Existential Intersections on Death

Notes on Death – Part One

I recall where I was when the news came through that my cousin ‘X’ had been murdered.  I was stood on the stairs of my parent’s house, watching as my mother burst into tears.  I myself was numb at the news.  I remember standing there not sure what to do, what to say, either to comfort my mother, or myself.  I remember though feeling relieved that I was due to travel back to camp the next day.  That I would be able to cut myself off from any feelings of loss.  Or so I thought. 

We don’t often enough talk about death although it is all around us.  Although so many of us are desensitised by such, we as a society take the lives of our livestock in order to feed our collective selves.  Although so many of us are desensitised by such, we as a collective look to be entertained by horror movies, action movies, superhero movies, where the heroic protagonists kill the villainous other(s) as they attempt to scare us all, to rescue us all, so save society from absolute destruction.  And, although so many of us are desensitised by such, we witness, or maybe we avoid witnessing, the daily destruction(s) of peoples from disparate parts of the planet in wars and famines, switching over, switching away from, or scrolling beyond, any news which may prove too distressing, too emotional, which might bring us too close to the death and suffering of our fellow human beings. 

For me therefore, this month’s blog has been motivated by my experiences at a recent funeral I attended, following the death of a close family member.  Being there as part of a congregation to honour the life of someone who had touched so many of us, the experience had me thinking about death in a way I have not for quite a while.  So writing about death this month is as much to honour the experience and the passing, as it is to process the pain and the sadness of said experience.  It is to remind us of the commonality of death, and to ask us to consider who gets to, or has to, engage with death’s grip, versus who has the privilege of narcissistic avoidance.   

Notes on Death – Part Two

My grandmother died when I was maybe three years of age.  All I recall of that time, was being back in Trinidad with my mother (I am not sure if my brother was there with us).  The funeral was held on a very warm sunny day, and I recall running alongside a pipe at the side of the road, trying to jump back and forth over it.  I was playing.  That is all I remember of that passing.  That I was playing in the street.   

In existential thought as raised in the Global North, the ideas of death are laid out as if they are a motivator to life.  Yet, we should not forget that a good number of theorists who wrote about death, they did so because they themselves were close to this aspect of life; from Buber’s experiences as a Jewish man during the rise of Nazism in Europe, to Kierkegaard’s writings around death because of his own black dog, those who have written about death, bring a knowledge embedded in the pain of experience (Buber, 2002; Kierkegaard, 1989). 

The experience of black existential death though is markedly different to most in the Global North.  The constant hyper-awareness of the presence of those who might take away our living means that we have a relationship with death very much embedded within the social constructions of culture within which we reside even today.  From the Middle Passage, or the stage where so many enslaved Africans were transported from West Africa to the Americas by Europeans, and where so many preferred the freedom of death to the soul-destroying nature of bondage .  From the modern-day murders by the police of Persons of Colour, the rioting of the Far Right across the United Kingdom and the politics of the Hostile Environment.  Our distance from death has always been a narrow one, where we have often survived through the supplication of who we are within the social systems of white supremacy.  Our experiences not being documented does death an injustice in that it fails to recognise the importance of death in the lives of so many of us who are the racial other.  Death compels us to comply, and comes for us when we speak out, when we disobey the edicts of white supremacy (Malcolm X, MLK).

Notes on Death – Part Three

I decided when I was fourteen that my life was no longer worth living.  I was being bullied at school by my peers (often racially), and the teachers did nothing to help me.  Whilst at home my life was hellish, as I had the kind of parents who either wanted me to conform or who wanted nothing to do with me.  I was very much alone.  I therefore decided that I would end my life on my fifteenth birthday, and in preparation for this time, on New Years Day I would begin writing a diary of my last six months of life.  I have been writing that diary now for forty years.  I still have not died as yet.

When I recently told a close existential colleague about the time I wanted to die at fourteen, as presented in this blog, she mentioned that this would have given me a unique perspective on death, one which is not that widely shared in the Global North given our propensity to believe in our own sense of omnipotence.  She was right, I realised driving home later that night, not that I knew back then what this meant.  It was later that I realised one of the reasons I am (or can be) so apart from the world is that this early brush, this early engagement and entanglement with death, it set me apart from the world.  It, even then, allowed me to see the world in a different light, and especially, my role within it.  I have never been one to conform to a way of being, to take on the jobs, the routes, or narratives, which were the same of my peers.  And whilst this occasionally brought me ridicule, it also gifted me a freedom to see, experience, and write about things in a way which suited myself. 

All that I do now is from those experiences of death, even this blog.  I travel from a space of freedom riven with death, I write from a creative space where death sits alongside my every word, every blog, every book.  I even live my life knowing that it is a short one, knowing that the choices I make are not about fitting in with a world which often hates and fears me, but are more about walking my own path lest Mistress Death take me too soon. 

Notes on Death – Part Four

When ‘Y’ died recently, his passing really hit me hard.  The brother of ‘X’ we were incredibly close when we were children, playing together, holidaying together, our families intertwined together.  It was an honour to be one of his pallbearers at his funeral.  To carry his body into the church, out of the church, and to lower it into the grave to lay with his brother.  Whilst this was not about me, this was important for myself as maybe for the first time in a long while I allowed myself to feel the grief of loss of someone close to me.  I didn’t overeat, I didn’t self-sabotage.  I did a ritual of my own later.  I went home.  I raised a glass to say farewell.  I wept. 

References

Buber, M. (2002). Between Man and Man. Routledge.

Kierkegaard, S. (1989). The Sickness Unto Death. Penguin Classics.