Thinking about death, about how people write about and view death, for my long essay for class. Reading some poems by Jack Gilbert, thinking about my own encounters with death, and trying to put this all together.
Emailing back and forth with Jay about my prospectus on my paper about Jack Gilbert, I wrote about death:
“So not about death in the sense of dying-dead-gone, but more about what was valued in life and what the speaker finds themselves losing as they come apart in death. What, more than the physical body, was treasured and valued. Like almost everything written in Western culture it isn’t about death, the poem is about the values the speaker had in life, what defined them as a person more than the “bag of mostly water” that was their physical body.”
His reply:
“People write / think about death as a way to encounter it, prepare for it, not turn away from its reality. Also, doing so can have the nice result of pushing you out into life, into desire, love, human encounter. I make my death art and then leave my desk for an encounter!”
I still have to stand by what I wrote, that we don’t write about “death” typically in culture. We write about grief, about loss, about absence, about people suffering, but not about the death itself.
I still remember when my great-grandmother passed away when I was child, everyone seemed to avoid saying she was dead. She was gone, she had passed away, one of my relatives kneeled down next to me to tell me, “Grandma Hunsacker has gone away, she won’t be coming back anymore.” and I remember patting them on their head and saying something like, “I don’t know if anyone has told you, but I think she is dead.” and one of my uncles nearby breaking out laughing as they overheard me call them on their bullshit.
I don’t think we ever really encounter or discuss death. The whole idea of an afterlife seems to be a construction to avoid having to talk about death, a way to skip discussing the event but discuss what happens after. We talk about all the human events surrounding death, but not about the moment when entropy gives us its final greedy kiss and we go from being a Who to a What, a person to a corpse.
Funerals, grieving, are not about the person who is dead. Noticing that again as I read “The End of Days” by Jenny Erpenbeck for class. Funerals are about the people who are still living, about giving them a process to handle grief, to package it so they can set it aside and get on with living. Not about the dead, not about death.
Art about “death” always seems to me to be veiled art about life. You talk about death, about pain and grieving, to remind yourself of what you value in life, what you would miss if it was gone.
Death is something we fear because we can’t encounter it, we can’t picture it. I think it was Jim Butcher in his Dresden Files series who described death as being a one-way door, exactly one person wide. Something you pass through, on your own, and no one ever comes back to explain or describe it.
It is the destination we all head towards, and that many people seem to spend the second half of their lives running away from. Botox, face-lift, anything that can be done to remove the signs of aging; as aging is the roadmap to death, the wrinkles on our face being the mile markers on the road between birth and death.
I wonder how much healthier we would be as a culture, as a society, if we had a more wholesome acceptance of the fact that life does end, that everyone will reach an end someday, and if we spent less time worrying and fretting about that and more about how best to live the life we have, instead of hoping for some afterlife if you jump through the hoops of ancient collections of myths and fables.