Potent quotables
What was a nice girl like me doing in a body-disposal warehouse like this?
(a blow to both her ego and her lesbianism).
My parents named him Superfly after the title of the Curtis Mayfield hit, but it’s doubtful my fish experienced the hustlin’ times and ghetto streets described in the song.
What is most surprising about this story is not that an eight-year-old witnessed a death, but that it took her eight whole years to do so. A child who had never seen a death would have been unheard-of only a hundred years ago.
This is it, I thought. I’m done. I have shamed myself and my family and all is lost.
Death represented a failure of the medical system; it would not be permitted to upset the patients or their families.
I hate people who don’t try.
It wasn’t that Mike gave me negative feedback, but the absence of feedback was just as crippling for an insecure millennial. I projected onto him the fear that a weakling like me couldn’t handle the work, couldn’t handle the real death I had been so desperate to be in the presence of.
No funeral home, no sad faces, no need to see Dad’s body—total avoidance for the low, low price of $799.99.
Why did you not look up the best funeral homes in the area, compare prices, ask friends and family, figure out what’s legal, or most important, talk to your mother about what she herself wanted when she died? Your mother was dying and you damn well knew it. Refusing to talk about it and then calling it “unexpected” is not an acceptable excuse.
It was death that the public was being cheated out of by the funeral industry, not money. The realistic interaction with death and the chance to face our own mortality.
My work at Westwind had given me access to emotions I didn’t know I was capable of. I would start laughing or crying at the drop of a damn hat. Crying at a particularly beautiful sunset or a particularly beautiful parking meter, it didn’t matter. It felt as if my life up to this point was spent living within a tiny range of sensations, rolling back and forth like a pinball. At Westwind that emotional range was blasted apart, allowing for ecstasy and despair like I had never experienced.
Score one for appropriately timed morbid humor.
If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture—that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves
I understood that I had been given my atoms, the ones that made up my heart and toenails and kidneys and brain, on a kind of universal loan program. The time would come when I would have to give the atoms back, and I didn’t want to attempt to hold on to them through the chemical preservation of my future corpse.
Where, exactly, did things go so wrong: with the people who ran the industry, the people who taught them, or the industry itself?
Now that I had seen our society’s structural denial of death, it was hard for me to stop thinking about. I wanted to quiet my brain, to stop its incessant ruminations on the whys and hows of mortality.
The only thing that’s certain is that nothing ever is.
Every culture has death values. These values are transmitted in the form of stories and myths, told to children starting before they are old enough to form memories. The beliefs children grow up with give them a framework to make sense of and take control of their lives. This need for meaning is why some believe in an intricate system of potential afterlives, others believe sacrificing a certain animal on a certain day leads to healthy crops, and still others believe the world will end when a ship constructed with the untrimmed nails of the dead arrives carrying a corpse army to do battle with the gods at the end of days. (Norse mythology will always be the most metal, sorry.)
It is no surprise that the people trying so frantically to extend our lifespans are almost entirely rich, white men. Men who have lived lives of systematic privilege, and believe that privilege should extend indefinitely.
Death might appear to destroy the meaning in our lives, but in fact it is the very source of our creativity.
Accepting death doesn’t mean that you won’t be devastated when someone you love dies. It means you will be able to focus on your grief, unburdened by bigger existential questions like “Why do people die?” and “Why is this happening to me?” Death isn’t happening to you. Death is happening to us all.
In 1961, a paper in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology laid out the seven reasons humans fear dying: 1. My death would cause grief to my relatives and friends. 2. All my plans and projects would come to an end. 3. The process of dying might be painful. 4. I could no longer have any experiences. 5. I would no longer be able to care for my dependents. 6. I am afraid of what might happen to me if there is a life after death. 7. I am afraid of what might happen to my body after death.
Lit review
Why is a book about a woman who is obsessed with death care and death rituals in the Intermission category? Because it’s Just. That. Good.