On Death – A Review
I don’t think it’s strange to say that I’m interested in death. What might be weird is to suggest that death seems quite interested in me.
If the difference between being alive and dead was a simple fine line stretched in chalk across a great field, you’d find me toeing the divider, peeping over to see what’s so different about the other side. Fascination in the macabre is a universal thing, and I’ve been curious since I was little.
Can some things be more alive than others? Does that mean some things are more dead? What about rocks and minerals. What about dirt. What about snapped tree branches, fallen leaves, or uprooted vegetables. What about the removed pieces of a self-replicating starfish? What about a sample of stem cells? What about a severed human limb? What is alive? What is dead?
Mankind has asked those questions for centuries. The answer seems to change somewhat regularly, now we have classifications thanks to advances in science, but before that, all we had was what was spiritual.
Totems and long forgotten gods were considered alive. Today, those beliefs still stand in shrines old and new. Many religions suggest there is no death at all. That life is unending. Other religions suggest there is a line. A divide that is crossed over. But some religions posit that the divide itself is death. So, for that fraction of a moment that your being is crossing that line, you are truly dead, but before you even have a chance to haunt anyone, you’re already “alive” again, in the afterlife or resurrected. So, then death only exists for a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second. An impossibly miniscule moment. A time period that is immeasurable. Which makes me wonder… does it happen at all? Even lights take a second to turn off after the switch is flicked.
A common phrase associated with my generation of millennials is: “I want to die.” I’d be lying if I pretended like I never said it. Sometimes it’s hyperbolic. Simply thrown into the wind of a conversation as a joke, or to suggest that the speaker is suffering. Other times, it’s all too real.
No one likes hearing it, but for whatever reason, a lot of people like saying it (or maybe they just need to). It most likely stems from a more thorough understanding of mental health and a familiarity with the existential dread that comes with having to face a future that was wrenched out of our control by the generations older than us. But it might also be because it caught on as part of the 21st century vernacular thanks to the internet. Regardless, it’s said in the Central US, the East and the West, the North and the South, it’s said in Europe and Australia, Central America, Canada, and South America and it always stings.
I’m happy to say, I don’t want to die. That’s not me living counter-culture either. I’m sure anyone who says that phrase unironically would like to be able to think the opposite, but it takes time. But not wanting to die, doesn’t mean anything. Because, death is inevitable. I’m not afraid of it, and I’m all too familiar with how fast it can come.
That’s why I sometimes try a bit too hard to make people happy. But, that’s a different story for another day.
Our fascination with death is actually chartable. For a long time, philosophers questioned the nature of “the end,” but it wasn’t until the black death that the concept became foundational to our livelihood. Prior to the spread of the plague, lives revolved around death, but weren’t centered on it. Then came books like Boccaccio’s The Decameron and eventually it’s ripoff, The Canterbury Tales, at that point it became abundantly clear that there was a deep-seated intrigue in society when it came to death. It was around this time that paintings began depicting disease itself as a skeletal reaper. Shortly thereafter, the reaper came to just represent death.
This symbol soon was replaced with various shorthand imagery, mainly skulls. Depending on the culture, skeletal iconography represents death itself or simply mortality. There is no notable correlation between belief systems and this differentiation, so you can decide yourself if you want to see death as an end, or as a reflection of life itself without going against any mores from where you’re from.
I don’t like comparing tragedies, or guessing how much someone suffers and weighing that against my own suffering. I can only know what I feel. And I know that in the Winter marking the beginning of 2016, I had a burden. I felt death’s specter looming everywhere I looked. I became tragically obsessed with it, due to various encounters.
I’ve always been better at understanding something through dialogue. If I can talk to someone or write about something, I’ll come to terms with it. So, I wrote a research paper on death. I also had a minor role as a dead guy in a play (I had lines in flashbacks, don’t you worry). You got a small synopsis of the paper in these last few paragraphs, but the whole thing ended up spanning around 15 pages. I cut it down to 6 or 7 and presented it at a research “seminar,” I don’t know what else to call it. I was the only one there who was doing research into the liberal arts, I made my poster look like a stage. It was cute, but everyone else there was doing math and science presentations on plain white trifold boards. Woops.
I don’t regret doing that, I thought it was funny in a gross sort of way. I might have added fuel to the fight between STEM and the Liberal Arts, but getting artsy was my only way to talk about death without wanting to break down in front of half of the science and math department at Newberry.
Through my research, I went into detail about why mankind was so fascinated with the prospect of death. About why so much of our literature focuses on death, violence, or disease. And at the end of it all? It became pretty clear that it was just about understanding. The whole journey I took in order to figure out why I was feeling the way I was, was the answer to the question I was asking.
Death interested me, because it surrounded me. The reason death interested the bulk of artists and authors that I studied was because it surrounded them too. They wrote about it to come to terms with it themselves, just like me. And I’d like to imagine that’s the same reason we’ve read these books for so long, and the same reason we watch the movies with death counts surpassing the thousands. It’s a practice in empathy, really. But in this case, we’re being empathetic through the eyes of another character towards ourselves.
Alright, maybe that’s me getting too deep in this stuff. We might just also like to see things blow up. And character death might be a good way to motivate our main characters to go out and blow more stuff up, but the fact is death exists. It’s something we face every day. For some people, someone we lost years ago is still there every time we close our eyes. We see their smile when things are tough, and when we’re feeling blue we might think of them to remember that each second is precious. We’ve all come in contact with the line. It was drawn long before we existed, and we can’t know if it’ll be there after we pass on. And while it’s sad to see people journey into that vast unknown with only either faith or our perception to understand what’s happening to them, we know that their new vacancy isn’t meant to deter us from living while we still can.
So, tell everyone you love them. Smile at the stranger on the street. And draw silly pictures, sing silly songs, and write down what you believe. Because everyone has that gift until they don’t.
