Death Ritual

Yesterday evening, my daughter was video chatting with my mother when I called from my hiding place that it was time for bed. 

“Oh, Matthew!” my mom said. “There you are. I didn’t see you there, behind the couch.”

“Hi, Mom,” I said. “Hadley, go brush your teeth and hop into bed, okay?”

“Matthew, before you go there is something I wanted to tell you,” my mom said. “Do you remember Allan Bell?”

“No, I don’t think so…” I replied. 

“He flew an airplane,” she continued. “He lived in Vermont. We had dinner with him in 1983.”

“Yeah, I honestly don’t really recall,” I reiterated. “I would have been three, so...”

“Well, guess what?” she interjected. “He’s getting ready to take his final flight. He’s dying!”

“Oh,” I said. 

“In just a few days,” she went on. “It’s going to be a big change.”

“For him, yes…”

My primary correspondence with the person who gave me life is an awkward string of conversations in which she asks me if I remember someone, I tell her I don’t, and then she tells me they had a heart attack or stroke or got run over by an 18-wheeler. It’s like she’s trying to find out if I’m a psychopath, testing the emotional waters to see whether I can experience and display genuine human emotions. But since I never know who she’s talking about, I often have trouble summoning the appropriate display of sorrow when I learn they have departed from this earthly realm. It’s like that thing they do at the Oscar’s when they play soaring orchestral music and play a slideshow of “people we lost” in the previous year. I’ll see a photo of the boom operator from “Sleepless in Seattle” and feel a faint tinge of sadness for his friends and family, but also a legitimate suspicion that his passing will have very little impact on my daily life. 

When my mom visited us last year, I was lying in bed one evening, reading and chuckling at a funny, lighthearted book by Bill Bryson, when she appeared in the doorway. I was laughing at a scene in which old Bill accidentally orders too many hamburgers at McDonald’s, then feels confused about it. 

“Matthew, before I go to bed, I wanted to ask, do you remember Laura O’Brien?” my mom said. 

“Who?” I said, tilting the cover downward so I could see her. 

“Laura O’Brien. You went to kindergarten with her? She had long, blonde hair. Her parents drove a Volvo.”

“Hhhmm,” I said, trying to remember everyone I’d ever met in my 40-year life. “I can’t really place her.”

“Well, do you know what happened to her?” she asked with what appeared to be sincerity.

“We haven’t really stayed in touch.”

“She died!”

“Oh, sorry. When?”

“Four or five years ago. Okay, sleep tight!”

“Thanks. Goodnight.”

The future of this ongoing conversational thread seems pretty bright, at least for my mom. Every day, 150,000 people die. Every second, nearly two people expire. In the time it takes you to either read this column to its completion (unless you give up and do something more fruitful with your time), about 1000 people’s lives will end. Assuming my mother is committed to continuing in her role as a herald of the deaths of people I don’t know or remember, she has nearly infinite fodder. 

There is an idea, popular in Bhutan and many other corners of the world, that each person should think about death several times a day. Doing so, it seems, is healthy and makes people happier. When I encounter people who rarely ponder mortality, I am often surprised at how unhappy they are. They, like people who never study history, seem to live in a vacuum in which very few events and emotions are in reasonable proportion to everything else. People who are mad because they only make $30,000 annually probably don’t have a great grasp on how little 99.9 percent of the people who came before them made. People who worry they might only live to 70 don’t realize how rare or lucky they will be if they do. People who think they work too hard don’t realize how hard people used to work, people who think they don’t have enough time or resources don’t realize how scant time and resources used to be, and people who think they are unhealthy don’t fully understand how unhealthy the healthiest people used to be. 

Likewise, those of us who are alive today usually don’t stop to take stock of how very unalive a few dozen people have become by the end of this sentence, or how many thousands will expire by the end of this day. 

So while I always cringe when my mom begins a conversation with, “Matthew, do you remember…” I try to imagine that she is simply participating in a Bhutanese death ritual in her own clunky way, whether she knows it or not. And when I feel sorry for myself because my mind has again returned to death, that greatest of mysteries, I will try to remember that only the living can take part in this particular ritual of worry and wonder. It is ironic that only the living can ponder death, and only those who walk the earth can dance and feast on the Day of the Dead. Only those who are still here can wonder where we go, when we depart and take our final flight. If you think about these things, if you worry about them, it is a sure sign that you have not yet left.