Confront a corpse at least once. The absolute absence of life is the most disturbing and challenging confrontation you will ever have.
—David Bowie
For many years, and in a number of different settings, I was a pastor. In denominational, nondenominational, and completely deconstructed, experimental community environments, I preached and taught and prayed and did all the stuff associated with church and religious communities. I met people at the best and worst moments of their lives: births and marriages, the beginnings and ends of life and love. If I were forced to choose, I would prefer to preside at funerals rather than weddings. Funerals are where you get to be in solidarity and communion with people at their most painful and lowest, yet there is often a sense of hopeful humanity, marked by grief though it may be. But funerals can bring us to places of honesty and openness seldom found elsewhere. Shit gets real.
By the time I was seventeen, two of my friends had died. I wore black for a year and dropped out of school during that time. My friend Tim died by suicide not long after we had gone to what was my first ever live concert: the Temptations at the Royal Albert Hall in London. To this day, I cannot play their music without thinking of Tim. I won’t say much about his suicide; I have lived under the same shadow of depression for much of my life. It was shocking and sad and a fucking waste of his life, but I understood what he was going through (and I still do).
Simon Critchley says suicide is impossible. He derives his view from Freud and links it to the experience of melancholy. Suicide is impossible, he says, because the melancholic person experiences a division between who they are and an aspect of themselves that has been lost. He calls it the “hated other.” The person who dies by suicide is ultimately not themselves but rather the hated other. This is not suicide, Critchley says, but murder—murder of the hated other that I am.
My friend Kevin died in a car crash on the way back from a club we had both been at together. I went home with someone else in a different car and was woken the next day with the news of his death. His parents visibly aged overnight, and his once outgoing and cheerful dad became a broken man for the rest of his life. Kevin’s was the first body I ever saw laid out in a mortuary (another friend and I picked out his clothes for the casket). I can still conjure the smell, and I remember being taken aback by how cold he was when I touched his forehead. The mortician had done a terrible job on Kevin’s hair, making him look like a banker, so we fixed that. It was obvious to me that some transition had taken place, that his flesh and blood had become something else. Whatever it was, I was certain he wasn’t there anymore. I couldn’t express it, and I hadn’t any religious or philosophical ideas about mortality to draw upon then, but I knew it was brutal and complete. Kevin was gone.
Since then, I have spent a lot of time with people as they die, so I know something of the trajectory of a person’s last days. Occasionally, I can predict their last breath to within a few hours. Like most everything else in life, it unfolds with a particularity—what Samuel Gross called “the rude unhinging of the machinery of life”—and it happens in such a predictable series that once you’ve experienced it a few times, it becomes very familiar.
Some people die well. Once, when I was working at a church in Los Angeles, I visited a man in the hospital whom I barely knew. His wife often helped with a homeless food program that the church hosted. She wasn’t really a churchgoer; she just believed in trying to give something back to the community. But, regardless of her lack of interest in religious practice, her husband was dying, and she needed someone to speak with him. I think I was the least-likely looking minister available, which seemed to be what she wanted. He was in his late eighties, and his wife was there with him. She looked amazing, as she always did, stylishly cutting her own path through the sartorial landscape. The man was fantastic too. “I’ve had a good life,” he said. “I’ve known wonderful people and had a long and happy marriage, and now it’s time for me to go.” He was a lifelong Episcopalian but wanted no prayer-book ending. He told me he didn’t believe in an afterlife. He wanted nothing stodgy for his funeral, just lots of love and hopefully martinis for everyone after the service.
After he died, his ceremony was brilliant. All these old-school Hollywood people showed up. Not the plastic-surgery mob or the old Beverly Hills money crowd, but the arty types. It was as if they had all stepped out of a bohemian past. His wife was dressed to the nines and the attendees had been invited to wear anything but black. He was well eulogized, as one of the great Marvel comic creators was amongst his friends. Shaken by the loss but gamely rising to the occasion, the man delivered tales of his friend’s life well-lived and of their friendship over decades. Copious martinis were served afterward, fueling a celebration of a person who would be missed but also remembered for his wit, grace, and kindness.
The worst funeral I ever conducted was for a little boy who died of a genetic disease that ate him up before he was even ten years old. The deeper tragedy was that in spite of the odds against it—the medical probability was almost zero—his younger brother had the same condition, which meant the family was facing a repetition of the same event in a couple years’ time. My opening words at that funeral were, “This is fucked up.” And it was. The family’s grandmother was hostile to religion, a nonbeliever ironically angry at God, but she liked me because I swore at the funeral. To be honest, I didn’t swear for dramatic effect. It’s just all I had to say.
The hardest thing about that funeral was standing with the parents at the grave while the bulldozer covered his little coffin with dirt. Forget the idea of gravediggers carefully crafting a space in the earth. Graveyards are mechanized and industrialized, making it even harder to watch with the humanity removed just a little from the event. Digging a hole six feet into the earth must be incredibly difficult for the bulldozer operators, but they caused the whole earth to shake like an earthquake. This was fitting, because the whole thing felt like a psychic earthquake, a total shattering of the ground beneath this family’s feet. Everything vibrated. The sight of that backhoe dragging mounds of earth toward the hole and the sound of it thudding onto the coffin—that’s a sound I am in no hurry to hear again. There was silence when the bulldozer finished and the three of us stood there. It felt like eternity, but at least I was able to leave and go back to my life. The parents, on the other hand, were going to the hospital to tend to their other son. It was fucked up. Life is like that sometimes, and there is no explanation beyond that, especially one that includes God.
I find the defense of God at funerals to be the highest form of bullshit. To me there is nothing redeemable about God in such situations, and those who feel funerals are a good place to instruct people on God’s bigger plan or some other spiritual platitude are missing the point completely. I get that they want to comfort people, but it usually comes across as an exercise in affirming their own beliefs in the face of a circumstance that challenges the base of our own views on God.
There is a verse in the Bible by the apostle Paul that declares, “O death, where is thy sting?” (1 Cor 15:55). It’s a statement about the power of Christ’s death and resurrection and how for Paul, this means that the “sting” of death is taken away. Understanding this gave Paul a profound sense of comfort and inner strength to continue to do the work he felt called to. I have never particularly liked this Scripture. I think I may not have experienced resurrection in the same visceral way that he seems to have. I applaud Paul’s sentiment and recognize that he was trying to affirm something that might transform our understanding of death and mute its emotional impact, but I have felt death’s sting so often that no amount of religious belief seems to eradicate it. It takes more than a statement of belief for someone to overcome the finality of human existence, and whatever Paul meant, I doubt he intended it to be invoked as some kind of remedy for grief and loss without the experience that brought him to say such a thing. We spend so much time trying to keep death away from us, but it’s the one guarantee in life.
Some people try to mitigate death’s impact because they believe death is not the end. Their religions offer an elaborate explanation of what comes after. Christianity, like most religions, has developed a scheme for handling death, with Christ’s death being the ultimate finger raised to the power of death over us and our psyches. Declaring that death’s power has been broken is a common trope for people familiar with Christianity.
Religion has done a good job of developing complex theories about the potential afterlife in order to help us find hope when we lose those we love. But death stings like a scorpion and, once bitten, you’re never the same. I believe in the afterlife—the life that comes after us (this notion came from an interview between Critchley and my friend Kester Brewin when Kester was researching for a book he was writing)—but whether there is a future for me beyond my last breath is unknown and I have little opinion about that. There was life before me and there will be life after me—this is what I know. Immortality doesn’t appeal to me. As Andy Warhol once said, “The worst thing that could happen to you after the end of your time would be to be embalmed and laid up in a pyramid. . . . I want my machinery to disappear.”
I think other people’s deaths can teach you about your own life and your own death. I could quote Martin Heidegger’s theory of “being-toward-death”: it is certain, it is indeterminate, it is not to be outstripped, and it is non-relational. His theory is that we gain a more authentic perspective about life as we grow when we have death as a sort of guiding or mentoring force. Or something like that! It’s not an orientation but a way of being. It’s a nice theory, but I resonate with the songwriter Jackson Browne more. Browne is one of the best death philosophers/theologians, if you ask me. In the song “For a Dancer,” written for a friend who died in a fire, Browne expresses his inability to understand death. Like all of us, his friend, who was a dancer, has one dance they must do alone: the dance of death. Beyond that, Browne can only express ideas about death in the abstract and the poetic:
I don’t know what happens when people die
Can’t seem to grasp it as hard as I try
It’s like a song playing right in my ears
That I can’t sing
I can’t help listening
Death is like a song you can’t help listening to, but even though it’s in all our ears, no one can sing it, because it’s the one great mystery of life. This is the best I can do with death, and it’s why I think any theory of an afterlife is precisely that: just a theory and a guessing game.