Caitlin Doughty's Blog, page 10
July 21, 2020
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May 13, 2020
Exploring Grief in Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Image via @gabbydarienzo
The release of Nintendo’s social simulation video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons could not have come at a better time.
In the early weeks of government-mandated stay-at-home and physical distancing orders relating to COVID-19, people around the world started to collectively mourn — not only for those directly affected by the virus, but also for what felt like the loss of normalcy. Our daily routines and commutes, social events with our friends and families, and general productivity all ground to a halt as the virus rapidly spreads across the globe, affecting millions in its wake.
For anyone who has lost a loved one to COVID-19, this grief has come tenfold. Not being able to come into direct contact with our deceased, coupled with funerals being prohibited, or restricted to only a few attendees, COVID-19 is denying mourners the opportunity to properly grieve their dead and be comforted by loved ones during this deeply troubling and socially isolating time.
To those who are already familiar with the Animal Crossing franchise, it’s no surprise that on March 20, 2020 — in the early weeks of COVID-19 lockdown — millions flocked to download this newest installment for comfort.
Photo Credit: Reddit user edgore23
For those who are unfamiliar, Animal Crossing is a slow-paced game with tend-and-befriend mechanics —meaning, there’s no combat, violence, or even death in the game, and instead the main mechanics are centered around crafting spaces, watering flowers, and making friends.
At a time when our society is collectively grieving, Animal Crossing: New Horizons has been integral for millions of players when it comes to maintaining routines, socializing with friends, and having a digital space to create freely.
Photo Credit: Twitter user @emiface
One of the many craftable decorations in Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a tombstone (or “Western-style stone” as it’s referred to in the game). While some players have found the existence of such an item to be a little unsettling, several others using these tombstones to lovingly craft digital memorials for their deceased loved ones.
Twitter user @emiface who lost their grandmother at the beginning of April 2020 and was unable to attend her funeral crafted a beautiful seaside memorial where they can visit and honour their grandmother. “She and my grandpa loved going to the beach… I feel so upset not being able to say goodbye but now I can remember her more everyday.” Many other Twitter users also responded with similar memorials they created for their relatives, parents, and even their pets.
“I did the same for my grandmother,” replied one user. “She passed back in 2014. I made her a nice memorial overlooking the ocean, and since Eagles were her favorite, I made sure Apollo [an Eagle villager in the game] lived nearby. He waters the lilies around her grave every day.”
Photo Credit: Twitter user @shakuricosplay
Many Animal Crossing players have been crafting gardens for their loved ones, including Twitter user @shakuricosplay, “I lost my mom to breast cancer in 2015… Her favorite flowers were red tulips. I’m glad I’m not the only one who did something like this.”
Tombstones aside, many Animal Crossing players are using the open-ended design of the game to create spaces for mourning their deceased loved ones. Another Twitter user @p_uddles posted a lovingly-crafted recreation of their grandparents’ home in memory of them.
Photo Credit: Twitter user @p_uddles
Because Animal Crossing: New Horizons works on an actual clock, it’s designed to be played slowly — content is doled out a little bit over time with only a few new things to experience every day, and because there is no ending to the game you aren’t able to “binge” it like you would with most other video games. With this in mind, the joy in playing Animal Crossing comes in playing for a small amount of time every day. Checking your mail, greeting your villagers, seeing what few new items are in stock at the local shop, watering your flowers, etc…
One of the most important parts of mourning — whether it’s a deceased loved one, a recently-ended relationship, a job loss, etc — is finding a routine or ritual and allowing ourselves to fully grieve. This could be visiting a place that reminds you of the person or thing you are mourning, or listening to a song that reminds you of them, making a specific food dish they baked, whatever. Unfortunately, many who are mourning during this current pandemic are unable to create or practice their mourning rituals in order to do so at this time.
Although mourners may not be able to maintain their rituals in real life, Animal Crossing: New Horizons gives players the opportunity to find a daily routine filled with small but positive actions, and encourages the player to return to the game every day — even just for a little bit — to maintain this routine. Unable to visit their father’s memorial, Twitter user @aduenas99 created one for him instead, commenting “Because of the quarantine we can’t go visit him, but at least I can do it on my island… I’m glad we all can find a little comfort in doing this.”
Some of these rituals may even be continued from previous Animal Crossing games. “I’ve decided that, in each of my save files from herein, I’m going to dedicate a space to my father” said a Reddit user on the Animal Crossing Subreddit. “A whole room full of ‘hey, Dad.’ Animal Crossing helped me as a lost nine-year-old, and I figure it can be a tool now, fourteen years later.”
Photo Credit: Twitter user @aduenas99
One of the most difficult aspects we are collectively having with COVID-19 is the inability to directly interact with our friends, families, or… anyone really. During a global crisis, it’s a huge discomfort to not be able to visit loved ones, or eat at a favourite restaurant with friends, or even shop for groceries like we normally would.
Many of us have been spending more time on our devices in an effort to stay in contact with our loved ones and see friendly faces through screens —Zoom business meetings, FaceTime calls with grandparents, and Instagram dance parties included. Although these interactions may not be as comforting as they would be in real life, it’s a relief to be able to connect with our loved ones at all.
Many people are turning to video games while isolating at home as a way to entertain themselves, socialize with friends, and distract themselves from everything that’s going on in the world. Animal Crossing: New Horizons allows up to 8 players to visit each other at the same time, and gives opportunities for people to socialize with each other and have fun during a time where playfulness is needed now more than ever.
Players are using Animal Crossing to host parties, graduation ceremonies, and even funerals.
Photo Source:
When Branden Perez died from complications related to coronavirus and his family and friends were unable to hold a traditional funeral because of lockdown restrictions, they instead decided to celebrate his life in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
“Branden absolutely loved video games, so this type of service was perfect for him,” said his cousin Pricilla Perez. “It was the most beautiful thing that I’ve ever seen, we were able to go into the town that [he] had built in Animal Crossing and leave flowers… We have a really big family and it made us so happy to have that for Branden, it’s a place we can always go back to, to be with him.”
“This gave us a great deal of closure, all his friends got to go and leave flowers and leave comments and memories, it was so beautiful.”
Image Via The London Economic
COVID-19 has been a frustrating, stressful, tragic experience for the many who are directly impacted and the many whose lives have been uprooted by the pandemic.
Video games have always been a source of entertainment, socialization, and comfort for many, but I cannot think of a single more important game to exist than Animal Crossing right now. During a time when we are unable to attend funerals or memorials for our loved ones and when we are unable to console each other in person, it’s comforting to have the means to do so through the soft and slow gameplay of Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
Gabby DaRienzo is a Toronto-based video game developer and artist whose work often focuses on death and grief in games. She is the creative director of the critically-acclaimed funeral home simulation video game A Mortician’s Tale and the host and producer of the Play Dead Podcast, where she interviews other video game developers on how they’re exploring death in their own games. She currently works as an artist at DrinkBox Studios, the creators of death positive games Guacamelee! and Severed. You can follow her on twitter @gabbydarienzo and find more of her work at gabbydarienzo.com.
May 1, 2020
April 20, 2020
Grave Matters: Segregation and Racism in U.S. Cemeteries
The cosmology of American political life is saturated with death and the bones of the dead.
— Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes toward Death, 1799-1883
A nation that racially segregates its dead offers, for example, the story of George Hubbard, a Black church deacon who died on July 4th, 1963, in Nowata, Oklahoma. In an era of bitterly contested civil rights, a dispute quickly arose over his body’s final resting place. According to the New York Post, Hubbard “was the custodian in the bank in Nowata … for 36 years. When he died the tiny town refused him burial in its white cemetery.” Hubbard’s two sons, both lieutenant colonels in the Army, rushed home to address this offense. The city council resisted pressure from the governor and a senator to allow Hubbard’s burial in his home town. With a perverse sense of piety, “Mayor A. E. Richardson said the decision was based on ‘generations of tradition and custom,’ adding: ‘It is not within our power to destroy that which our predecessors have sought to build. We cannot forsake those who are now powerless to speak for themselves.’” According to the New York Times, Hubbard was buried in a nearby town, right over the Kansas border. His son explained, “we didn’t want a long fight. I’m going to leave that to posterity.”
James van Der Zee, Harlem Book Of The Dead
There is a contemporary history in the U.S. of whites in mortuary panic. A few vivid examples from recent decades illustrate this convoluted cultural legacy. The perplexity that can arise in reading through this litany, offense by offense, is not simply toward the irrationality of these burial exclusions but, more fundamentally, toward the question of how to tell a political story about dead bodies. What principle of justice do their passive forms articulate? How do social identities and hierarchies interact with cemeteries, crematoria, and remains?
What matters in these stories is the ruse of whiteness in the face of death. We should consider these episodes of mortuary segregation, and the political resistance they generated, as a haunting context for current practices in the U.S. of discarding non-white and borderland dead. Ideologies of privileged belonging in the U.S. still unfold across corpses, ashes, and burial grounds.
Oliver Cemetery map, Smithville, Texas (Via Carol Snyder, Smithville Heritage Society)
In 1951, officials of the Sioux City Memorial Park Cemetery, Iowa, stopped the burial of Sgt. John R. Rice, a member of the Winnebago tribe, who had been killed in combat in Korea. According to the New York Times, “before the coffin could be lowered, the family was notified that Sergeant Rice … could not be buried there. A clause in the sales contract for the cemetery lot reserved burial privileges for Caucasians only.” Evelyn Rice, his widow, later described in court her humiliation at his thwarted burial. Her lawsuit ended several years later in the U.S. Supreme Court without establishing any violation of Sgt. Rice’s constitutional rights. During the controversy, the cemetery published a pamphlet in its own defense, defending the practice that future generations would seek to end: “the restriction to members of the Caucasian Race is almost as old as the cemetery business and has come down with the development of the cemetery business. This restriction is in probably 90 per cent of the private cemeteries in the United States.” Although President Truman intervened to have Sgt. Rice buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors, he and his family had suffered a searing insult, not by accident, but by the specific design of a system that sought to extend, by sheer force of collective hallucination, racial whiteness beyond embodied, biological life.
His opinion culminates in a warning against legally enforced mortuary integration as nothing less than totalitarianism. “The undisputed facts in the instant litigation are that Evergreen Cemetery has segregated sections restricted to white children, Masons, veterans, Lutherans, and so forth. These restrictions implement the universal desires of religious, racial, and fraternal groups to be associated in death as well as in life. ‘Birds of a feather flock together.’ Obviously, if Negro children were admitted to ‘Babyland,’ its white exclusiveness would be gone, and it would be in the same category as the unsegregated section which was rejected by the Negro appellants. The appellants’ grievance is the mere existence of any exclusive section for white children into which Negroes cannot intrude at will…. From time immemorial the scope and extent of an individual’s choice in his private affairs has been the Anglo-Saxon measure of his liberties. No individual right has been more cherished than the right to choose one’s associates. Regimentation in the private affairs of life, on the other hand, has been the badge of the police state.” The following year, in 1961, the state legislature amended its anti-discrimination laws to clearly pertain to “the disposition of human remains.” In 1962, Mallery retired from the bench.
Three years after the Prices were denied a burial plot in Seattle, George Vincent Nash, a member of the Winnebago tribe and World War I veteran, “was denied burial in the White Chapel Memorial Cemetery [in Troy, Michigan] because he was an Indian and not a white Caucasian,” according to a story published in The Worker. In fact, his burial was interrupted: “the body of Nash had been lowered and workmen had started to fill in the grave when the undertaker was stopped as he was leaving the cemetery with the family and told the burial could not take place. He had to remove the coffin and take it back to the funeral parlor.” His wife, a member of the Chippewa, had been buried in this cemetery in 1949. According to the article, “cemetery officials had raised a question about his mother’s burial at the time, but finally ‘had cleared her as white.’” An article in the New York Post about this burial refusal explained the cemetery’s policy: “you must be able to prove that, when alive, the blood in your veins came 75 per cent from Caucasian forebears.” This gravesite calculation of whiteness, an esoteric mathematics, could differentiate the social worth of decomposing human tissue with an apparently absolute precision.
J. Merrill Spencer
In 1964, a funeral director and owner of a successful mortuary in Flint, Michigan was himself denied burial rights in a local cemetery. J. Merrill Spencer had purchased a burial plot in Flint Memorial Park for his mother in 1959. Yet the white cemetery owners refused to honor this purchase at her death, because the family was black. In Spencer’s victory in the State Court of Appeals, Chief Justice T. John Lesinski rejected the argument, which Judge Mallery had made so vehemently six years prior, that racial exclusions in cemeteries are justified by a right to determine one’s private associations: “When the law recognizes the philosophy represented by ‘his own kind,’ we are only a step away from adopting the racist philosophy which World War II was fought to eliminate.” After the decision, Spencer’s mother, Rosa, was exhumed and reburied in her rightful plot in Memorial Park.
Funeral procession of Cpl. Bill Henry Terry, Jr.
Bill Henry Terry, Jr., from Birmingham, Alabama, lost his life in Vietnam while serving in the Army. He volunteered in 1968 and, in 1969, was killed trying to protect fellow soldiers during an ambush. He was posthumously promoted to Corporal. According to Pete Hamill, writing in the New York Post, “his body was shipped home and his mother tried to answer one of her son’s special requests: that he be buried a half-mile from his home in the Elmwood Cemetery. The request was denied. [Bill Henry Terry, Jr.] was black.” Another ambush, on the home front. Local clergy, black and white, protested. The family sued and won in court, and on January 3, 1970, Terry’s body was exhumed from another cemetery and accompanied by a procession of twelve hundred people for reburial in Elmwood. A priest told those assembled: “We are rejoicing, not mourning. This is not really a funeral march. This is a victory march for Billy and for truth and right.”
Soon after, in 1971, Wilbert Oliver was told by Escude Funeral Home in Mansura, Louisiana—the only mortuary in his home town—that they wouldn’t allow his mother’s funeral service to be held on premises, despite the fact that Martha Pierre Oliver had served as midwife and wet nurse for the Escude children. Oliver was forced to hold his mother’s wake in a run-down storage building of a nearby church, while paying the same price charged to whites for use of the air-conditioned funeral home facilities. Because white-owned mortuaries in the region still routinely refused to serve black people, Oliver and others filed a class-action lawsuit against Escude and a nearby mortuary implicated in the same practices, Hixson Brothers Funeral Homes, in 1973. Lawyers with the Southern Poverty Law Center represented the plaintiffs. The court’s summary judgement, which declared these practices “illegal and unconstitutional,” served as a clear message to funeral homes and cemeteries throughout the region that policies of racial discrimination could not be legally sustained.
Of course, widespread work remained to be done, both in reclaiming neglected burial grounds and in affirming equal access to mortuary spaces and services. As if a bizarre, involuntary twitch of an old racist muscle—or an unusually public display of a hidden one—in 1996 the board of deacons of Barnetts Creek Baptist Church in Thomasville, Georgia requested the removal of a recently buried baby from its cemetery because her father was black. The baby, Whitney Elaine Johnson, who had died nineteen hours after birth because her skull was not fully formed, had been buried three days earlier, in a plot near her maternal grandfather’s remains. The church’s intention was to keep the cemetery as it had been, filled exclusively with the corpses of whites. Logan Lewis, deacon, was widely quoted as saying “There’s not any mixing of cemeteries anywhere in this area. If someone white asked to be buried in a black cemetery, he’d be a laughing stock.” As news of the offense spread across national media, the baby’s grandmother, Sylvia K. Leverett, told the New York Times that Logan “‘said they don’t allow half-breeds in their cemetery’.” Faced with overwhelming public pressure, church deacons quickly relented and publicly apologized, confirming that Whitney’s remains would not be exhumed.
In this thwarted re-segregation, on the occasion of an infant’s death, we can see with special clarity the terrible fragility of whiteness. As a historically shifting idea about the meaning of certain bodies, or a floating symbolic force posing as a biological feature, whiteness risks falling into crisis as a category to think about the dead. It is the weaker enigma, revealed as a ruse, confronted with the inexhaustible enigma of death. The idea in the U.S. of an all-white cemetery might be interpreted as a desire to make one’s feeling of whiteness, as an intangible value or possession, into an existential fact. An all-white cemetery, based on exclusions, functions as a persuasive alibi that one’s whiteness preceded birth and will continue after dying. To conjugate the idea of whiteness with a fetus or corpse—let alone with a zygote or cremains—is to reveal it for what it is, a desperate and incoherent claim for an exclusive social prestige that can be passed down through generational lineage, from one mortal body to another.
Photo by Eddie Seal.
A broken 1910 grave marker for Santiago sits just outside the San Domingo Cemetery fence.
Instances of racial mortuary exclusions in the U.S., even since the Civil Rights era, are innumerable. In May 2016, San Domingo Cemetery in Normanna, Texas, an all-white cemetery, refused to bury the remains of Pedro Barrera. Dorothy Barrera, his wife for over forty years, sued. From an article in The Texas Tribune: “According to the lawsuit, cemetery operator Jimmy Bradford told Barrera that her request to bury her husband at the cemetery had been denied by the Normanna Cemetery Association. When Barrera questioned the vote, Bradford allegedly responded that her husband couldn’t be buried there ‘because he’s a Mexican,’ the federal complaint detailed. Bradford then directed her to ‘go up the road and bury him with the n—— and Mexicans’ in the nearby Del Bosque Cemetery.” The lawsuit, filed by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, quickly compelled the cemetery to change its policy. Observers noted that the one tombstone with a Spanish surname, for Santiago Ramirez, who died in 1910, lay just outside the cemetery’s chain-link fence, which “turns so sharply at his grave that it actually cuts into the backside of the tombstone,” according to Noam Hassenfeld, reporting for Latino USA. Marisa Bono, a lawyer with M.A.L.D.E.F., commented that “it’s almost as if the fence was built specifically to exclude this one tombstone which also happens to be the one tombstone with a Latino name.”
A society’s basic moral grammar is expressed by its care for the dead, and particularly by its care for the corpse of the stranger, the outsider, the other. Rather than older forms of racial segregation, current generations will primarily confront mortuary justice in the terrible fact of unclaimed, indigent bodies in our desert borderlands. Thousands will continue to die in desperate migration, killed from exposure to the sun, thirst, drowning, and violence. Most of the borderland dead are unidentifiable; many are buried under the name “John Doe” or “Jane Doe” in places like the Terrace Park Cemetery in Holtville, California, which in its back lot holds the remains of hundreds of unclaimed migrant bodies, each marked with a brick. In recent years, many of the unknown migrant dead have been cremated, their ashes scattered in the ocean. In the face of such radical dispossession, in both life and death, what mortuary practices will be morally sufficient? Who is likely to create an adequate burial ground for these dead, despite their nameless poverty? If we’ve learned anything from past struggles for mortuary rights, we should insist that those who die crossing our borderlands should also be included in the human community after death, as lives worthy of our recognition without invidious political distinction.
One day—I predict, I expect—there will be a ceremonial excavation of an unnamed migrant from a borderland pauper’s field, a public procession with those remains, and their reburial at a Tomb of the Unknown Migrant. This one body, which might be any, will represent the rest, an acknowledgment of thousands in mourning for those lost. Families in grief will have a grave to spend time at. The nation will have begun to claim a new kind of citizen.
David Sherman is faculty in Brandeis University’s English Department. His first book, In a Strange Room, is about cultural responses to the modernization of death practices around the turn of the twentieth century. He is now finishing a far less academic book, Inventing Farewell, about contemporary artists, activists, and writers trying to create new cultural spaces for dead people. He lives in Cambridge, MA, near lots of old burial grounds and old libraries, often confusing the two.
Citations:
Angelika Krüger-Kahloula’s groundbreaking research on this topic has been indispensible for many scholars. See “On the Wrong Side of the Fence: Racial Segregation in American Cemeteries,” in History and Memory in African American Culture, eds. Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Pages 130-149.
Laderman, Gary. The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes toward Death, 1799-1883. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.
Levin, Alan. “Bias in an Okla. Graveyard.” New York Post, July 16, 1963.
P. “U.S. Negro Colonel Bars a Bitter View Over Burial Dispute.” New York Times, July 17, 1963.
“Truman Sets Arlington Interment for Indian Denied ‘White’ Burial.” New York Times, August 30, 1951. Pages 1-2.
“Ban by Cemetery on Indian Upheld,” New York Times, November 16, 1954. Page 22.
Huston, Luther A. “Burial Bias Plea Rejected Again.” New York Times, May 10, 1955. Page 21.
P. “Supreme Court Judge Fires Blast at Negroes.” The Daily Chronicle (Centralia-Chehalis, WA), December 8, 1960. Page 1.
Price v. Evergreen Cemetery Co. of Seattle (Washington Supreme Court, 1960):
https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/1144742/price-v-evergreen-cemetery-co-of-seattle/
“Lash of Bigotry Follows Vet Even unto the Graveyard” Worker, August 21, 1960.
“Indian Denied Burial: Barred from Cemetery in Detroit Because of Race.” New York Times, August 12, 1960. Page 41.
Grove, Gene. “For the Dead, 74% Won’t Do.” New York Post, August 12, 1960.
P. “Negroes Picket Flint Cemetery.” Ironwood Daily Globe (Ironwood, MI), April 11, 1966. Page 10.
P. “Cemetery Owners Ending Racial Bias in Flint, Mich.” New York Times, December 7, 1966. Page 38.
Spencer v. Flint Memorial Park Assn. (Michigan Court of Appeals, 1966):
https://www.leagle.com/decision/19661614michapp1571137
Hamill, Pete. “An American Hero.” New York Post, November 13, 1969.
Wooten, James. “Black Soldier Buried Among Whites.” New York Times, January 4, 1970. Page 57.
Honan, William. “Wilbert J. Oliver Dies at 89; Fought Funeral Color Line.” New York Times, August 23, 1999. Page 9.
Wilbert Oliver et. al. v. Escude Funeral Homes et. al (Southern Poverty Law Center summary):
“Body of Biracial Body Allowed to Stay in Cemetery of All-White Church.” Jet, April 15, 1996. Page 37.
Sack, Kevin. “Anger Over Effort to Disinter An Infant of Mixed Race.” New York Times, March 29, 1996. Page A14.
Bragg, Rick. “Just a Grave for a Baby, But Anguish for a Town.” New York Times, March 31, 1996. Page A14.
Ura, Alexa. “Texas Cemetery Scraps ‘Whites Only’ Policy.” Texas Tribune, July 25, 2016.
Hassenfeld, Noam. “Segregation in Texas Cemeteries Proves Hard to Undo.” Latino USA, July 19, 2017.
Sanchez, Tatiana. “Remains of hundreds of unidentified immigrants are buried in Imperial Valley Cemetery.” Los Angeles Times, June 18, 2016.
Baskin, Morgan. “Field Notes for a Cemetery for the Nameless.” Pacific Standard, March 31, 2017; updated October 6, 2017.
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April 16, 2020
Life, Death, and the Anxiety In-Between
Courtesy of Louise Hung.
I was six-years-old the night death took up residence in my brain. I was sitting in bed with my mom and she had just read to me from a book of Greek myths. I don’t remember the story she read me, I don’t remember who was punished or pardoned. But I do remember that in the story a character died, a character who felt important to me.
Death was not described as especially violent, cruel, or gory, but something about my mom’s voice and the demise of a character I had conjured into being shined a light onto something I didn’t know was there.
I began to cry. It was the first time I remember crying over sadness that I’d seemingly picked out of the ether. Nobody had pinched me, nobody had stolen my special frosted birthday cookie (a travesty that had happened earlier that year) – I was just suddenly overcome with the type of sadness, a panic, that made my heart race, my breath catch, and my stomach lurch.
Was this fear or was this sorrow? Should I scream or should I faint? The only thing that made sense was to cry.
My Mom, who was never one to coo or coddle asked, “What’s wrong?” Usually her cool, assuredness made the monsters go away, but this time…maybe not.
I hesitated.
In the moments I spent turning over the death of a character I had briefly willed into existence, I realized something about life: it ends.
Death was real. It was like a light turned on or innocence dimmed.
It wasn’t just a plot point in a story or some unknowable thing that happened to grandparents or Mr. McFarson next-door.
My grandfather had DIED.
Don McFarson had DIED.
That guy from the Greek myths story – whether he was totally made up or had actually lived a long time ago – had DIED.
Even scarier, one day my young life would be an old life, and one day my life would be no more.
Image from D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths
“Everybody…dies?” I asked.
Saying things out loud makes them really, really real. Children know this. Saying “everybody dies” or repeating the name of a ghoul in a dark mirror — two things that will make the amorphous material.
My mom didn’t miss a beat. “Yes. Everybody dies.”
My stomach twisted, my heart fluttered, my head felt like it might fly away.
“Will you?” I asked. I had to hear it.
Again, no beats missed, just a few that were supposed to come from my heart.
“Yes.”
And like one of those mythical Greeks I felt my body turn to stone, as my mother softened.
“But not for a long, long time. And when I do, I’ll have you to remember me. So in a way, I’ll always be with you.”
I wept. I couldn’t stop. No – weeping is too elegant of a description. Weeping is what ladies in silk dresses do when their gentleman caller does not show. I bawled and whimpered and howled. I could go through all the synonyms I just looked up on the Internet for “cry”. I think I bleated at one point.
My mom held me until she fell asleep but I don’t remember sleeping that night. I was racked with a fear I’d never known before. Unlike my previous fears of ghosts, Gremlins, and Willy Wonka, death was absolutely, without a doubt real, and it was coming for me – and it was coming for my mom, and my dad, my dog, Punky Brewster and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
The realization that “Me. Louise. One day, I will be dead. It WILL HAPPEN.” kept rippling through my head and taking my breath away.
Since that night death anxiety has been a constant companion. A companion that is sometimes my muse and sometimes my captor. Many people are surprised to hear this, considering that my days are largely spent writing about and grappling with issues surrounding death and the funeral industry.
To be clear, my death fears are not the cause of my mental health issues — specifically intense anxiety and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder — but they do influence them.
A quick aside for those of you who aren’t familiar.
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or “OCD” is a disorder I live with that compels me to well, obsessively, repeat behaviors lest SOMETHING terrible happens to me or my loved ones. You may remember it from the time Jamie at work (erroneously) said, “OMG I’m so OCD, I ONLY drink oat milk in my latte!” Maybe you do have OCD Jamie, but oat milk isn’t the problem in this scenario.
Often the behaviors, though stressful – counting everything, tapping doorknobs – are relatively harmless. Other times – like the urge to pick at the skin on my hands until my fingers are bloody flesh nuggets – my compulsions are my tormentors.
This is how I live with OCD. It may not be how you live with OCD. It may not be how Jamie lives with OCD.
My big beautiful brain is a cocktail of all sorts of chemical imbalances, experiences, and probably a Q-Tip or two. Death fears are a part of that cocktail. It’s the vermouth in my compulsions. The bitters in my dermatillomania (the skin picking). The seltzer in my depressive episodes.
But I’ve always been a person who runs toward what frightens them. If it makes me uncomfortable I want to look at it. Hiding from the THING that is plaguing me feels like I’ll always have to be looking over my shoulder. I’d rather have it in my sights. Make peace with it, if not befriend it.
Such is my relationship with death.
Art by Lily Padula.
Which doesn’t mean I feel TRIUMPHANT over death. Oh no, it’s a constant battle. There are days I feel paralyzed by the impending deaths of the people I love. There are days my own mortality feels cruel. Sometimes fear invades every thought and every action and though I want to make the most of my time allotted I feel relegated to focusing on the next breath and then the next and then the next…
Sometimes my brain tricks me into thinking I can ward off death by going through a complicated series of tapping, counting, or repetitive actions. I won’t steer you too far down my compulsion path, but odd numbers are better than even numbers and if on a rough day, I say, turn the faucet on and off 5, 7, or 13 times, my brain tells me that I may have singlehandedly warded off death for another day.
Of course I don’t think for one second that I’m actually cheating death (honestly that sounds like its own sort of hell), there’s just the inescapable question that’s always lingering in my head: “But what if…?”
Despite my death anxieties making me count, tap, fret and sweat, I don’t want to eliminate them (entirely). The constant turning over and examining of my death fears makes me acutely aware of what I do and do not want in regard to my death and the deaths of my loved ones. It makes creating death plans and Advance Directives not just important, but ways in which to quiet my anxiety.
Perhaps it’s less that I’m afraid of death, but rather I’m afraid to die without having at least made the effort to care for the people (and let’s face it, cats) that I love.
But more than anything, I find death anxiety to be something that bonds all of us.
Portrait of the author by Bill Wadman.
HOT TAKE: We’re all afraid of death – whether it’s the actual state of BEING DEAD one day, the pain of dying, or how your remains will be treated after death. I think there’s a direct correlation between how much a person protests and how afraid they are.
No judgement, we all have different ways of raising up fences to protect ourselves – “I’m totally not afraid of death!” is definitely one of them.
Here’s something that happens to me very often when new people find out I work for an organization called, “The Order of the Good Death”: “That’s amazing,” they say. “I think it’s so important we talk about death. Can you believe people are afraid of dying? You can’t fight it! I’m not afraid of death. When it’s your time, it’s your time! Am I right?”
I smile and I nod, and usually, I offer ways for them to engage further with death acceptance. But generally I leave them to go on their merry way. A gathering of friends to eat pizza and watch a movie about humanoid cats singing and dancing is not the time to dig into someone’s death hang ups. That’s for Thanksgiving.
But what I want to tell people is that being unafraid of death is not a prerequisite for being death positive. It’s not the goal that we are all working toward. I mean, it would be nice, but making it the prize we get after 200 Death Positive Proofs of Purchase is not sustainable or helpful.
What is helpful is understanding that death fears and anxiety are what we all live with and that a way to calm those fears is by confronting them. Contemplate them. Hold them in your hand like a precious little potato and consider the best way to cook it (the answer is tater tot – the answer is always tater tot).
We’re all contemplating the mysteries of the death potato.
Death is multifaceted. It’s not just the fear of non-existence. It’s the fear of suffering, of our loved ones suffering, our bodies and identities being disrespected, and the the burden of our end of life that might weigh on the people we love. Fear of death is not indisputably self-centered; it can be a compassionate fear.
This is the part of the essay where I’m supposed to give you some directive or advice that confidently sends you off into the world. “Conquer thy death fears! Here’s how!” I’m supposed to say.
I’ve been sitting here staring at the bottom of this essay for a long time and, in good conscience, all I can offer is this:
Death is scary but you are not alone.
People often talk about death as lonely, that last leap you have to take all by yourself. In that regard, yes, I can see the loneliness in that.
And anxiety, depression, a lot of mental health issues can feel very lonely. Like you’re the only one who ever had a panic attack or couldn’t get out of bed for days; like you’re the only one who ever cried and bleated for seemingly no reason.
But knowing that every single one of us will experience death is the least lonely thing I can think of. Every single one of us – you, me, my mom, my dad, Punky Brewster – will know death, will have to think about what our death will look like. It takes the edge off my fears knowing that I’m not “broken” or irrational for being afraid.
There’s a whole world of people out there staring at a death potato, wondering how to make a tot.
By Noah Scalin.
Louise Hung is the producer & co-writer for “Ask a Mortician”. Along with writing and researching for the Order, you may remember her words from HuffPost, Time, xoJane, or your local NYC lit reading. Follow her on Twitter.
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