Postcards from the edge: our fascination with death

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/mar/01/our-fascination-with-death-eve-wiseman

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Sometimes it comes quietly, yawning, and other times it appears storming out of the sea to grab a man in the prime of his life and drag him away into the wet and green. You will never die. Nope. But you will see the rest of us go, and some of us will have our hands held and for some of us you’ll cry. I know because I’ve read about it.

The last family funeral I went to was my grandma’s, in a mixed-faith cemetery in Manchester, where our Jewish bit was dour without the east side’s Catholic wreaths. It seemed to be raining more over in our section, too, where a little crowd of us stood and said things like: “She challenged us right to the end,” and her carer, her feet and hands bandaged with burns, cried. But either the coffin was too big or the grave was too small, and despite having “watched her weight” for 90ish years, she just wouldn’t fit. The rain was coming down quite hard then, as the rabbi scrabbled at the dirt to widen the hole, and my mum gripped my arm and I knew we were dangerously close to shrieking with laughter.

Ah, death. The stories are good. As proven by the guaranteed interest in an essay written by a person dying. Somebody close enough to death to tell the truth of it all but far enough away to have the language to make us really understand. They’re shouting up at us from the pool, feeling the temperature with their toe. When Oliver Sacks wrote in the New York Times about his terminal cancer, it quickly became its most shared piece. The internet was alive with death. “My luck has run out,” he wrote. Some people were sharing his essay as a Buzzfeed-y list of life lessons (“There is no time for anything inessential”), while others were praising it for its poignancy, its poetry, were tweeting it as an uplifting plea to live well while you can: “I feel intensely alive.”

Why do we love to read essays about dying? And why particularly do we love to read essays about dying by people near death? What does that intimacy add? Maybe we read them simply because they remind us that we are alive. “I do not fear death,” wrote Roger Ebert. He recalled a conversation with his friend. ‘“Ask someone how they feel about death,” he said, “and they’ll tell you everyone’s gonna die. Ask them: In the next 30 seconds? No, no, no, that’s not gonna happen. How about this afternoon? No. What you’re really asking them to admit is: Oh my God, I don’t really exist. I might be gone at any given second.”’

It’s as if we had forgotten. Then a brilliant writer shouts a few words about their failing blood into a magazine and suddenly it is all there, laid out on a duvet cover, our own brittle brevity and the things we forgot to remember. We rarely live with the dying today, and those with whom we do spend time, whether at home or in a hospice, rarely seem in the mood to engage with it philosophically, or perhaps that’s because of what our faces do when they begin. And yet we were desperate to talk about it, it turns out. Desperate. We read these essays by ourselves, over a Wispa and an avocado wrap, and then we send them on. “Read this,” we text, alone. “It made me cry!” we text, alone.

Death is always a shock, even when you see it coming. One of the reasons it’s shocking is because we spend our lives trying to cheat it and deny it, and eventually look away, quick. And then we read Kate Gross’s elegant Late Fragments (“I would do anything not to be writing this book”) or Roger Angell’s notes on the glum afterkick of a photo album, “like a chocolate caramel”, and it makes us feel calmer. “I know death now,” we nod, wise before teatime.

These pieces rarely read as though they were written by somebody crying. They read like satisfied sighs, lists of people they’ve been happy to love. They share a terrible clarity. Like that white tunnel of light has arrived a bit early. And through the porch window it’s shining on their desk.

Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk. Follow Eva on Twitter @EvaWiseman

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