The Whole Death Catalog

by Harold Schechter

  “The Pornography of Death” appeared when America was in the grip of one of its periodic bouts of hysteria over media violence, particularly the intensely gory crime and horror comic books of the period. Gorer did not believe that these pop entertainments, gruesome as they were, had a harmful effect on young readers. Rather, he viewed them (along with “detective stories, thrillers, war stories, spy stories, science fiction,” and other mass-produced fantasies) as a symptom of an unhealthy attitude toward death characteristic of twentieth-century Western societies.

  In the previous century, Gorer argued, it was sex that was “unmentionable”—something not to be discussed or even acknowledged in “polite society.” Death, on the other hand, was treated openly. People died at home, “the cemetery was the center of every old-fashioned village,” and “children were encouraged to think about death, their own deaths and edifying or cautionary deathbeds of others.”

  Nowadays, the situation is reversed. Sex is everywhere. But the “natural process” of death has become a taboo, forbidden subject. According to Gorer, our refusal to accept the fundamental realities of “corruption and decay” has transformed death into something sick, morbid, “disgusting”—an attitude reflected in the ultraviolent excesses of our popular entertainments.

  In short, what sex was to the Victorians, death is for us.

  At present, death and mourning are treated with much the same prudery as sexual impulses were a century ago.

  —GEOFFREY GORER

  The Good and Bad News

  About Immortality

  The ancient Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, dating back more than three thousand years, is regarded as the oldest written narrative in the world. The story relates the adventures of the hero-king Gilgamesh and his boon companion, Enkidu. When Enkidu falls ill and dies, Gilgamesh—panicked at the thought of his own inevitable demise—sets off in search of eternal life. Eventually, he learns of a plant of immortality growing at the bottom of the ocean. Gilgamesh manages to retrieve this treasure, only to have it snatched away and swallowed by a snake.

  That the pursuit of physical immortality forms the central theme of humankind’s earliest epic reveals something important: namely, that the possibility of abolishing death is one of our oldest dreams. And indeed, from Gilgamesh’s failed effort to Juan Ponce de Léon’s equally futile hunt for the Fountain of Youth, the alchemists’ quest for the philosopher’s stone to our own desperate search for genetic solutions to aging, humans have always sought the magical elixir that will keep them alive forever.

  DEATH FUN FACT

  Though his enduring fame rests on his feats as an aviator, Charles Lindbergh was also involved in the hunt for immortality. In 1930, three years after his solo transatlantic flight made him an international superstar, “Lucky Lindy” teamed up with Nobel Prize-winning scientist Alexis Carrel to create a machine that would extend human life indefinitely. Needless to say, they didn’t succeed—though their efforts did produce results that helped pave the way for such lifesaving techniques as open-heart surgery and organ transplants.

  You can read the whole story of their strange collaboration in David Friedman’s fascinating book, The Immortalists: Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Alexis Carrel, and Their Daring Quest to Live Forever (HarperCollins, 2007).

  Ironically, according to one eminent scientist, we already have achieved immortality—of a sort. In a famous lecture on the origins of death, Harvard professor and Nobel Prize-winning scientist George Wald, drawing on the theories of the German biologist August Weismann, distinguished between our “germ plasm”—the cells that produce the sperm and ova in higher animals and transmit hereditary information—and our bodies or “soma.” It is the purpose of the body, said Wald, “to carry the germ plasm, to feed it, to protect it, to warm it in a warm-blooded organism, and finally to mingle it with the germ plasm of the opposite sex.” Once this function has been fulfilled, the body “can be discarded.” From this point of view, death is merely “the casting aside of the body, of the soma, after it has done its work.”

  What this all boils down to is the argument that while our bodies are bound to perish, our genetic material—which extends back in an unbroken line through countless millennia and has the potential to exist indefinitely—lives on. “We already have immortality,” says Wald. “We have it in the germ plasm.”

  Of course, as Wald also points out, most of us couldn’t care less about our germ plasm and where it’s going to be a thousand years from now. What we really cherish is the body—“the thing that looks back at us from the mirror,” the repository of our individual identities. And that part is doomed.

  In short, this is very good news for your genes. As for you personally, not so much.

  America:

  Paradise Regained?

  Ever since Adam and Eve got expelled from the Garden of Eden, humans have been searching for a new terrestrial paradise—a place of perpetual summer where no one ever gets old or dies. From time immemorial, there have been legends about such enchanted realms. The ancient Greeks, for example, told tales of a faraway land called Hyperborea, whose inhabitants lived in perfect health and happiness for a thousand years until, “sated with life and luxury,” they leapt into the sea. Indian myths speak of the land of the Uttarakurus, home of the magic jambu tree, whose fruit bestows everlasting youth on all those who taste it. The ancient Persians believed in a timeless utopia ruled by a figure called Yima, while Japanese folklore describes the blessed isle of Horaisan as “a land of eternal spring untouched by sickness, age or death.”

  America itself has always been regarded as one of these magical kingdoms. When Columbus first reached the New World, he thought he had found the actual Garden of Eden, while the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León was convinced that the fountain of youth was located somewhere in Florida.

  Two centuries later, newly arrived immigrants still believed that the very atmosphere of the New World could restore a person to youthful vitality. Not long after coming to America, an English settler named Francis Higginson—who had suffered from severe digestive problems all his life—announced that he was cured. “My friends that know me well can tell how very sickly I have been,” he wrote in a book about his new life in Massachusetts. “But since I came hither on this voyage, I have had perfect health, freed from pain and vomiting. And therefore I think that a sip of New England’s air is better than a whole draft of Old England’s ale.” Unfortunately, Higginson spoke a little too soon. Shortly after he wrote his glowing testimonial, he suffered a catastrophic illness.

  Americans, of course, are still searching for the elixir of eternal youth, though we now call it by other names—Botox, Viagra, Olay Regenerist Deep Hydration Regenerating Cream. Evidence suggests, however, that we are no more likely to achieve long-term rejuvenation than was the overly optimistic Francis Higginson, who by the time his book was published was already dead.

  RECOMMENDED READING

  For an exhaustive scholarly study of what he calls “prolongevity legends,” see Gerald J. Gruman’s “A History of Ideas About the Prolongation of Life” (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., Vol. 56, pp. 1–102).

  Time flies: seventeenth-century allegorical emblem depicting winged hourglass with Deaths scythe.

  “The Wild Honeysuckle”

  The transience of existence is one of the perennial themes of poetry. In this 1786 lyric by Philip Freneau, America’s first professional poet, the speaker compares the average human life span to the “frail duration of a flower” and offers a consoling thought—“if nothing once, you nothing lose”—that not everyone will find as comforting as the poet evidently intended:

  Fair flower, that dost so comely grow,

  Hid in this silent, dull retreat,

  Untouched thy honied blossoms blow,

  Unseen thy little branches greet:

  No roving foot shall crush thee here,

  No busy hand provoke a tear.

  By Nature’s self in whit
e arrayed,

  She bade thee shun the vulgar eye,

  And planted here the guardian shade,

  And sent soft waters murmuring by;

  Thus quietly thy summer goes,

  Thy days declining to repose.

  Smit with those charms that must decay,

  I grieve to see your future doom;

  They died—nor were those flowers more gay,

  The flowers that did in Eden bloom;

  Unpitying frosts, and Autumn’s power

  Shall leave no vestige of this flower.

  From morning suns and evening dews

  At first thy little being came:

  If nothing once, you nothing lose,

  For when you die you are the same;

  The space between is but an hour,

  The frail duration of a flower.

  The Fellow in the

  Bright Nightgown

  If you were to ask them what death looks like, most people would be able to offer a pretty detailed description: a tall bony guy with hollow eyes and a leering grin, wearing a black hooded robe and wielding a scythe, alias the Grim Reaper. This particular personification, however, is only one of countless guises death has worn throughout the ages.

  According to certain accounts, personified depictions of death go all the way back to Stone Age cave paintings that portray it as a giant winged being that battens on corpses. To the ancient Greeks, death was the god Thanatos, son of Nyx (Night) and Erebus (Dark-ness) and brother of Hypnos (Sleep). A winged, bearded, sword-bearing figure, Thanatos would bring the departed to the underworld and turn them over to the boatman Charon, who would ferry them across the river Styx.

  In Hindu mythology, the Lord of Death is named Yama. Garbed in red clothes and riding a water buffalo, he carries a loop of rope with which he lassos the souls of the dead. In the Book of Revelations, death is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (he’s the one on the pale steed), while in Islamic tradition, he is the angel Azrael, a colossal figure with four thousand wings and a body composed of as many eyes and tongues as the earth’s population.

  During the Middle Ages—when, thanks to the Black Plague, Europe was turned into an immense charnel house—death was most commonly pictured as a rotting cadaver who comes to claim victims of every age and rank. Gwyn Ab Nuud is the name of the death god in early Welsh folklore, a supernatural hunter “who gathers lost souls and escorts them to the land of the dead on a white horse.” And in the Haitian Voudon pantheon, death is the dapper Baron Samedi, a skeletal, white-bearded fellow with top hat, tux, and dark shades hiding his empty eye sockets.

  Not all death figures are male. Quite the contrary. The mythologies of the world are full of female personifications, from the ancient Roman death goddess Mors (a voracious black-winged figure who would swoop down on her victims like a great bird of prey) to the Japanese “Snow Queen” Yuki-Onne and Hel, ruler of the Scandinavian underworld. In modern-day Mexican folk culture, death is represented as Santa Muerte (Saint Death), a white-garbed female skeleton carrying the traditional scythe.

  KITTY OF DOOM

  For centuries, death has been represented as a black-hooded, scythe-wielding Grim Reaper who comes knocking on your door when your time is up. It turns out, however, that this image may be wildly off base—at least as far as the residents of one New England nursing home are concerned. At the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island, patients know that they are about to die when an adorable gray-and-white pussycat named Oscar hops onto their bed and cuddles with them.

  According to an article by David Dosa that appeared in the July 26, 2007, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, the two-year-old feline has an “uncanny knack” for predicting a patient’s imminent demise. Adopted as a kitten and raised in the third-floor dementia unit, Oscar prowls the ward on a daily basis, going from room to room and sniffing the air. In general, he is an aloof creature who shies away from human contact. Occasionally, however, he will leap onto a bed and curl up beside the patient. When that happens, it’s a good bet that the person isn’t long for this world. To date, more than twenty-five patients who have received these attentions from Oscar have died within four hours of his visit. Indeed, he is considered such an accurate foreteller of death that when nurses see him snuggling with someone, they immediately notify family members that the end is near.

  Exactly how Oscar performs his feat remains a mystery. Some observers speculate that he detects telltale scents or picks up subtle signals from the nurses who raised him. Others think that he is simply drawn by the warmth of the electric blankets that are often placed over dying people.

  Whatever the case, this furry little harbinger of doom has racked up such an impressive record that he is regarded as a better predictor of death than the doctors who work there. As Dosa writes in his essay, “No one dies on the third floor unless Oscar pays a visit and stays there.”

  Besides these culture-wide representations there are countless other death personifications in high art and pop entertainment. In a famous poem by Emily Dickinson, death is portrayed as a courtly gentleman who offers her a lift in his carriage and conveys her straight to the cemetery. Walt Whitman describes death as a “strong deliveress”—the “dark mother always gliding near with soft feet.” W. C. Fields saw death as “the fellow in the bright nightgown,” while Ingmar Berg man portrays him as a soft-spoken Swedish chess player in The Seventh Seal. In the 1998 box office bomb Meet Joe Black, death assumes the form of Brad Pitt, while in a classic episode of TV’s The Twilight Zone it appears at a frightened old lady’s door in the equally hunky guise of the young Robert Redford.

  According to thanatologist Robert Kastenbaum, “Personifying death is one of the most ancient and durable methods for coping with death-related anxieties and fears.” By giving death a humanlike shape and endowing it with a personality we deprive it of some of its fearful mystery. In his own studies, Kastenbaum found that people in the United States today tend to visualize death in one of four ways: an elegant, smooth-talking con man; a wise elderly comforter; a cold, robotic being who pursues his lethal work with an unsettling calm; and—most traditionally—a malevolent, macabre creature who revels in destruction: “the sworn enemy of life.”

  RECOMMENDED READING

  Kastenbaum offers an extensive discussion of the psychological research into death personification in his textbook Death, Society, and Human Experience (Allyn & Bacon, 2004). An illuminating online survey of the subject is Leilah Wendell’s “Selected Cross-Cultural & Historical Personifications of Death,” available at www.themystica.com.

  ASK DR. DEATH

  Dear Dr. Death:

  What’s the difference between “life expectancy” and “life span”?

  Confused

  Dear Confused:

  Glad you asked, since there is, in fact, an important distinction between these concepts.

  The phrase “life expectancy” refers to the number of years that the typical person can expect to live in any given era and place. Back in ancient Rome, for example, the average man could expect to live only into his late twenties (less if he was a gladiator). By 1800, the life expectancy for the average person in the more advanced societies of the West had skyrocketed all the way up to thirty-five. A hundred years later, it had climbed to nearly fifty in the United States, England, and Sweden. Nowadays, the average American can expect to live into his or her late seventies.

  “Life span,” on the other hand, refers to the maximum number of years accorded to members of a species—in other words, the extreme limit of longevity, the age beyond which no individual has ever survived. Up until the 1990s, the maximum life span for humans was believed to be 110 years. Then, in 1997, a Frenchwoman named Jeanne Calment died at the age of 122 years and 164 days. (Calment had lived so long that she had clear memories of meeting Vincent Van Gogh, whom she recalled as a “dirty, badly dressed, and disagreeable” fellow.) As a result, human beings now officially have a max
imum life span of 122½ years (much better than mice, who are lucky to make it to four, though not nearly as good as Galapagos tortoises, who have the potential to reach two hundred).

  The good news in all this is that, thanks to advances in medicine, eating habits, and so on, life expectancy has been steadily increasing for members of advanced societies. The bad news—at least for those of us with dreams of living forever—is that no matter how many crunches you do and trans fats you avoid, human beings (at least as presently constituted) are never going to grow much older than 120 years at the max.

  Everybody has got to die, but I always believed that an exception would be made in my case.

  —WILLIAM SAROYAN

  Death Fear

  Though certain extreme circumstances—crushing depression, excruciating pain, having to sit through Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace—can make the prospect of death seem appealing, most people view the inevitable cessation of life with fear and trembling. To be sure, there are seemingly healthy, well-adjusted adults who will tell you that the idea of dying doesn’t particularly bother them. Chances are, however, that these Pollyannas are in a serious state of denial.

  In various clinical studies, college-age volunteers were hooked up to polygraph machines and asked how they felt about death. Even those who claimed to be completely unconcerned showed heightened psychogalvanic skin response—an indication of deep-seated anxiety at odds with their supposedly carefree attitudes. These tests confirmed the observation made by the eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “He who pretends to look on death without fear lies.”