It’s Death again – He’s always there –
Watching, waiting – e’er the stare!
Every time I look behind
Or reach to pull the window blind,
I catch a glimpse of grubby hood –
A little clue to where he stood;
The glint of light that caught the scythe.
Perhaps if I could pay a tithe…
But O! no use, he’ll never go.
The adamant phantom; don’t you know
He will but wait until it’s time
For me to hear His fateful chime? –
The toll that claims my destiny,
To Hail: “You’re next, it has to be…”
“It's Death Again” by Mark R Slaughter
Our culture does not deal with death. Not really.
Perhaps that sounds ridiculous. After all, every day people die in various ways. We have wakes and funerals. We have graveyards full of corpses.
But what I mean is that, with the exception of people in a few specific jobs, we don’t generally see death. We avoid seeing it or dealing with it in a realistic way—that is, as an ordinary occurrence, a normal part of existence.
We avoid it, we push it away, we hide it, we simply refuse to deal with it unless we absolutely have to. And then, the typical reaction is devastation. Or guilt, shame, fear…whatever.
What we do with a dead body is sort of crazy. We fill it up with chemicals to delay decay, we paint it’s skin and insert small prosthetic devices to keep the skin to affect some resemblance to the person when they were alive. Because we cannot bear the idea that the person we knew is now a bunch of decaying, ratting flesh. And we seal the corpse up in a very fancy and expensive box to bury in the ground—also delaying the natural processes of decay and transformation of matter into something else (a much more appealing idea to me)—and then mark the spot with large carved stones and go visit them and sometimes leave (already dead) flowers or plastic flowers or various other items that the dead body will never appreciate. It’s almost a way of sort of saying death isn’t real…this person lives on, here, in the ground inside a box full of chemicals.
We put off death and refuse to look at it and deny it as much power as possible.
And I don’t mean just with people. Pets too, or just random animals we’ve never before seen alive. Roadkill or some carcass we happen upon…it’s horrid and vile, and we can’t stand to look upon it. If it’s in front of our house, or on our street, we’ll call someone to come remove it—as if nature doesn’t already have an excellent process for that.
Today’s rant was prompted by something posted on face book by a guy I know:
I’d seen this before, maybe a year or more ago when it was published. But here are comments that were made on this guy’s post:
— This is just plain messed up...but I can't stop looking.
— OK that is just weird.
— Recycling
— This is so wrong on so many levels.
— That is wrong, messed up, nasty, weird, disturbing, etc. Shaking my durn head.
— Oh, my. No. No no.
— So darn bad!
— Add this to the list of thinks I didn't need or want to know this week.
I’ll let you guess which comment was mine.
My first thought in seeing these comments was, “What’s so messed up or wrong or nasty about this?” Weird, yes. It’s unusual, but interesting. Disturbing? Well, okay, if you’re especially invested in kitties, or afraid of them, you might find this disturbing. But all the rest of those comments are just examples of our fear and avoidance of death.
I’m not sure if I’ve written about this before, but…I’m reminded of a conversation I had with my mother. It was about funerals and cemeteries and such things. I said I didn’t want to be filled with chemicals, sealed up and buried. She asked what should be done with my body, and I said, ideally, throw me out in the woods somewhere that I’ll be consumed by animals and/or plants, as we all should be. But that’s illegal. So, I suggested cremation and one of those urns that you plant a tree in, or something. She thought the idea was kind of horrible.
Another possibility is to give my body to a “body farm” where they study decomposition for forensic investigations and such.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Anyway, my point is that we have an un-natural attitude about death. It seems to me that people in jobs that actively deal with death—morticians, maybe coroners, crime scene cleanup, etc.—are sort of viewed as creepy or scary. And people who have an interest in taxidermy are often thought creepy as well (unless, perhaps, it’s only a head of something you shot, mounted on a wall).
We don’t want to see dead things. We don’t want to view them as dead, as corpses.
And there’s an argument to be made (it has been made) that our entire culture, our “civilization” is based on the idea of denying death. It’s based on the idea that we humans do not have to live at the mercy of the gods, of nature; we get to decide who lives and dies; we will not succumb to famine or disease or bad weather. No, we’ll plant more crops, discover cures, build better houses. We are humans, damn it, and humans are really supposed to die. It’s built into some of our folklore (a.k.a. religion).
Well, it’s all nonsense. Sad, delusional nonsense. Death happens. It’s sad when it’s someone we know and love. But it happens. Why the shock and craziness? Oh, yeah, ‘cause we don’t think it ever will happen, so when it inevitably does, it fucks with our concept of delusional concept of how the world works.
