one of my least favourite sayings is ‘death is the great equaliser’. here’s a fun fact: it’s not. if you’ve ever seen a picture of the great pyramids, you already knew that. having money and power, having the “right” colour of skin, living in the “right” place, believing in the “right” god - there’s a whole lot of factors across human history that have made it very, very unequal.
that being said, we all get to die. that part is true, and maybe that’s all the saying means. no matter what you have, you’re mortal just like everyone else. but even in that, it’s not equal - if it were, everyone would die peacefully in their sleep at 99 years old after eating an entire box of mac and cheese for dinner.
so why does the saying persist? i imagine it’s mainly because of modernity’s death anxiety. we’re really, really bad at death. we don’t like looking at it, or experiencing it, or talking about it. when your 83 year old grandma starts talking about when she’s gone, everyone in the house exchanges a worried look and says things like ‘oh grandma june. you’ve got 20 years left at least! you’re gonna be around forever!’
i myself have anxiety. a copious amount of it, and in lots of different categories: social, general, ecumenical, medical, culinary. so people wonder why i, the most anxious person on the earth, spend most of my time reading about death. doesn’t it make you more anxious, they usually ask me while they look uncomfortably around the room trying to pawn me off on someone else. but the answer is no. death is one of those things that actually makes me less anxious. i find it comforting, in a lot of ways, that nothing here is permanent. everyone that has ever lived, good or bad, rich or poor, significant or a member of the general populace, has died. memories of us only live so far as our grandchildren or maybe if we are lucky or unlucky our great grandchildren and then many of us are merely a stone or a drawer with a name or date some young person finds funny (personally i hope to die on june 9, 2069 and if i do, please allow my grave to become a pilgrimage place for bored teenagers to make out on. please also bury me in Nice, France. thank you in advance)
there’s a lot we can learn from our dead relatives and forbearers about our time on earth. that’s a lesson i learn constantly, sometimes personally and other times academically. and, just like with everything, not all of those lessons are fun. but almost all of them can be pretty funny, in the right light, or at least on the right medication.
here’s the thing i love most about history: everyone’s story is done already. you can draw whatever conclusions you like, really. with the proper application of evidence, you can tell someone’s whole existence, from birth to death, and you can pick what kind of story to tell - a love story, a sad story, a story of triumph, a story about historical best friends slash spinsters who adopted some kids, owned a cat named sappho, and just had a happy life together as bffs. whatever fits the bill, really. even as historians, we can’t make the history of anyone or anything objective. it comes with the territory.
i struggle with telling my own story, though, even to myself, because i can’t find what kind of story it is. my best guess is that it’s one of those environmental disaster ones that i’ve never really enjoyed. i also have reason to assume i’m not the main character, but that’s neither here nor there.
but in any case, death is nice because it gives us all perspective. did i accidentally say ‘love you’ instead of ‘thank you’ to my starbucks barista this morning? i sure did. do i feel weird about it? i sure do. will it haunt me at night for many months? it sure will.
but someday i’ll be dead and so will she, so i think it comes out in the wash. maybe death isn’t the great equaliser, but it’s certainly plot-convenient. i probably won’t have a pyramid in which to store my mummified corpse, or even a wikipedia page about my greatest achievements, but there will be a day where no one is alive to remember the time i tripped and fell down an entire flight of stairs at school because i sometimes forget to actually look where i’m going. or the time i thought it was “idelation” instead of “ideation” when talking about my own experiences with suicide on not one but TWO podcasts interviews. or the fact that i posted all these things on the internet, which is immortal and will contain these stories for as long as humanity exists, or at least until the sharks at the bottom of the ocean finally eat through the cables.
i was suicidal for a rather extended time. it gave me a rather optimistic outlook on death, which i managed to hold on to even after i got better. these days, i’m finding that i get to celebrate both still being here, and bouts of existential dread. you have a different relationship with existentialism once you’ve actively wanted to die and then gotten better - it’s almost incredulous: ‘i …want to live?? oh my god I WANT TO LIVE.’ which is hard to explain to people.
for me, living meant both choosing life, the good parts and the shitty parts, and also choosing the unknown: if i’m not taking my own life, then something else gets to, at a moment i don’t get a say in. but it’s something i share with everyone else too: we’re all in this together, until biology says we’re not. i chose anxiety instead, both to see what other things my story might have, and because there were other alive people that needed me more than the dead did.
this project was born from both the living and the dead. it will explore my own experiences with both sides, from my life and from history. the dead can teach us things, even things we didn’t want to learn. and i hope it gets us all more comfortable talking about our death - and the death of grandma june. because she’s 83 years old already and she doesn’t want to live forever, okay? she just wants to know that you’re going to miss her, and also, that her funeral is bussin. we don’t all get pyramids or wikipedia pages, but we do all want people to miss us, at least for a generation or two. if we have to make the trip alone, it’s always nice to know we’ve got people on both sides. but since death is for everybody, it’s also nice to know no one, not even your least favourite cousin, is safe from the inevitable. see you in hell, susan!