Death — It’s So Hot Right Now… But We STILL Can’t Talk About It
Death is supposed to be the great equalizer. No matter what our station in life, we all end up dust… and all that. But actually death plays favorites. Death is a racist pig. Death stalks the poor and nonwhite and the overworked and underpaid. The coronavirus plague has again taught us that. So yes, death is in the air again, in the daily morbidity reports from all over the world. But even though it’s everywhere, our society still rejects its hovering presence. Western society, with its tyranny of diversions, has raised escapism to its highest (or lowest) form. We won’t think about death, we CAN’T think about death. We plug our ears, our eyes, our minds like children during terrifying movie scenes. And yet it waits for all of us – there’s no way to escape it, no matter how much we ignore the inevitable.
I’m at the age now when our hold on life is most tenuous – and so we’re awarded priority appointments for Covid vaccinations. (Age and preexisting conditions have their benefits.) Nearly everyone I know is walking wounded – cancer, stroke or heart attack survivors; hypertension; diabetes; stomach disorders; prosthetic knees or hips – or some combination of the above. And yet hardly anyone I know wants to talk about death. They avoid the subject like the, well, plague. They make light of it, or they grow nervous, or they dive too frantically into it.
One of the only friends who has engaged me in a deep and honest conversation about death is Mark Dowie, whom I first met back in the 1980s when we were both editors at Mother Jones. Mark is over 80 now, but he doesn’t seem grimly obsessed with his advanced age – just cognizant of it. He has been writing a fascinating account of his late-in-life friendship with a woman who had a terminal disease -- their emotionally wrenching but exhilarating “dates” and her ultimate death on the day of her choosing. It’s a remarkable, first-person story by a talented writer with a successful career – and yet Mark can’t find a publisher for it.
It was Fred Branfman, another fearless writer, who convinced me years ago to devote one week of Salon – the online magazine I founded in 1995 and ran for 10 years – to the subject of death. Other publications were featuring breezy summer entertainment supplements at the time – Salon did death. Nobody I knew thought or talked about death more than Fred. He had seen a lot of it as a relief worker in Laos during the secret U.S. air war there, which he helped expose. American culture, he would tell me, is in such deep denial about the end of the life cycle on Earth – that’s why were so materialistic and neurotic. Even our images of death – gloomy crossings on the River Styx or swoonings that look like sexual ecstasy – betray our deep unease about the subject. But Fred and I would get into it. Does homicide – and genocide – give murderers a feeling of power over death? That’s the kind of question that Fred and I would’ve spent an entire lunch noodling over, even in my harried, deadline days.
One afternoon when I met Fred for lunch in San Francisco, he told me that his Hungarian lover Zsuzsa, who was home in Budapest, and he had been crying for so long on the phone about the idea of being parted by death that his mobile battery had finally died.
A few years later, Fred suddenly contracted a fatal disease and Zsusza lovingly nursed him until the end. After he died, she was eager to get his memoir about his full and eccentric life published and I told her that I would try to help. She was in the airport in Budapest, about to board a plane to the U.S. when she dropped dead of a heart attack. Or perhaps a broken heart. Zsuzsa was not yet old – but she couldn’t live without Fred.
I think of Fred often these days, and Zsuzsa too -- but the conversations I have with them about death and life are silent.
There are others with whom I have unspoken talks about death. I knew Kathryn Olney for a long time – ever since the 1980s when she too worked at Mother Jones, as a young fact checker. She was part of our dance-night pack, when our crowd would hit the I-Beam or The Stud – in exuberant defiance of AIDS, an earlier plague. She was from somewhere in the Midwest, and more wholesome than the rest of us, but always eager to fit in. She didn’t seem to know how beautiful she was. She appeared embarrassed by her majestic height, instead of rocking it like a model. As a fact checker, she was shy about bringing up writers’ mistakes, but insistent about correcting them. That’s what I’ll always remember about Kathryn. Her stubborn insistence that she be taken seriously, to be admitted to the cool kids’ inner circle, to elevate our standards.
In 2019, she pushed her way into my world again. She was dying slowly of cancer. I was recovering incompletely from a stroke. We both lived with the shadow. She seemed angry and frustrated. She suspected, probably correctly, that she wasn’t getting the best treatment. With her fact checker’s persistence, she seemed to know more about her condition than her doctors. My stroke had left me more obviously disabled, but ironically more at peace with whatever is left of my life.
One night, I included her in a group outing to the Alamo, our neighborhood cinema/funhouse, to see a screening of my son Joe’s movie The Last Black Man in San Francisco. When Joe was a boy, my wife sometimes went on excursions with Kathryn and her kids to the beach or the zoo. Driving her home that night in our packed car was fun – it reminded me of the old days, coming home sweaty and high from some nightclub after hours of dancing. It was the last time I saw Kathryn. I should’ve known that it was MY time to contact her when she didn’t call or email for months. So, as I said, now our conversations are soundless too.
I don’t feel morbid when I dwell on death. It makes me feel more alive. I’m always curious to read how others – especially those whose minds I’ve come to respect – face the end. I wrote about George Harrison in my post-stroke memoir, Between Heaven and Hell, because like me I felt George was preparing for his final exit for his entire life. But long before George and our generation of seekers discovered the wisdom of India, the Transcendentalist movement of the 19th century absorbed some of these ancient insights. I recently read a biography of Thoreau, who died far too young – at 44 of tuberculosis, a disease that scythed its way through much of his generation. I was anxious to get to the end of the book, to see how the great philosopher, civil libertarian, and naturalist left this world.
Thoreau, I was delighted to read, went out in an exemplary way, with humor and composure and a sense of another destination. By the time his old friend Parker Pillsbury dropped by his home in Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau’s voice was reduced to a whisper. “You seem so near the brink of the dark river, that I almost wonder how the opposite shore may appear to you,” Pillsbury solemnly said. “One world at a time,” Thoreau replied with a smile.
Not long afterwards, another friend, Sam Staples, paid a visit to Thoreau’s death bed and later declared that he “never saw a man dying with so much pleasure & peace.” Thoreau’s sister, Sophia, who rarely left his side near the end, remarked on her brother’s “child like trust” in his fate, “as if he were being translated rather than dying in the ordinary way of most mortals.”
Thoreau rejected all opiates to ease his pain, insisting to another friend that he “preferred to endure with a clear mind the worst penalties of suffering, rather than be plunged in a turbid dream by narcotics.”
Thoreau’s mind was “clear to the last,” wrote his biographer Laura Dassow Walls. At the end, Sophia was reading to him from his account of a memorable river voyage he once took. “Now comes good sailing,” she heard her brother whisper. They were his final words.
