On Death
Death is a friend, a conceptual entity that has hovered at the margins of my life for its entirety. Not in a pithy way, a “my first brush with death was when my cat died when I was young” kind of way, but in a visceral way, a seeing murder kind of way. And, well, yes, I suppose we did have a cat that died when I was young.
I thought it strange, back then, the way she died. Her name was Jasmine, and I remember little about her but that she was quite overweight, and my mother loved her dearly. The week she died, or maybe it was a day or so, she went to be alone and we didn’t see her for a while. She died underneath this chair in our living room, hiding. In movies there was always so much holding of hands and crying, touching of faces, family gathering around the hospital bed, and so on, but in real life it was never like that. Time went on, and more and more Death became a part of life, as it does for most of us. Grandparents pass away, friends. You witness the new cat decapitating rodents, and you find entrails strewn about. There is such a disconnect between the way someone cleans up rat blood in the garage and the way we almost avoid the skin of an elderly human who’s on the edge of death. One is a mess, an inconvenience, and one is untouchable. Sacred. One moment a mother, blue eyes glistening with decades of stories and the knowledge of the best way to make sauce, and then next both a biohazard and a kind of statue, one we pass along to those we pay to clean up the mess of our family members. We no longer touch our own dead. The awkward navigation of this symbolic dichotomy exemplifies our oxymoronic existence, our hangups with not only Death, but relation.
And then there’s a different kind of death: a violent death. A car crash, bodies in the street, crumpled. The mortician’s job is to turn the reality back into the kind of fetishized statue, but for now there are no illusions, yellow tape tries to turn you away, pretend you haven’t seen, but you did. There are the deaths that happen between two people in relative private: a knife flash, running away from the scene. The kind that happens in broad daylight in the street with gun muzzles out windows for a split second and then before anybody knows what happened someone bleeds out in your lap, and is gone. These deaths leave little room for processing, for goodbye, because their consequences are so immediate and you are first and foremost focused on survival, not the careful cultivation of the illusion of creating a monument from what was once a human being.
But compared to the death of a pet that parents slyly take away, bury somewhere, or have cremated and turned into this little cute box that sits on a shelf collecting dust, it’s those deaths that are honest. To see something happen, for blood to run into the cracks of the pavement, food for pervasive rodents when humans stop pacing the streets at night, to fertilize the weeds and grass that prevent us from pretending altogether that we’re not really alive, that we’re made of concrete like our buildings. To understand that a last breath is final, to not need a middleman to tell you “he died, late last night, the on-call nurse found him”. The way we orient to these events is as tradgedy, and they are, certainly. There are truly no words to describe the way that these moments will wrench you from certainty, from the well-built walls of your life and turn you into a raging river crumbling a dam to pieces. Yet when the rain subsides and you cease to be a torrent, there is at least knowing. Hospital deaths -- those deaths where, despite the Hollywood portrayals of hands held until the last breath -- are in reality more like the cat hiding under the chair, dying where no one can see them. And these are horrifying. Death is not sterile, nor is it careful, or cautious, nor does it make monuments of us.
But what is it? Death, I mean. Why is our relationship with it so convoluted? Why do we hide it away behind concrete edifices, and names carved into granite? Or those horrific farms that turn living beings into styrofoam-packed cuts that bear names that only evoke salivation, and not gratitude or honor? Where much of the bodies are thrown into dumpsters carelessly, never to be consumed, never to truly return to the land? Why can we not even bear the thought that our food could be the result of death? Even if we don’t eat meat: we refuse to acknowledge that the process of growth is not sterile, that it relies on death and decay inherently. We sterilize even our soils, pumping them full of synthetic poisons rather than allow for the decomposition of living things to feed them.
Yet we crave it. All of this avoidance, and yet we yearn for death: we sit and play games that simulate murder, and dying. We watch television shows and movies that are full of death and blood. We use the metaphors of death in our speech: “it killed me”, “I could just kill him”, “I would absolutely die”. We read stories from a time where death was inescapable, where the reality of death was the morality parable. Stories of witches eating children only hold weight as a moral lesson where children and adults alike know that such danger really exists – though perhaps it is a bear that lurks in the woods, and not a witch – and yet we read them almost as relics, pretending they mean the same thing they did to those medieval peasants who first swapped such tales at work. We do “literary analysis” and castrate our fairy tales, unable to learn the lessons because to us Death is just as distant as the witch who blows into the castle in a cloud of black smoke, issuing her distasteful sorcery and setting an end date for the life of the baby princess.
And so what of this great psychosis, this avoidance of the reality of mortality, and yet the obsession with Death as an actor in the lives of those we cannot touch?
For we would not exist without Death. We can purport to live a life free of blood on our hands, but that’s a lie for all of us. Not only are there the obvious examples: our consumer goods produced by those in other places, working for pittance wages or none at all, destroying their bodies and dying prematurely from either workplace accidents, the accumulation of pollutants in their bodies, hunger, or violence resulting from subjugation and socioeconomic instability. I speak of these things a lot, but this is not what I mean right now. Right now, we’re getting to know the Death that’s required for our life to exist in a more immediate way, that which is required for ecological balance to persist.
Soil in a forest is made of the bodies of animals, fallen leaves, fungal decomposition, insect larvae and shells and shedded fur and molten skins. Soil is the product of decomposition. Even the mineral breakdown from rocks helps to create the mineral content of soils: a slow decay from beings not even considered by our culture to be alive. Everything else follows: water resources have a bidirectional relationship with the plant matter grown from decomposition, other beings eat plants, eat other beings, excrete things from their bodies that aids in this whole decomposition process, and the cycle continues. Death is vital, it turns out.
Beyond the buildup of soil or the cleaning out of the waste products of life, Death is the great regulator. There are fates worse than death. The whitetail deer in many regions of the US where their predators have been eradicated know that a quick death by wolf would have been better than the suffering of wasting disease. When we avoid Death recklessly in one context, we often find it in another: killing wolves who killed tended sheep has led to the collapse of ecosystems, as has been witnessed in Yellowstone. First the populations of deer explode, who rub the bark off of the trees, leaving them open to bark beetles and plague populations of other insects, which eventually kill the trees, and those birds and other animals who ate the bark beetles then must go elsewhere, which of course exacerbates the problem, and before long we have skeleton forests of dead standing trees ripe for wildfire to reclaim rather than living ecosystems full of organisms working together. We can decry the immorality of Death, but in our supposed rational outcry against that great limiting agent, we invite it to bring an army of the harbingers – and then the executors – of collapse.
There are perhaps so many coalescing factors that have led to our outright denial of Death, and therefore life, that have occurred between the telling of those fairy tales and their retelling. Increased urbanization, the cultural artifacts of certain religious preferences paired with rampant consumerism and a Death industry that preys on our fears, the cultural assertion that aging is horrific, untouchable, something to deny and cut out of ourselves, to name the more obvious of these. But it is perhaps far out of the realm of my capability to quantify and analyze all such factors. For now, I’m simply interested in the character of Death as it pertains to our life: it’s great dichotomies, its allure and its horror, its permanence and yet impermanence, its violence and its sterility. As it pertains to our attempts at making ourselves monuments even while alive, at becoming hollow statues of ourselves, at our denial of life even as we live it.
There was a point when humans began to name the forces they witnessed operating within the land they stewarded. This was possible because humans, in their role as a stewarding species, had the capability of perception, and measuring, in a way that most other beings did not. Furthermore, they had developed the capability to conceive of that which was not yet. And so, misunderstanding their grief when they would experience Death close to themselves, misunderstanding its purpose as a great teacher, they were capable of becoming incensed at the idea of the great Regulators of their existence: disease, drought, predation, weather, and so on. To become angry at Death itself. As humans began to name the forces they saw operating on and around them, they also began to name them “good” or “bad”. This was not inherent in humanity: for a long, long time, forces simply were. They were named, sure, and venerated as the great forces which held tension with one another to make possible this world, to make possible Life itself. But for a long time, there was no conception of “fertility”, for example, as “better” than death.
Many animals are like this, even animals capable of grief. When a pig is slaughtered in front of another pig, there is no anger towards the person doing the slaughtering, no great revolt that occurs. There is no conception, it seems, of this Death as horror, as tragedy. Though the pig might look for its companion for a few days is not accidental, nor due to a lack of intelligence. Like us, they take time to adjust to the change in their existence. Their place in the great web of beings has shifted, after all. However, unlike us they do not dwell indefinitely, nor harbor great grudges against all humans and develop aggression, nor depression. This is the only way I can think to conceptualize humanity before the advent of the idea of evil: that we understood our place, took time to adjust to great shifts like losing the physical presence of those we loved and cared for, honored our dead by returning them to the land, yes. But it seems that we did not shake our fist at “God” and wonder why benevolence would allow for Death to touch us. We understood that Death and benevolence are, after all, not opposites. Sometimes they are one in the same, and when they are not, they are still operating in tension, holding balance so that all Life must continue.
Thank you for reading this week. I appreciated having the opportunity to write something a little less literal, and a little more reflective. I understand that this piece may not feel ultimately complete, nor can it, at this moment in time. The reflection continues, though I hope that what I've left you with is useful, or awakens something reflective in you.
Until next time ~