose time and labour should absorb the shortage. Poverty may not have a final “solved” state, but that does not make every level or distribution of poverty equally inevitable. Protecting speech and reducing intimidation are both legitimate goods; the difficulty lies in preserving the conflict between them without pretending that one can expand without ever pressing upon the other.

Groups are especially skilled at making costs disappear. What cannot be held by the whole may be deposited in one member, one profession, one social class, one scapegoat, one exhausted worker, one unpopular patient, or one generation not yet present to object. The group then experiences itself as coherent because somebody else has become the bearer of its contradiction. From a group-analytic perspective, the task is not to create a group without frustration or exclusion. It is to make the border, the frustration and the exclusions available for thought: to notice where the cost has travelled, whose account is missing, and whether the apparent solution depends upon somebody remaining unseen.

Staying in the Cave

Godfather Death is not a comfortable moral tale. The father is not simply foolish: his distrust grows from actual deprivation. The physician is not simply lazy or fraudulent: his gift is real, and the desire to save life is not contemptible. Death is not simply fair: his equality is thin, his candles are uneven and, in the later ending, his judgement is entangled with vengeance. The story refuses to divide cleanly into the wise and the deluded.

Perhaps that is why it has stayed with me. It does not tell us to stop trying to heal, reform or rescue. Nor does it offer the fantasy that effort, love or moral purity will release us from limit. It takes us beneath the public miracle and shows us the candles: the hidden dependence, the unequal time, the cost displaced from one bed to another. It asks us to look before we declare either that the problem has been solved or that the loss was inevitable.

The fantasy of the solution says that no flame need diminish. The cold misuse of the trade-off says that whichever flame goes out was simply the price of reality. The tale leaves us somewhere more difficult, in a cave where thousands of unequal lives burn at once and even Death cannot be trusted to keep a neutral account. No single sentence, not even Sowell’s, can tell us what to do with them.

Note on sources

Thomas Sowell’s formulation is quoted on his Hoover Institution profile and reflects the contrast between “solutions” and systemic trade-offs developed in A Conflict of Visions. The account of Godfather Death follows the Grimms’ KHM 44 in D. L. Ashliman’s translation and textual note, which records the 1812 publication and the addition of the extended candle ending in 1819. The earlier 1553 antecedent is discussed in the Grimms’ notes and summarised in this history of the tale. John Welwood explains his use of “spiritual bypassing” in this interview.