The Living End

  by Staci Layne Wilson

You are going to die. How will it come--a bottle of randomly poisoned pain reliever? Lung cancer? When you step off the curb to cross the street tomorrow? When you slip into sleep ten years from now?

We may not know how or when, but we know it is inevitable. We are the only species, evidently, with the burden of this knowledge. Animals, while they have a strong sense of self-preservation, seem to have no idea that tomorrow might not come.

We have been captivated by death, and what may lie beyond, since time immemorial. This fascination has romanticized death in poetry ("I have been half in love with ease'ful Death..." --John Keats), in song ("This is the end, my beautiful friend, the end of nights we tried to die..."--The Doors), on film ("The Big Sleep"), and in books (The Vampire Chronicles--Anne Rice).

Everything that lives is born to die (or so goes the Led Zeppelin song). Acceptance of that fact, however, seems against our natures. Secretly, we hope that Lestat is not a fictional being, and that one night we will experience his dark embrace and emerge on the other side immortal.

Death can also be funny. Who didn't laugh at "Weekend At Bernie's" or the "Chuckles the Clown Dies" episode of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show?" There are some truly amusing epitaphs on gravestones, such as the famous one from Tombstone, Arizona: "Here lies Les Moore. Four slugs from a forty-four: No Les, no more."

Modern psychology generally recognizes five stages of grieving connected with death: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. As individuals and as a collective soul, we go through these stages all the time--whether for the death of our mother or the death of Mother Earth--and they manifest themselves in many different ways.

Another indication of our denial of impending oblivion is the belief in the existence of ghosts--perhaps it isn't tangible immortality, but it is a continuation of the human soul and that's better than nothing for a lot of us. Not to be outdone by the dearly departed, a lot of us living, breathing types have near-death experiences in which we describe approaching, then turning back from, a dark tunnel with a beckoning, bright white light at the end.

There are several far less interesting, but much more realistic ways, of achieving immortality. We bequeath our healthy organs to the living upon our own deaths. We have children and live on and on through our descendants. Even the popularity of face-lifts and hair plugs is a pale bid to prolong the inevitable.

Some Americans have achieved it: Jim Morrison, Marilyn Monroe, V.C. Andrews. They all live on, for one guaranteed way for the dead to remain "alive" in this capitalist nation is to continue to produce or consume. Following this logic, the aforementioned stars are alive because they continue producing revenue from their respective music, movie and book sales. Consumers might include those who pay for "rental space" for their dead bodies in cryogenic labs, hoping to be brought back to this wonderful world at a later date. Even Ripp Van Winkle didn't see this one coming--The Big Sleep indeed!

It is said that "dead men tell no tales," but money talks, even from beyond the grave. The dead continue to wield control over the living through stipulations in trusts and wills. Watch the movie "Greedy" for a fun take on this most serious of subjects. Or turn on the evening news and see what's going on with the latest dead celebrity's estate.

Maybe you can take it with you, after all. Legend has it that Atlas Shrugged author, Ayn Rand, is pushing up the daisies with a six-foot dollar sign resting beside her in her coffin. Perhaps the most infamous dead miser is millionaire oil heiress Sandra Ilene West, who was buried in her lace negligee behind the wheel of her powder blue 1964 Ferrari. She made the burial arrangements herself, down to having the car seat "set in a comfortable position," refusing to pass on a single cent of her inheritance unless her instructions were followed to the letter. A deceptively plain slab in the Alamo Masonic Lodge Cemetery in San San Antonio, Texas marks her grave.

While no match for the pharaohs resting among their gold and alabaster prized-possessions in the Great Pyramids of Egypt, those gals did have gumption. But some might say Ayn and Sandra were merely indulging in ghastly child's play. In 1996, the British outfit, Telecom Artificial Life, announced work on the Soul Catcher: a memory chip, which, within 30 years, will supposedly be able to capture our feelings and thoughts. By combining this with ever-accelerating cloning technology, we could recreate a person physically, emotionally and spiritually. It could well be immortality in the truest sense. How much do you think that's going to cost?

More than any nation on earth, Americans long for endless life. Perhaps it is because we are such a young country. Given the proximity of the United States to Mexico and the fact that Mexican peoples are one of the fastest-growing immigrant groups in America, it's worth reflecting on their apparent fixation with la mort. The Mexican culture is saturated with gloom: the morbid drama of the bullfight; the Day of the Dead observances and corresponding folk art, profuse with skeletons and bloody crucifixes; and the Mummy Museum in Guanajuato. These death-rich cultural traditions reflect the fusion of their Indian and Catholic ancestral legacies; the former includes the heritage of human sacrifices practiced by the Mayans and Aztecs, and the latter based upon the ultimate swindle of the Grim Reaper: the resurrection of Christ.

Then there are those who don't want to deny death. They, skipping ahead to the fifth and final stage of grieving, embrace it. In a country where voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide (ala Jack Kevorkian) are unregulated and illegal, the only real option for some people can be, sadly, to commit suicide. We politically correct Americans like to coin phrases with cachet, and so the term "self deliverance" has come into usage to distinguish the crazy kamikazes from the Romeos and Juliets among us.

"Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it." Those were the last recorded words of British author Somerset Maugham. Far from dull and dreary, the imagery of death in music, poetry, paintings and sculpture can be of the most enduring, magical beauty imaginable. Art is one sure defense against time, against that numbing knowledge that life itself is fleeting at best.

Arthur Koestler, Hungarian novelist, political philosopher and founder of the suicide Shangri-la, Exit, wrote before his own 1993 self-deliverance, "If the word death were absent from our vocabulary, our great works of literature would have remained unwritten, pyramids and cathedrals would not exist, nor works of religious art--and all art is of religious or magic origin. The pathology and creativity of the human mind are two sides of the same medal, coined by the same mint-master."

Cemeteries--from the Greek word for "sleeping place"--are cultural fixtures that symbolically dramatize fantasies of our departed dreaming forever in the arms of deliverance. There is breath-stealing beauty to be found in the garden of good and evil: tombstones and statuary that you can see strolling the cemeteries of France, Italy and Bulgaria rival that of any art you might find in those countries' most lauded museums. The handsome, feather-winged angel of death delivering his eternal kiss to a swooning woman carved in a headstone in the Florence, Italy cemetery is every bit as dramatic as the clutch of Cupid and Psyche at the Louvre. Oscar Wilde's magnificent memorial is every bit as stylish and witty as anything the man himself wrote. The bat wings and skulls that festoon forbidding, stone mausoleums are every bit as chilling and somber as the classical strains of the Funeral March.

If you make a study of cemetery art, you may notice that Gothic ghosts of gloom and doom were replaced gradually throughout the centuries by the Victorian phantoms of flowers and doves. It is thought that over time, with an increasing hope for heavenly immortality, and the Romantic faith in man's aspiration to divine perfection, there was a synchronal shift from scary, bat-winged skeletal images to portrayals of serene, feather-winged cherubs on the gravestones. No longer might we become ghosts or vampires; we might actually be going to Heaven.

And now, in this homogenized age, our tombstones continue to reflect the times: a simple, flat plaque bearing a brief, bureaucratic summary of the body beneath is the norm. Name, rank and serial number. Maybe a "Beloved mother / father, husband / wife" if you're lucky.

As a society, we hardly notice when someone goes teats-up anymore. In civilization's earliest period, a woman's average life span was often less than 30 years and infant mortality was as high as 75 percent. Now the dirt nap has become the domain of the elderly, with nearly 80 percent of all life losses in this country occurring in individuals over 65 years of age. But long ago, death was rightfully feared and dreaded: famine, disease, or war could lead to the destruction of the entire group.

"Nowadays this social gravity features the impersonal bonds linking heterogeneous and interdependent strangers within large urban areas. Social bonds no longer are based on mutual affection but rather on the achievement of complementary goals," says Michael Kearl of the popular Internet Death Ring. "Total selves are irrelevant to most social interactions; we now interact toward most others solely on the basis of the roles that they play. Here the scope of grief is limited to the family and friends of the deceased, who are given but a few days off from work before being expected to return a social system usually unaffected by the death."

The trend seems to be moving toward cremation, electronic cemeteries, and memorials on the Web. While seemingly cold and impersonal, never fear: Our dread of dying, dependence on science, and desire for immortality will keep death alive for a long time to come.
 

Photos from the Pere Lachaise Cemetery, © 1997, Staci Layne Wilson