Points out the soul’s eternal sleep.
Not so the ancients of these lands—
The Indian, when from life released,
Again is seated with his friends,
And shares again the joyous feast.
His imaged birds, and painted bowl,
And venison, for a journey dressed,
Bespeak the nature of the soul,
Activity, that knows no rest.
His bow, for action ready bent,
And arrows, with a head of stone,
Can only mean that life is spent,
And not the old ideas gone.
Thou, stranger, that shalt come this way,
No fraud upon the dead commit,
Observe the swelling turf, and say,
They do not lie, but here they sit.
Here, still a lofty rock remains,
On which the curious eye may trace
(Now wasted half by wearing rains)
The fancies of a ruder race.
Here, still an aged elm aspires,
Beneath whose far-projecting shade
(And which the shepherd still admires)
The children of the forest played.
There oft a restless Indian queen,
(Pale Shebah, with her braided hair)
And many a barbarous form is seen
To chide the man that lingers there.
By midnight moons, o’er moistening dews,
In habit for the chase arrayed,
The hunter still the deer pursues,
The hunter and the deer—a shade!
And long shall timorous fancy see
The painted chief, and pointed spear,
And Reason’s self shall bow the knee
To shadows and delusions here.
Heaven as Home
The Victorian tendency to sugarcoat death—to disguise its bitter realities beneath a cloying glaze of sentimentality—is epitomized by a popular volume, Golden Thoughts on Mother, Home, and Heaven. Compiled by the Reverend Theodore L. Culyer and published in New York City in 1882, this handsomely bound collection contains hundreds of poems and prose pieces celebrating the joys of its three titular subjects: motherhood, domestic bliss, and the afterlife.
For a sense of its intensely saccharine flavor, here is a typical selection, a bit of verse by a poetaster named Fanny J. Crosby with the simple title “Heaven”:
Oh! Where shall human grief be stilled
And joy for pain be given,
Where dwells the sunshine of a love
In which the soul may always rove?
A sweet voice answered—Heaven.
O heart, I said, when death shall come
And all the cords be riven,
What lies beyond the swelling tide?
That same sweet voice to mine replied
In loving accents—Heaven.
Where, where shall friendship never die,
Nor parting hand be given?
My heart was filled with strange delight,
For in that silent hush of night,
I heard the answer—Heaven.
O, voyager, on life’s fitful sea;
By stormy billows driven;
Say, what can soothe thy aching breast,
Or give thee comfort, joy, and rest,
Like Mother, Home, and Heaven!
The Corpse Brides
When you vacation at a deluxe resort hotel, all your needs are taken of. There’s the minibar, the fruit basket, the nifty little toiletry items. You’d think the same situation would exist in heaven—that the management would supply every amenity to make your stay a happy one. Certain people, however—the ancient Chinese, the Vikings, and various aboriginal tribes, among others—have had a kind of BYO conception of the afterlife, burying their dead with assorted goodies to enjoy on the other side: food, drink, even human companionship.
The same custom continues to this day in certain parts of the world, including rural China, where—as New York Times reporter Jim Yardley explains—“families burn offerings of fake money or paper models of luxury cars in case an ancestor might need pocket change or a stylish ride in the netherworld.” But the practice doesn’t stop there. Villagers who have lost a young unmarried son will go to even greater lengths to ensure their child’s contentment in the hereafter. Not infrequently, reports Yardley, they will “search for a dead woman to be his bride and, once a corpse is obtained, bury the pair together as a married couple.”
The tradition—known as minghun or “afterlife marriage”—extends back many centuries and is rooted in Chinese ancestor worship, “which holds that people continue to exist after death and that the living are obligated to tend to their wants.” People in the market for a marriageable female corpse search around for a family that has recently lost a daughter. Though commercial trafficking in cadavers is illegal in China, money always changes hands in these private transactions. The going rate for a corpse bride is the equivalent of $1,200—about four times the yearly income of an average farmer. In a poor region where young people frequently leave home in search of a better life, the steep price reflects the scarcity of the commodity in question. One family was able to sell their drowned teenage daughter as soon as her body washed up.
If parents do manage to find a nice dead young woman for their departed son, they hold a ceremony that varies in quality according to the family’s wealth. “Poor people just bring the bodies over and put them in the earth,” one local woman explains. “People with money will have a reception.”
It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death should ever have been designed by Providence as an evil to mankind.
—JONATHAN SWIFT
The Light at the End of the Tunnel
For people desperately seeking proof of an afterlife, new hope appeared in 1975 when Raymond Moody—a highly respected figure who held both a Ph.D. in philosophy and a medical degree—published his international best seller, Life After Life. Based on eleven years of research, Moody’s groundbreaking book offered compelling evidence of a remarkable (and quite heartening) possibility: that our conscious minds might actually survive our bodily deaths.
Having studied the cases of 150 people who had been brought back from the brink of extinction—including many who had been pronounced clinically dead before being resuscitated—Moody found a remarkable consistency in the way they described their experiences. Nearly all reported that they had first been infused with an overwhelming sense of well-being. This was followed by the distinct sensation of floating above their bodies and observing themselves from a height. Next, they found themselves hurtling through a dark tunnel toward an indescribably brilliant light, where they were welcomed by their long-deceased relatives and encountered a glorious being that radiated absolute acceptance and love. After viewing a panoramic replay of their lives, they returned—often reluctantly—to their bodies (often reentering through the top of the head). Taken together, these and other elements constitute the phenomenon that Moody dubbed “near-death experience,” or NDE.
Inspired by Moody’s book, other researchers began to study the NDE phenomenon, including psychologist Kenneth Ring and cardiologist Michael Sabom, whose own investigations largely confirmed Moody’s conclusions, leaving little doubt that the phenomenon is both authentic and widespread.
For the religiously inclined, these findings serve as a triumphant vindication of their beliefs since the common features of the near-death experience conform so closely to traditional conceptions of the newly departed soul’s voyage to heaven. Most scientists, however—while accepting that NDEs really happen to a significant percentage of dying people—offer less spiritually comforting explanations, attributing the experience to purely physiological causes, such as a lack of oxygen to the brain. According to a 2007 Time magazine article on the latest research in the field, “The brain-based theory of NDEs goes something like this”:
Survival is our most powerful instinct. When the h
eart stops and oxygen is cut, the brain goes into all-out defense. Torrents of neuro-transmitters are randomly generated, releasing countless fragmentary images and feelings from the memory-storing temporal lobes. Perhaps the life review is the brain frantically scanning its memory banks for a way out of this crisis. The images of a bright light and tunnel could be due to impairment at the rear and sides of the brain respectively, while the euphoria may be a neurochemical anti-panic mechanism triggered by extreme danger. As for perhaps the strangest element of NDEs, the out-of-body experience, studies led by Swiss neuroscientist Olaf Blanke have shed light on what might be going on there. In 2002, Blanke and others reported how they were able to induce OBEs in an epilepsy patient by stimulating the brain’s temporoparietal junction (TPJ), thought to play a role in self-perception…. It’s probable that stress in the TPJ causes the dissociation of NDEs—a dissociation that’s entirely illusory.
Though neuroscientists differ as to the precise cause of the phenomenon, they generally agree that, as the Time piece puts it, “NDEs occur in the theater of one’s mind, and that in the absence of resuscitation, it’s the brain’s final sound and light show, followed by oblivion.” Still, those looking forward to a life after death will find nothing in even the most up-to-date studies to definitively disprove their belief.
Are NDEs a genuine glimpse of the afterlife or a mere trick of the expiring mind? In the immortal words of Mark Twain: “You pays your money and you takes your choice.”
RECOMMENDED RESOURCES
Besides Moody’s seminal book, classic works on the subject include Kenneth Ring’s Life at Death: An Investigation of the Near-Death Experience (Coward, McCann & Geohegan, 1980) and Michael Sabom’s Recollections of Death: A Medical Investigation (Harper and Row, 1982). Mary Roach devotes a chapter of her book Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (Norton, 2005) to current NDE research. The Time magazine article cited previously, written by Daniel Williams, appeared in the August 31, 2007, issue of the magazine. For the latest developments in the field, check out the extensive website maintained by the International Association for Near-Death Studies at www.iands.org.
The Near-Death Scenario
Extrapolating from the accounts of 150 people who had undergone extremely close calls with death, Raymond Moody put together a list of traits that constitute the prototypical near-death experience. Here, in the most common order of their occurrence, are the outstanding ones:
Hearing the news. At the moment of crisis, the dying person hears himself pronounced dead by his physician.
Feelings of peace and quiet. Despite his physical distress, he is suffused with an overwhelming sense of calm and relaxation.
The noise. A peculiar sound—either extremely annoying (buzzing, banging, roaring) or intensely pleasant (orchestral music, wind chimes, etc.)—fills the dying person’s ears.
Out of the body. Detached from his physical self, the dying person floats above his own body, gazing down on it from a height.
The dark tunnel. The person has the sensation of being drawn, sucked, or hurled through a long tunnel-shaped space.
Meeting others. Otherworldly spirits—often those of deceased loved ones—appear to offer comfort and guidance to the dying person as he proceeds on his journey.
The being of light. An indescribably brilliant light appears in the distance. As the dying person draws nearer, it takes the form of a mysterious being that radiates warmth and love.
The review. In the presence of the radiant being, the dying person experiences an extraordinarily vivid playback of the high points of his life.
The border or limit. The dying person has the sensation of arriving at a fence or threshold or some other type of border—the final boundary between life and death.
Coming back. Though the person may earnestly wish to cross over to the other side, his soul is inexorably drawn back into life, sometimes reentering his body through the top of the head.
The aftermath of this experience also tends to be the same for every individual who experiences it. “Later,” says Moody, “he tries to tell others, but he has trouble doing so. In the first place, he has no human words adequate to describe these unearthly experiences. He also finds that others scoff, so he stops telling other people. Still, the experience affects his life profoundly, especially his view about death and its relationship to life.”
Death in the Movies
As even a cursory glance at the American Film Institute’s list of the all-time greatest movies makes clear, death has always been a major theme in motion pictures. Of the hundred films selected by the AFI, only about a dozen are devoid of death scenes. The rest (beginning with Citizen Kane, which opens with its dying hero breathing his famous last word, “Rosebud”) portray death in a staggering variety of forms: by revolver (High Noon), submachine gun (The Godfather), arrow (Stagecoach), dynamite (The Bridge on the River Kwai), switchblade knife (West Side Story), light saber (Star Wars), quicksand (Lawrence of Arabia), Roman chariot (Ben-Hur), hot rod (Rebel Without a Cause), mop water (The Wizard of Oz), knife-wielding transvestite (Psycho), machete-wielding bandito (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), shotgun-wielding redneck (Easy Rider), great white shark (Jaws), biblical artifact (Raiders of the Lost Ark), homicidal computer (2001: A Space Odyssey), nuclear Armageddon (Dr. Strangelove), Russian roulette (The Deer Hunter), plunge from convent bell tower (Vertigo), betrayal by double-crossing femme fatale (The Maltese Falcon), and many, many more.
Even heartwarming family films such as It’s a Wonderful Life, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and E.T. bring their heroes perilously close to death. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, for filmgoers everywhere, watching other people die on-screen is rich in entertainment value.
Clearly, there is no way of compiling a comprehensive list of death in the cinema without producing a thousand-page doorstop like Leonard Maltin’s annual movie guide. Here is a purely subjective list of a dozen personal favorites, arranged into helpful catgories.
MOST HEART-WRENCHING FUNERAL
Imitation of Life (1959). The single most agonizing scene in this ten-hankie tear-jerker occurs during the funeral procession of the saintly African American maid Annie (Juanita Moore). As the hearse makes its way along the streets, Annie’s light-skinned adult daughter Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner)—who, in her efforts to pass as white, has cruelly rejected her mother—suddenly appears and throws herself on the coffin, begging her mommy’s forgiveness. If this moment doesn’t reduce you to a state of helpless blubbering, you might want to visit your cardiologist to see if your heart is still functioning.
MOST AMBIGUOUS DEATH
Shane (1953). The final shot of this classic Western shows the heroic gunslinger (Alan Ladd)—who has been badly wounded during the climactic shootout—riding through a cemetery, holding himself in a very unnatural position, as though he is barely alive. Are we supposed to think that he is literally dying? Or is the scene merely allegorical, symbolizing the end of the frontier way of life that Shane personifies? This burning question will continue to be debated for as long as there are guys with nothing better to do than sit around with their buddies and engage in pointless arguments about old cowboy movies.
NOBLEST DEATH
Angels with Dirty Faces (1938). At the end of this classic gangster film, tough guy Rocky Sullivan (James Cagney)—who is ready to spit in the eye of any copper who lays a finger on him—is being led to the electric chair after plugging the double-crossing rat played by Humphrey Bogart. As Rocky swaggers down the corridor to the death chamber, his childhood-friend-turned-neighborhood-priest (Pat O’Brien) begs a final favor. Rocky is worshipped by a gang of young punks who still have a chance to go straight. If they see that their idol has feet of clay, maybe they’ll stop regarding him as a role model and think twice about following in his criminal footsteps. At first Rocky refuses, but at the last minute—in a redemptive self-sacrificial act that brings tears to the good father’s eyes—he pretends to break down and goes screaming and crying t
o his death.
MOST EMOTIONALLY SATISFYING DE AT H
Dirty Harry (1971). Few, if any, other moments in cinematic history are as profoundly gratifying as the climax of this two-fisted classic, when Clint Eastwood’s heroic police officer puts a well-deserved .44 Magnum slug into the worthless carcass of the sniveling long-haired psycho killer after asking, “Are you feeling lucky, punk?”
BEST 3-D DEATH
Dial M for Murder (1954). Originally meant to be shown in 3-D (which enjoyed a brief vogue in the 1950s), this Alfred Hitchcock thriller concerns evil hubby Tony Wendice (Ray Milland), who sets up his rich wife, Margot (Grace Kelly), to be killed by an intruder. During the attempted murder, Margot fights back and manages to bury a pair of scissors between the shoulder blades of her attacker. In a tight close-up, we see the scissors sink into his body as he falls onto his back—a shocking image in any format but especially powerful when viewed, as intended, in 3-D.
MOST DIABOLICALLY INGENIOUS DEATHS
Final Destination (2000), Final Destination 2 (2003), Final Destination 3 (2006). In the original entry in this series, Death—feeling cheated after a few intended teenage victims escape destruction by refusing to board a doomed airplane—sets out to reclaim them by devising ingenious Rube Goldberg-like accidents. The most thrilling is the elaborate accident that starts off the second installment with a colossal bang.
The Whole Death Catalog Page 36
