“I understand. In death, a member of Project Mayhem has a name. His name is Robert Paulson.” – Fight Club
I don’t want to be killed by a large sneeze, though. I don’t want people saying I bit off more than I could achoo.
As a culture, at least in the developed West, fearful of death. We hide from it to a degree that I’m not sure most of us are aware of. How could we be aware? Like our browser history, we’ve spent so much time and effort hiding it from public view.
I noticed a pattern in my life. First, when I was young, we went to funerals. Those funerals were where we buried my grandparents. As I got older, I started going to a lot of weddings as friends tied the knot, and funerals dropped to nearly zero. But as I get older, I’m seeing more funerals again. Most recently, it was for The Mrs.’ grandfather. Her grandfather was a crew chief on B-17’s for the 8th Army Air Force. He was buried in the same Army olive drab uniform that he’d worn in World War II.
Funerals are, and should be, a time for reflection. When I looked a little at the big picture, in modern America most people rarely see dead people unless it’s in a hospital bed or at a funeral. Sure, there are exceptions. Cops, soldiers, people in medicine, and morticians see them all of the time outside of those limited settings, but those people are a pretty small percentage of the population.
When I pass away, I don’t want a fancy funeral. One like this is fine.
I was half-watching a movie, perhaps in the 1990s, so I’m a little shy on details. The movie was set during the Great Depression, and the husband had died. The wife had prepared the body and it was sitting ON THE DINNER TABLE for people to come and see for the visitation. Okay, not sitting. But the husband’s corpse was stretched out where they ate their fried okra and possum sushi or whatever it was people ate during the Depression.
What the heck? “Surely they didn’t really do that,” I said. There was an older person in the room who had lived through the Depression. He corrected me. “Surely they did. Funeral parlors were for rich people. And what are you gonna do, put him on the floor?”
Wow. I guess the old saying of “dust bunnies don’t mix with the dead” is true.
Being a product of my time, I hadn’t really thought about that at all. Dead people? Call a professional. Very nice and tidy and nothing but a bill that you can pay by check or credit card.
But when you look back at life in the 1930s and before, I guess there was a reason that people had little graveyards on the farm: they were used to dealing with death and couldn’t pass the duties required by death to someone else. Who else was going to do it? You couldn’t hire it out like today. Our ancestors knew what we have now forgotten. Just as birth starts a life, death ends it. I heard a statistic from the CDC® that life has a nearly a 100% mortality rate.
I will say I’m in favor of the new congressional cheese support bill. Count me as pro-volone.
Close physical contact with our dead relatives used to be the norm, not the exception. For them, death was a part of life. My mother-in-law was doing genealogy of her family. For the most part, genealogy is not horribly interesting to me unless there’s a story. Just knowing that I had a great-great-great-great grandpa called Duncan McWilder back in 1788 doesn’t tell me a lot. Was he a scoundrel? Why did he hop the boat to America? Was it for better Internet?
I did jump on the Mormon database and at least someone thinks I am the great29 grandson of Harald Hardrada, who had a notoriously bad day in 1066 A.D. when he forgot to put on his armor when going up against the English. At least Harald has a story. After one of Harald’s vacations in Bulgaria, he got the nickname “Bulger-burner,” which is probably a lot funnier of a nickname if you’re not from Bulgaria.
And I hear that dead Viking Scrabble® players go to Vowel-halla.
Okay, that was a digression. I’ll see if I can’t get off at the right exit this time. Anyway, my mother-in-law was doing genealogy. One particular male relative had three or four wives. Polygamy? No. His wives kept dying in childbirth or from some plague that we can fix with a shot or thinking that arsenic and lead were what made makeup good, or wearing asbestos corsets and radium jewelry. People were acquainted with death in a real and up-close manner in the Victorian era.
Sad clowns don’t wear arsenic makeup, they use frown-dation instead.
I think that as we isolate ourselves from death, we start to pretend that it doesn’t exist. In some cases, people like Ray Kurzweil are attempting to figure out how to stop aging and live forever. Failing that? Ray is planning on being frozen into a corpse-sicle for later defrosting and infinite life. My bet? People will be able to live longer, but they won’t be able to live forever, because testing immortality drugs takes forever. And everyone is doing it: a guy outside of Wal-Mart® was selling immortality supplements, and it looked like a scam, so I called the cops. They were aware – they arrested the guy last year, in 2000, in 1968, and even, they said, back as far as 1880.
Ray may be able to squeeze a few more years out, but I thing that physical immortality isn’t something that we’ll see. At least not in my lifetime. Sorry, but immortality jokes never get old.
Even though life is part of death, that doesn’t mean we have to like it. But we don’t have to fear it, either. Very few of us will get to choose the time and place of our death. But we have the choice as to what we are going to do tomorrow to make this a better world – to do things that matter.
If a Viking is reincarnated, is he Bjorn again?
Heck, if I was immortal, I’d probably never get around to doing things that matter, since there’s always another tomorrow.
Until there’s not.
Just like Harald Hardrada, there will be a time and place when we’ll die. But Harald was a smart Viking, and he knew he wouldn’t drown. He knew that you could lead a Norse to water, but you can’t make him sink.
So, get going. And don’t forget your armor.
Surviving artillery barrages is a great way to learn that no, you are not in complete control of your life. Bad things really do happen to good people. Sometimes, you’re still alive only because the shell landed on the other side of the wall. But most survive, while a few unlucky or unprepared people don’t.
Sometimes you’re only alive because you got the mild form of the virus. But most people survive, while a few unlucky or unhealthy people don’t.
Not that I recommend this as a general course of instruction, mind. It’s not for the meek and timid.
Well, eventually something gets all of us. I’m hoping mine involves cherry pie and a Ferrari.
Spot-on insight you have presented here, John.
I swipe and type my way endlessly across the Internet these days, I frequently have a thought that pops up in my mind as I manipulate my fingers: “You don’t get to do this forever”. I always have the disquieting feeling that feeding all this dopamine to my brain from endless addictive surfing is not really the best way to spend my time.
Frequently hugging a beloved spouse is the best way I’ve found so far to make a better world. I’m looking for other ways.
Making a better world? I’ve got a couple a quirky little projects going on here. Maybe they’ll give you an idea.
A few years ago, a friend invited me to join his ham-radio emergency-communications group. As he explained “You don’t need to know Morse Code any more. Just take the test, like getting a driver’s license, to show that you know how not to make trouble for others.” So I did, and I discovered that we have a little social gathering, by radio, for 30 minutes every week. Only one person can speak at a time, so every such “net” needs a “net controller” to manage the talking. As the years have gone by, I assumed some leadership, and help keep the group going. I’m involved with two nets, actually, one oriented to emergencies (e.g., when a hurricane hits), the other simply friendly conversation. As net control, I get to ensure that everyone gets a chance to speak, and I like to throw in a short story or joke so that people have some point of interest. They keep coming back, so I guess I’m doing something right.
The other project is church maintenance. My Dad once told me that “every church needs some person who looks after the property as if it was his own home.” That is, who knows what to do when a drain is clogged? Who changes the furnace filters? Who makes sure the grass gets cut? For my little church (with 50 present on a good Sunday, before the pandemic!), that’s me. I change the light bulbs. I wash the windows (with a long-handled squeegee that works better than an infinite supply of paper towels). It doesn’t take much time, and some times it just takes a phone call to resolve some issue. In past years, property management has fallen on the Pastor, but I’d prefer for the Pastor to focus on the people. I support the place, where the people gather(ed) to support each other. An organization of volunteers can get mired in minutiae. “That light has been burned-out for months! Why didn’t somebody change it?” “Did you ask anyone to fix it?” “I don’t know who to ask…” Entropy will win, but not without a fight. If you have a talent, share it.
Your actions and outlook are an inspiration. Godspeed with your efforts.
Q: How many Baptists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Who said anything about change?!?
Opie Odd
You remind me of the Hymn “Hark the Voice of Jesus Crying”
Well, there’s writing? And your comments certainly make this place better!
People certainly used to be more comfortable with death, at least more accepting of it, and a lot of it in Western civilization seems based in Christian teaching. The Amish still reflect this, tragedy striking is chalked up to “God’s will”, almost excessively. In other cultures death still is treated more casually. On a trip to Haiti we were in a bus heading to church and on the cross street people were waiting for a bus or something and there was a dead guy laying in the street a few feet away. No one seemed to notice or care.
A lot of the ugly aspects of the human experience are hidden from view. No one butchers their own meat, it just magically appears in foam trays at the store. We defecate in little rooms and it goes away with the flush (sometimes several) and the exhaust fan and potpourri spray cover up any unpleasant odors. When a pet gets sick we take them to a vet where they quietly just “go to sleep”, instead of shooting them behind the barn. Women rarely die in childbirth, compared to the old days. We even pay money to buy water in a bottle instead of drinking the water that is piped right into our homes. Life is designed to be as safe and inoffensive as possible but those days are coming to an end.
People who are more comfortable with the unpleasant reality of the world are going to be in a much better position very soon and people who don’t even have a manual can opener to get into canned goods are going to starve pretty quickly.
I totally agree with you. Especially “the ugly aspects of the human experience are hidden from view”.
Making the world a better place today amid the realization of one’s own mortality is a worthy goal and noble ambition. And also an uphill battle.
https://theanthropocene.org/
https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.c2b74806-ab98-c177-a022-fa622d7fac9f?autoplay=1
Even if we succeed in making Earth a utopia, nothing we do can stop the sun from its own death, boiling the oceans of Earth away before engulfing us and expanding all the way out to engulf Jupiter as well. The words of Shakespeare and the good works of men are ultimately destined to be ashes. We are closer to that fate than the original start of life on Earth. Our entire biosphere is in fact middle-aged and literally heading into the sunset even if it doesn’t have a “heart attack” from the Anthropocene.
There are even more disturbing aspects of the human experience that are hidden from view. Cosmology is the modern scientific replacement for religion and it offers zero comfort or guidance, especially since it went from philosophy to irrefutable reality upon the seminal discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background in 1964 (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background ).
This discovery has opened the door for a further blizzard of breathtaking discoveries over the past 55 years that are “hidden from view” of the general public by their fascination with, say, good TV shows instead. Cumulatively these (discoveries, not TV shows) form an iron-clad proof of “The Big Bang” having occurred 13.8 billion years ago – only about three times longer ago than the Earth itself formed – which is just as real as dead bodies at Haitian bus stops. Even the death of our warm and lovely Sun is an insignificant matter in the grand scheme of things, ending a fate that even we cannot foresee…yet.
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/what-will-it-be-like-when-we-reach-the-end-of-the-universe-7d453a232dbb
Encouraging and humorous words from insightful men, and daily hugs from a beloved other, are indeed among the most important things a man can have in this world.
The ultimate fate of the Earth and all its inhabitants may be cold ashes, but we’re a long way from that point. The ultimate fate of a chess game is that all the pieces are swept from the board and put back into storage, but while we’re playing the game, we play the best game we can. Live as if it matters, because living as if it doesn’t matter is sure to end in misery.
There is a question of “scale”. Some people change the world, with an invention or industry, while others (like myself) just try to smooth the rough edges off of their immediate environment. The only way my efforts can scale beyond my immediate reach is to describe them, and get others to look for their own opportunities for small-scale change. Good luck.
When I moved into this neighborhood 20-some years ago, my new drive to work took me past an undeveloped block in an urban area. Wild shrubs beside the road grew out into traffic, and it was clear that only the traffic kept them trimmed. Not wanting the paint on my car to be scuffed by the branches, I took a pair of loppers out one fine day and cut everything back 3-4 feet from the curb. The bare ground was ugly with litter, but I have my limitations. A few weeks later, I saw an old lady picking up the trash. A couple of months later, grass started filling in the bare ground. A couple months after that, somebody had pushed a lawnmower down the block, and it was actually starting to look pretty nice. I still go back to trim every two or three years, when the weather is nice and I’m not too busy.
Oh, here’s one more item. I like to ride my bicycle, and there only road into my neighborhood meets the next road at the top of a hill. I can avoid the hill by cutting through a small woodlot, but the footpath is muddy after a rain. But I have a large supply of stones, sifted out of my garden, and it’s not hard to carry 10-20 lbs. of stone in a knapsack, so… the path is not so muddy as it once was. The low spots are filling in, month after month. The neighbors are starting to notice.
Yup. When Pugsley caught his first fish, he cleaned it, too. You have to keep in touch with the reality of life . . .
Then there is how the ultra-rich are approaching this….
https://youtu.be/EYXKCfLJXM4
Yup. They’re not like us. They have money.
I think you might have gotten Harald Hardrada, who was a guardsman in Byzantium at one point, confused with Emperor Basil II “Bulgar-Butcher,” who was Emperor (as his title suggests) of the Byzantine Empire some 200 years or so earlier. Both were folks you generally wanted to avoid annoying beyond a certain point, but different individuals all the same.
As for the rest, spot on.
Thanks! Yeah, Harald was a refresher for me – I’d read about him a long time ago, and forgotten most. Here was the source for the Bulgar-burner comment:
https://www.historyhit.com/1066-harald-hardraada-lands-england/
Mommygov will declare a WAR on shuffling off of this mortal coil and we will all be immortal.
We’re in this together comrade, keep your distance.
Pansy masks will soon have the outline of a vagina so the sheep can look sporty at the Sack N’ Save stocking up on Cheetos and sugar water.
Heh!
Yeah, and if you do die, they’ll tax that, too.
I grew up listening to mom’s stories after dinner. She grew up poor in a backwater village of a (then) 3rd world country. Grandpa was the circuit preacher and grandma founded a school. As you might guess, life was chancy. Her best friend bled to death in childbirth. Another friend’s mom was struck by a little brown snake in the leaves and dropped dead in front of her.
Grandma and Grandpa went to a lot of funerals, as you might guess, so I’ll pass on the lesson she taught my mom, who taught me.
It is better by far to give roses to the living than lilies to the dead.
Never part from a loved one – even for a little while – without a hug (and for the husband a kiss) and telling them “I love you.”
We exist in an entropic universe.
Only Love endures.
I was gonna comment to the group that it’s okay to take SARS-2 seriously while trying as best you can to live a normal life (and encouraging others to do the same), but I think this statement is more important than that.
“Never part from a loved one – even for a little while – without a hug (and for the husband a kiss) and telling them “I love you.”
This^^^
Yup. I try not to let ’em leave unless I’ve said that. Who knows when you say your last words to a friend or family member?
“Y’ALLHALA!” Yeah that made me laugh. I decided to test that joke on a tough crowd and asked The Missus “Honey, where does an Alabama Viking go when he dies?” and when I told her the punchline, she actually chuckled. Normally telling jokes to her is like ordering at a Chinese restaurant for optometrists, I only get eye-rolls (ba-dump!).
Glad I got a chuckle! Eyerolls! Heh!
My church supports 4 missionary families who serve overseas. They go for 3 years and then spend a year sabbatical back here in a house the church owns. After several cycles of getting reacquainted with these people every 4 years, they all say the same thing: basically, Christians in the U.S. have become ‘soft’ and are only getting ‘softer’. This would all the more apply to the general public.
When the Praise and Worship music really took hold in the 80’s, there was something that I thought a bit wrong about it. I now see that it was the narcissistic nature of it. Yep, we all need to toughen up for what’s coming.
Well said. Narcissistic is a good term for some of that.
When my Dad died a few years ago, it was the first time I was intimate with death (at home). It was really surprising how impersonal the whole thing was. Call the funeral home and a couple of hours later they pick up his body. A few days later, the funeral happens and an hour later he’s is in an incinerator. You pick up the ash like you would a parcel from the post office.
A little bit like buying all your meat from the supermarket, something is certainly lost from not being more personally involved with the preparation of a body. It seems to me as if there would be a benefit to the loved ones as well; putting the work in, I imagine, would be a somewhat fulfilling work – and at least go part of the way to processing the loss.
Are there even alternatives to the professional approach in the western world?
I really don’t think so. I think the law has now (at least in my state) more or less mandated a funeral home in there somewhere.