🔭 The Death Essay

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You never forget the first time you die. Or the second. Or the — GODDAMNIT! What kinda shopkeep doesn't hoard shotgun ammo‽ And why won't these zombies shamble in clusters‽

Sometimes death comes via a pre-Y2K Blockbuster Playstation rental. Other times it's a filicidal English doctor with a milk-fed snake. (Post-facto SPOILER ALERT for a classic turn-of-the-20th-century locked-room mystery). And on some occasions — I swear this one's more contemporary — it's an Orange Dwarf plutocrat with a diarrheal face cloaca.

Whether you're choking down McGarbage, binging VHS transfers of “Faces of Death,” or scrolling past U.S. senators karaokeing Slipknot at town halls, you dally with death daily. (For the record, Sen. Ernst, the actual lyric is “C'mon, motherfucker, everybody has to die.” Get that Kidz Bop, “smells like my baseball cleats” bullshit outta here.)

Contemporary eschatology aside, death is ubiquitous. Death of Rats, too, if you read enough Terry Pratchett or raise swamp adders. When faced with the facts of lack of life, otherwise cogent people hide behind aphorism and quotation. (You remember what Nietzsche said about aphorisms? And Ralph Waldo Emerson about quotations?)

Me too. Immersed in a sea of platitudes, I buoy myself to blowhards:

“Death is the only adventure.”

Capt. James “Bart” Hook, off-Wall Street pirate

“Not today, matey. Only the good die young.”

Second Technician Arnold Judas Rimmer as he knees Death in the nards

(Death's got nards!)

That's right, folks, the end is inexorable, so go twatting and screaming into that smeg night.

Actually, I prefer the unaired version of the aforementioned Grant Naylor scene, where a vending machine punctuates Rimmer's assertion that “every dog has his day” with a fatal soda projectile:

“And this is the day, and I'm the dog. Awwhoooo!”

— the last dispenser standing

Exercising agency without an extension cord is totally badass.

Which brings us to euthanasia.

Well, not exactly. I want to reference Kurt Vonnegut's “God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian,” but every time I crack it, I get chrono-synclastic infundibulum fatigue and have to re-read “The Sirens of Titan” to calm down. (Creakly Review: Hilarious. Read it.) Also Kevorkian-adjacent is Doctor Dark, the first record from The Residents after the death of Hardy Fox. (Crokely Review: Good. Give it a listen.) And, in the same milieu, there are the ongoing legal challenges to those 3D-printed suicide pods in Switzerland. (Sarco, like “sarcophagus.” Funny, right? Ha… ha… ha…)

Clearly loads of people are afraid of death. If only someone had answers. (Cue eye roll.)

As far as I can tell, five kinds of people have legit white-light experiences: First, there's the group I hope includes all consenting adults — those who transcend via orgasm, or la petite mort, which is French for “coffee break.” (Legality varies by act and locale. Please send tapes to the nearest moral authority for review.) After that comes the meditation crowd. (Mostly legal. And a huge pain in the ass. And legs. And back. Did I mention it's boring? And seriously, my back aches after three minutes) On to the weirdos. Here we have the Near-Death Experience folks. (Quasi-legal, depending how it's achieved, and fine by me as long as you say you convened with all my old pets.) Next, we peek under the Out-of-Body-Experience tent. (Legal, though you might get locked up if you discover implications for anyone other than yourself.) And last, there's Team DMT. (Illegal, at least in the States, but probably brain endogenous so, to misquote Terrance McKenna, “Everyone's holding.” Take that, Unfriendly Ghost of Nancy Reagan.)

Let's try a few experiments… 

Wow, the stuff that happened to the kid in “Heaven Is For Real” does NOT square with my chrome skeleton porcupines that project reality through the pinwheels of their quills or the psychedelic butterfly-winged frog-blobs who encase us all in their loving, tentacled accordion wombs. To be fair, I didn't ask after names. It's totally possible one of them was Jesus or Mahershalalhashbaz or Shenron or whoever.

Actually, my favorite interpretation of The Big Sleep comes from the OG version of the horror tour de force “Martyrs.” (Prangly Review: Potent. Don't watch it. (RE: Raymond Chandler, Bonus, Primply Review: Delightful. Read it.))

The only insight I have into death comes from a pilgrimage to the “Bone Church” — Sedlec Ossuary in Kutná Hora, Czechia. (Did you see that old D&D movie with one of the Wayans brothers? Me neither, but I think it's where Jeremy Irons keeps his Warhammer minis. (Lisa Simpson voice: “Jeremy's Iron.”))

The silence. The scale. The huge pyramids of bone.

And then there's the ossified coat of arms. The House of Schwarzenberg bankrolled the whole thing, so it's a bit of a flex, including a skull getting pecked by a bone-LEGO raven. Death depicting art depicting death. DUDE.

The sacred silence in my own skull was finally broken by a memento mori courtesy of the late-but-also-right-on-time Jhonn Balance:

“Pay your respects to the vultures. For they are your future.”

Or, in other words, it's …

THE END