"The Winter of Our Discontent" is a novel written by John Steinbeck, published in 1961, and set a year earlier. Like most (but not all), of Steinbeck's work, it is a socially realistic novel dealing with contemporary issues.

Ethan Allen Hawley is the scion of an old money family in Long Island (although the setting seems more like New England), who has fallen on hard times. After coming home from World War II, he lost his money in bad investments, and has been forced to take a job in a local grocery store. He has a wife and two teenage children, and is getting by. He actually has a somewhat managerial job, but he considers himself "just a clerk". He is also worried about the long term prospects for his family. His manager, an immigrant from Sicily, tries to order him to cut corners with customers. His wife's best friend, gives him a tarot card reading and tells him

My grandfather moved away from South Bend, Indiana to a retirement community an hour from Salem, Oregon sometime in his eighties so that he could die. It wasn’t necessarily that he needed to uproot himself to die for himself, far from the place where he worked all of his life and raised a family. It was that Salem was where his younger daughter and her physician husband lived. The theory was that the physician husband would be best capable to take care of my grandmother, once my grandfather was

English tradition of ringing church bells to announce someone is about to die.

"In Renaissance England the hoot of an owl flying over one's house was an evil omen, and meant impending death for someone inside. Shakespeare refers to the owl as the "fatal bellman" because it was the bellman's job to ring the parish bell when a person in the town was near death. "This was called the passing bell, and was a signal for all hearers to pray for the dying