and it's an interesting glimpse into America's "death industry" as well as a discussion of death in general. Plus the author is woke.
She compares the (almost uniquely) American practice of embalming to other culture's practices:
Every culture has death rituals with the power to shock the uninitiated and challenge our personal web of significance—from the Wari’ roasting the flesh of their fellow tribesmen to the Tibetan monk torn apart by the beaks of vultures to the long, silver trocar stabbing Cliff’s intestines. But there is a crucial difference between what the Wari’ did and the Tibetans do with their deceased compared to what Bruce did to Cliff. The difference is belief. The Wari’ had belief in the importance of total bodily destruction. Tibetans have the belief that a body can sustain other beings after the soul has left it. North Americans practice embalming, but we do not believe in embalming. It is not a ritual that brings us comfort; it is an additional $900 charge on our funeral bills.“
The book is darkly humorous:
These babies arrived at the crematory from the largest hospitals in Berkeley and Oakland. The hospitals would offer parents a free cremation if their baby died in utero or shortly after birth. It’s a generous offer on the hospitals’ part: cremations for babies, while often discounted by funeral homes, can still run several hundred dollars. Regardless, it is the absolute last thing a mother wants the hospital to give her for free.
I had written my thesis on medieval witches accused of roasting dead infants and grinding their bones. A year later I found myself literally roasting dead infants and grinding their bones. The tragedy of the women who were accused of witchcraft was that they never actually ground the bones of babies to help them fly to a midnight devil’s Sabbath. But they were unjustly killed for it anyway, burned alive at the stake. I, on the other hand, did grind the bones of babies. Often I was thanked by their poor parents for my care and concern.
Things change.
A nine-year-old girl named Ashley, who had just finished the third grade, died at a hospital, where her parents left her body, went home, typed their credit card into a website, and waited two weeks for her to appear in a box by mail.
Where capitalism has invaded death, communism is on its heels:
In 1963, Mitford wrote a book called The American Way of Death, which was not at all kind to funeral directors. A card-carrying Communist, Mitford believed funeral directors were avaricious capitalists who had managed to “perpetrate a huge, macabre, and expensive practical joke on the American public.” The American Way of Death was a massive bestseller, staying at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for weeks. In response to her book, Mitford received thousands of letters from citizens who felt cheated by the death industry. She found unlikely allies in Christian clergy members, who thought the focus on the expensive funeral was “pagan.”
This is what happens to your dead loved ones if you want them embalmed:
Next came the needle injector. The needle injector was a mouth-closing gun, a metal device used to shoot wires into the decedent’s gums so they could be tied together to hold the mouth shut. I began by choosing a sharp pin with a long wire attached to the end, like a tiny metal tadpole. It was placed into the tip of a large metal needle, which shot the barb into the top and bottom gums. Our injector at Westwind was of somewhat shoddy quality, a bit rusty. It didn’t inject with the level of oomph one would desire. This meant I had to climb on top of Elena and use my whole body weight to inject the wires with a mighty “Hoo-AH!”
At ninety years old, Elena was lacking in the gums department, necessitating several tries to get the barbs to stay put. Once the barbs were lodged in place, the two wire tadpole tails were twisted together through the plastic of the mouth former, bringing the upper and lower jaw together.
If all these tricks failed and the eyes or mouth still insisted on falling open, there was always the secret weapon: superglue. We used those little green tubes of liquid magic for everything. Even if, by some miracle, the eye caps and needle injector worked as intended, it was wise to reinforce. Milky blue eyes and exposed gums were not what the family wanted, but they were less terrifying than catching an unwanted glimpse of the flesh-toned spiked plastic or the thick tadpole wires that now held their loved one’s face intact.
The obesity epidemic also impacts cremation:
Using the principles of Cremation 101, Mrs. Greyhound went in at the beginning of the day, when the cremation retorts were still cool. We needed the cremation chambers stone cold in the morning to accommodate our larger men and women. Without a cold chamber, the flesh would burn up too quickly, going up the smokestack in thick, dark puffs, potentially summoning the fire department. People with additional body fat (such as the zaftig Mrs. Greyhound) were cremated first, while smaller, older ladies with zero body fat (and babies) were generally saved for the end of the day.
I loaded Mrs. Greyhound into the cold retort and went about my morning business. When I returned moments later, there was smoke pouring out the door. Billowing, black smoke. I made my “assessing an emergency situation” noise, a cross between a choke and scream, and ran to get Mike in his front office.
“Oh shit, the floor,” he said, steely-eyed.
Mike and I came screeching around the corner back into the crematory. At that same moment, from the chute where the bones are swept out, came a sluice of gushing molten fat. Mike pulled out the bone-collecting container, roughly the size of a large shoebox, to find a pool of what had to have been a gallon of opaque slop. And it kept coming. And coming. The two of us replaced container after container at the bottom of the bone chute like we were bailing out a leaky boat.
Mike ran the containers to the prep room, washing the fat down the same drain as the blood from the embalming process. Meanwhile I plunked down on the floor with a pile of rags, sopping and swabbing up the fat as it cascaded out.
Mike kept apologizing, the first time Mike had apologized for anything in my whole time at the crematory. Even he was on the verge of heaving after the tenth round of smoke, heat, scrub, swab, repeat.
„It’s the floor,” he said, defeated.
“The floor? The beautiful new retort floor?” I said.
“The old floor had all those craters, the fat could pool there and burn up later in the cremation. Now the fat has nowhere to go, so it’s gliding out the front door.”
When at last the situation was under control, I looked down to find my dress stained with warm human fat. (Would you call this color burnt sienna, or is it more of a marigold? I wondered.) I was sweaty, defeated, and drenched in lard, but I felt alive.
The World Health Organization (along with any of the forty-five extreme-weight-loss television programs) tells us that the United States has more overweight adults than any other country in the world. It’s no surprise that the market for oversized caskets is booming.
This is your heart on fat:
„Look at this guy. Cocaine overdose? More likely he had a heart attack. Look at this,” Bruce said as he reached into Juan’s chest cavity, picked up his heart, and presented it to me. “Look at his heart! All this fat around it. You know he was sittin’ there with his friends at the bar eating a hamburger and doin’ his lines of coke. All this stuff”—he pulled his gloved hands apart to reveal the yellowed deposits—“this is why you can’t be fat!
Working in a crematory must be the best drug ever...
It felt as if my life up to this point was spent living within a tiny range of sensations, rolling back and forth like a pinball. At Westwind that emotional range was blasted apart, allowing for ecstasy and despair like I had never experienced.
Everything I was learning at Westwind I wanted to shout from the rooftops. The daily reminders of death cast each day in more vivid tones. Sometimes in mixed company I would share the story of molten fat or some other cringe-inducing tale from the crematory. People performed their scandalized reactions but I felt less and less connected to their revulsion. The most salacious stories—bones ground in a metal blender or torture-spike eye caps—had the power to disrupt people’s polite complacency about death. Rather than denying the truth, it was a revelation to embrace it, however disgusting it might sometimes be.
...but sometimes it's brutal:
Bruce told the story of an arrangement he had made with a pregnant woman ten years prior. She had told him the arrangement was for her baby. “When she came in I said to her, ‘That’s a shame about your baby, but you’re lucky you’re pregnant, and gonna have another child.’ But the baby she was making arrangements for was the baby in her stomach. It had died and they couldn’t take it out yet. That baby was eight months old. That tripped me out. She’s sitting in front of me with a dead baby in her. That was messed up. All these years I remember that. To this day, man. That’s why there’s so many alcoholics and drug addicts in the mortuary business, so you can forget about what’s going on.”
Deadpan humor at work:
„Hey, Caitlin, you see that leg in the reefer?” Mike asked. After six months as his colleague I could discern the subtle distinction between all-business Mike, genuinely asking if I had seen the aforementioned leg, and wry, sarcastic Mike, about to crack the most minuscule of smiles.
“Well, no Mike, I haven’t seen this leg you speak of. Is it a Science Support leg?”
“No, man, the lady’s alive,” he said. “She had it amputated yesterday. Diabetes, I guess. She called to see if we could cremate just her leg. That was the weirdest phone call. Chris picked it up at the hospital this morning.”
“She’s cremating just her leg? So you’re telling me this is a … premation?” I replied. My joke was rewarded with a hint of a laugh.
When Hannibal Lector performed the autopsy:
Bruce gestured at the young man who lay on the table in front of him. “This is the guy that Chris picked up at the coroner’s today. Overdose or something.”
That was when I noticed that the man who lay on the table did not have a face. He hadn’t been decapitated, he just did not have a face. The skin from the crown of his head to the bottom of his chin had been pulled down like a Fruit Roll-Up, revealing the vessels and muscles underneath.
Vivid descriptions of olfactory delights at the workplace:
For those of you who have not had the privilege of smelling Eau de Decomposition, the first note of a putrefying human body is of licorice with a strong citrus undertone. Not a fresh, summer citrus, mind you—more like a can of orange-scented industrial bathroom spray shot directly up your nose. Add to that a day-old glass of white wine that has begun to attract flies. Top it off with a bucket of fish left in the sun. That, my friends, is what human decomposition smells like.“
Why everybody should work at a crematory once:
Corpses keep the living tethered to reality. I had lived my entire life up until I began working at Westwind relatively corpse-free. Now I had access to scores of them—stacked in the crematory freezer. They forced me to face my own death and the deaths of those I loved. No matter how much technology may become our master, it takes only a human corpse to toss the anchor off that boat and pull us back down to the firm knowledge that we are glorified animals that eat and shit and are doomed to die. We are all just future corpses.“
Some clients are hard to please:
The deceased was “not looking so good.” What did that even mean?
What it meant, as I discovered Monday morning, was that Mother’s cheeks had developed strange patches of bright-orange rot and her nose was covered with a hard brown crust. Her face was puffy and smooth, like an overripe peach. Human skin is confined to a dull color palette of cream, beige, taupe, and brown when people are alive, but all bets are off once someone is dead. Decomposition allows skin to flower into vivid pastels and neons. This woman happened to be orange.
I started on her makeup. I used whatever was available in Westwind’s makeup kit—half special mortuary makeup, half bottles from the drugstore down the street. I tried primping her hair to distract from the decomposition. I placed white sheets around her face, which was the size (and color) of a basketball, in an attempt at a flattering angle. After rolling her under the rose-colored lamplight of the viewing room, she didn’t look half bad.
...
The first thing the son said, quite emphatically, was, “She looked better before. Mom looked much better before all this makeup.”
...
I would ask him to clarify what he meant by “she looked better before.” Was “before” when she was still alive? That made sense. Or was “before” when he last saw his mother and she wasn’t yet the color of a traffic cone?
When the author doesn't cremate bodies, she picks them up wherever they drop:
I was just the body-van driver. Three times a week I would drive my eleven corpses up the I-5 from San Diego and pass through the immigration checkpoint. My large, unmarked white van moved slowly toward the front of the inspection line, looking far more suspicious than the Priuses and Volvos in the other lanes. I would find myself hoping to be stopped, if only as a break from the monotony. In my mind, this is how the scene would go:
“You don’t got any inmigrantes back there, do ya, missy?”
“No inmigrantes, Officer. Just eleven people,” I’d reply, and, whipping off my sunglasses, “former US citizens.”
“Former?”
“Oh, they’re dead, Officer. Real dead.”
Unfortunately, every time the van rolled up and the officer saw a young white woman at the wheel, he or she would wave us right on through. I could have smuggled hundreds of Mexicans into the country in cardboard cremation containers. I could have been a drug mule. I could be a rich woman by now.
With as much time as I was spending on the road, my main fear was getting into an accident, crashing on the freeway. I imagined the back doors of my van flying open, all eleven passengers hurling out. The police show up amid chaos and confusion. Eleven fatalities—but why are these people so cold, with no signs of bodily trauma?
Once the smoke cleared and they discovered that all these fatalities were pre-dead, I’d become an Internet meme, my little head grimacing in a Photoshopped Wizard of Oz–style corpse tornado.
What to say when you apply at a crematory:
As my departure approached, we posted the opening for my job on the Internet, and people applied in droves. The job market must have been abysmal, because people seemed eager to work in a mortuary.
...
The real gems came in when we selected several people to fill out an additional questionnaire. I thought that the questionnaire was a little much, in an “if you were a tree what kind of tree would you be?” way, but one has to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Q: In approximately 300 words explain why you are interested in working at a mortuary.
A: I love the death.
Q: Are you aware of, or have you participated in any religious/spiritual rituals surrounding death? Please describe these events.
A: I play with the wigy [sic] board once.
Q: Are you able to be empathetic to people without becoming personally involved? Describe a situation where you were able to do this.
A: I kill a bunch of people once.
Q: Are you able to be flexible with regards to your job duties and description?
A: Oh hell yeah.“
The author quits working at the crematory, enrolls at a school to become a licensed mortician and is not impressed with the curriculum:
One thing that was immediately apparent about the professors at Cypress College of Mortuary Science was that they believed in the work they were doing. Professor Diaz, a short blond woman, was the most aggressively cheerful person I had ever met in my life. Her enthusiasm for embalming, caskets, and all the available swag of the modern funeral industry bordered on the threatening. In her lectures she described embalming as an ancient art and said things like, “Do we have to embalm our bodies? No, but we do. It is who we are.”
In one class, Professor Diaz showed us lengthy slideshows of different caskets, gushing over her own purchase of a $25,000 Batesville Gold Protection casket with a forest-green interior.
A large part of the book discusses how American culture alienates people from death, and how other cultures handle death:
When a death occurs on the Indonesian island of Java, the whole town is obligated to attend the funeral. The body is stripped of clothing, the jaw closed with a cloth tied around the head, and the arms crossed over the chest. Close relatives of the deceased wash the body, holding the corpse on their laps, positioned so the living are soaked in the water as well. The idea of cradling the dead this way, according to anthropologist Clifford Geertz, “is called being tegel—able to do something odious, abominable, and horrible without flinching, to stick it out despite an inward fear and revulsion.” The mourners perform this ritual to become iklas, detached from the pain. Embracing and washing the corpse allows them to face their discomfort head-on, and moving to a place where “their hearts are already free.
Culture exists to provide answers to the big human questions: love and death. When I was still a young girl, my culture made me two promises. The first promise was that society knows what’s best for us, and what’s best for us is that death be kept hidden. That promise was shattered at Westwind, which I had discovered was playing its part in a vast mortality cover-up. Now that I had seen our society’s structural denial of death, it was hard for me to stop thinking about. I wanted to quiet my brain, to stop its incessant ruminations on the whys and hows of mortality. I felt like Muchukunda, the mythical Hindu king who, when asked by a god what reward he desired for his years of fighting (literal) demons, wished for nothing more than never-ending sleep. Death, for me, was like a never-ending sleep. And I longed for it.
The second promise was delivered by popular culture, which laid out the narrative that a girl is owed the prize of true love. I didn’t believe myself to be a slave to popular-culture narratives (spoiler: I was). Instead I believed what I shared with Luke was a rational, passionate connection with another human being. But somehow I was wrong about everything. Both of the promises my culture made to me were broken, my webs of significance snapped. None of my privileged assumptions about the world could be counted on anymore.
Every culture has death values. These values are transmitted in the form of stories and myths, told to children starting before they are old enough to form memories. The beliefs children grow up with give them a framework to make sense of and take control of their lives. This need for meaning is why some believe in an intricate system of potential afterlives, others believe sacrificing a certain animal on a certain day leads to healthy crops, and still others believe the world will end when a ship constructed with the untrimmed nails of the dead arrives carrying a corpse army to do battle with the gods at the end of days. (Norse mythology will always be the most metal, sorry.)
Historically, death rituals have, without question, been tied to religious beliefs. But our world is becoming increasingly secular. The fastest-growing religion in America is “no religion”—a group that comprises almost 20 percent of the population in the United States. Even those who identify as having strong religious beliefs often feel their once-strong death rituals have been commoditized and hold less meaning for them. At a time like this, there is no limit to our creativity in creating rituals relevant to our modern lives. The freedom is exciting, but it is also a burden. We cannot possibly live without a relationship to our mortality, and developing secular methods for addressing death will become more critical as each year passes.
There is a mid-fifteenth-century German woodcut entitled Triumph over Temptation that depicts a man lying on his deathbed. The denizens of heaven and hell surround him, fighting over his mortal soul. Demons with twisted porcine faces, claws, and hooves reach toward the bed to drag him down to the fiery underworld; above him, a horde of angels and a floating crucified Jesus pull a tiny version of the man (presumably his soul) upward to heaven. In the midst of all this commotion, the dying man looks positively blissed-out, filled with inner Zen. The little smirk on his face tells the viewer what he is thinking: “Ah yes, death. I’ve got this.”
The question is: how do we get to be that guy? The one who is facing his own death with complete calm, ready to get on with the moving-on.
The woodcut represents a popular genre in the late Middle Ages: the Ars Moriendi, or the Art of Dying. Ars Moriendi were instruction manuals that taught Christians how to die the good death, repenting mortal sins and allowing the soul to ascend to heaven. This view of death as an “art” or “practice,” rather than an emotionless biological process, can be tremendously empowering.
This was my worst fear, what Buddhists and medieval Christians referred to as “the bad death”—a death for which there is no preparation. In the modern era it takes the form of bodies ripped apart in a searing crunch of metal. Never to tell their loved ones how passionately they are loved. Affairs out of order. Funeral desires unknown.“
The author dreams of a better, less commercialized way to deal with death:
More and more I began to cherish the idea of the home funeral. I had never forgotten about my original dream of owning a funeral home. The dream of La Belle Mort had morphed into the dream of Undertaking L.A. At Undertaking L.A., families could reclaim the process of dying, washing, dressing, and attending to the body as humans had done for thousands of years. Family members would remain with the body, free to mourn and care for their loved one in a supportive, realistic environment. Such an idea was taboo at mortuary school, where wisdom held that embalming kept a corpse “sanitary.” No wonder Bruce said funeral directors were telling families that dead bodies were a threat to public health: they were learning that dead bodies were a threat to public health.
I started to put essays and manifestos on the Internet under the name “The Order of the Good Death,” looking for people who shared my desire for change. One such person was Jae Rhim Lee, an MIT-trained designer and artist who created a full-body suit for a human to wear for burial. The “Infinity Burial Suit,” which might be described as ninja couture, features a dendritic pattern of white thread spreading out across the black fabric. Lee crafted the thread from mushroom spores, which she specially engineered to consume parts of the human body using her own skin, hair, and nails. This may sound like a Soylent Green future, but Lee is actually training the mushrooms to remove toxins from our bodies as they decompose the human corpse.
After seeing a demonstration of her work at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles, we met at a taco truck and talked for hours on a bus-stop bench on Olympic and La Brea. I was grateful to talk to someone interested in pushing the boundaries of body disposal; she was grateful that someone in the traditional funeral industry was willing to listen to her ideas. We both agreed that inspiring people to engage with the reality of their inevitable decomposition was a noble purpose. She gave me a bucket of the flesh-eating mushroom prototype, which I attempted (and failed) to keep alive in my garage. Not feeding it enough flesh, I reckon.
The Internet is not always the kindest of forums, especially for young women. Tucked away in the comment section of my kitschy web series “Ask a Mortician,” there are enough misogynistic comments to last a lifetime. Yes, gentlemen, I’m aware I give your penis rigor mortis. It wasn’t just the anonymous basement dwellers who took issue with me. People in the funeral industry weren’t always thrilled that I was sharing what they perceived to be privileged “behind the black curtain” knowledge. “I’m sure she’s just having some fun. But since fun has no place in the funeral industry, I wouldn’t go to her for my loved one.” To this day the National Funeral Directors Association, the industry’s largest professional association, won’t comment on me.“
I should fly more:
I recently sat next to a middle-aged Japanese man on a flight from L.A. to Reno. He was reading a professional magazine called Topics in Hemorrhoids, complete with a large-scale photographic cross-section of the anal canal on the cover. Magazines for gastroenterologists do not mess around with metaphorical cover images of sunsets or mountainscapes. I, on the other hand, was reading a professional magazine that proclaimed “Decay Issue!” on the cover. We looked at each other and smiled, sharing a tacit understanding that our respective publications weren’t for popular consumption.
The most gruesome corpses come from nursing homes:
This gradual deterioration comes at a terrible cost. There are many ways for a corpse to be disturbing. Decapitated bodies are fairly gruesome, as are those dredged from the water after several days afloat, their green skin sloughing off in strips. But the decubitus ulcer presents a unique psychological horror. The word “decubitus” comes from the Latin decumbere, to lie down. As a rule, bedridden patients have to be moved every few hours, flipped like pancakes to ensure that the weight of their own bodies doesn’t press their bones into the tissue and skin, cutting off blood circulation. Without blood flow, tissue begins decay. The ulcers occur when a patient is left lying in bed for an extended period, as often happens in understaffed nursing homes.
Without some movement, the patient will literally begin to decompose while he or she is still living, eaten alive by their own necrotic tissue. One particular body that came into the preparation room at Westwind I will remember for the rest of my life. She was a ninety-year-old African American woman, brought in from a poorly equipped nursing home, where the patients who weren’t bedridden were kept in cheerless holding pens, staring blankly at the walls. As I turned her over to wash her back, I received the ghastly surprise of a gaping, raw wound the size of a football festering on her lower back.
And medical advances make sure more people end up in nursing homes:
We know that media vita in morte sumus or, “in the midst of life we are in death.” We begin dying the day we are born, after all. But because of advances in medical science, the majority of Americans will spend the later years of their life actively dying. The fastest-growing segment of the US population is over eighty-five, what I would call the aggressively elderly. If you reach eighty-five, not only is there a strong chance you are living with some form of dementia or terminal disease, but statistics show that you have a 50-50 chance of ending up in a nursing home, raising the question of whether a good life is measured in quality or quantity.
The author talks about her own grandmother's last years:
My grandmother Lucile Caple was eighty-eight when her mind shut down, even though, technically, her body lived on to the age of ninety-two. She had gone to the bathroom in the middle of the night and fell, hitting her head on the coffee table and developing a subdural hematoma — medical-speak for bleeding around the brain. After a few months in a rehabilitation center, sharing a room with a woman named Edeltraut Chang (whom I mention only because hers was the greatest name ever assembled), my grandmother came home. But she was never the same, transformed by her brain damage into something of a loony tune — if I may throw around another fancy medical term.
Without medical intervention, Tutu (the Hawaiian word for grandmother) would have died shortly after her traumatic brain injury. But she didn’t. Before her mind was blunted, she had insisted, “For heaven’s sake, don’t let me ever get like that,” yet there she was, stuck in that depressing place between life and death.
By not talking about death with our loved ones, not being clear through advanced directives, DNR (do not resuscitate) orders, and funeral plans, we are directly contributing to this future … and a rather bleak present, at that. Rather than engage in larger societal discussions about dignified ways for the terminally ill to end their lives, we accept intolerable cases like that of Angelita, a widow in Oakland who covered her head with a plastic bag because the arthritic pain of her gnarled joints was too much to bear. Or that of Victor in Los Angeles, who hung himself from the rafters of his apartment after his third unsuccessful round of chemotherapy, leaving his son to discover his body. Or the countless bodies with decubitus ulcers, more painful for me to care for than even babies or suicides. When these bodies come into the funeral home, I can only offer my sympathy to their living relatives, and promise to work to ensure that more people are not robbed of a dignified death by a culture of silence.“
Even with the knowledge that they may die a slow, grueling death, many people still wish to remain kept alive at all costs. Larry Ellison, the third wealthiest man in America, has sunk millions of dollars into research aimed at extending life, because, he says, “Death makes me very angry. It doesn’t make sense to me.” Ellison has made death his enemy and believes that we should expand our arsenal of medical technology to end it altogether.
It is no surprise that the people trying so frantically to extend our lifespans are almost entirely rich, white men. Men who have lived lives of systematic privilege, and believe that privilege should extend indefinitely. I even went on a date with one of them, a PhD candidate in computational biology at the University of Southern California. Isaac started his graduate career in physics, but made the switch once he discovered that, biologically, man does not have to age. Perhaps “discovered” is too strong a word. “I had the idea that, using the principles of physics and biology, we can engineer and maintain a state of indefinite youth. But when I realized that there were other people already working on it, I was almost like, fuck it,” Isaac explained to me over our organic chicken sandwiches, revealing not a trace of irony.
Though he had seriously pursued rock stardom and considered writing a great novel, Isaac now waxed poetic on mitochondria and cell death, and the idea of slowing the aging process to a snail’s pace. But I was ready for him. “There is already overpopulation,” I said. “So much poverty and destruction, we don’t have the resources to take care of the people we already have on Earth, forget everyone living forever! And there will still be death by accident. It will just be even more tragic for someone who is supposed to live until three hundred to die at twenty-two.”
Isaac was entirely unmoved. “This isn’t for other people,” he explained. “This is for me. I’m terrified at the thought of my body decaying. I don’t want to die. I want to live forever.”
Death might appear to destroy the meaning in our lives, but in fact it is the very source of our creativity. As Kafka said, “The meaning of life is that it ends.” Death is the engine that keeps us running, giving us the motivation to achieve, learn, love, and create. Philosophers have proclaimed this for thousands of years just as vehemently as we insist upon ignoring it generation after generation. Isaac was getting his PhD, exploring the boundaries of science, making music because of the inspiration death provided. If he lived forever, chances are he would be rendered boring, listless, and unmotivated, robbed of life’s richness by dull routine. The great achievements of humanity were born out of the deadlines imposed by death. He didn’t seem to realize the fire beneath his ass was mortality — the very thing he was attempting to defeat.
THE MORNING I GOT the call about Tutu’s death, I was in L.A. at a crematory, labeling boxes of ashes. ... The phone rang, with my mother’s voice on the other end: “Valerie just called. She’s hysterical. She said Tutu’s not breathing. I think she’s dead. I used to know what to do, but now I don’t. I don’t know what to do.”
...
While they waited for the morticians to arrive, Valerie laid Tutu’s corpse out on her bed and dressed her body in a green cashmere sweater and a colorful scarf. My mother texted me a picture. “Here’s Tutu,” it read. Even through the phone, I could tell Tutu looked more peaceful than she had in years. Her face was no longer screwed up in confusion, struggling to understand the rules of the world around her. Tutu’s mouth hung open and her face blanched white, but she was a beautiful shell. A relic of the woman she once was. I still treasure this picture.
So yeah, everybody should read this book!
Submitted June 24, 2018 at 05:53PM by KMIAL_reloaded https://ift.tt/2yCtKxl
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