On December 9, 2019, my grandma—wearing her favorite dress, with her hair set and makeup applied—sat in her favorite recliner, surrounded by family at home, and raised a glass of strawberry daiquiri for a toast. We all yelled “kanpai!” She thanked us, and drank. Eighteen minutes later, she was dead.
Mildred was a complicated woman to love. She was not a hugger or giver of compliments. While she was exceptionally generous (money was her preferred gift to give), had a good sense of humor, and was adored by her friends and neighbors, everything needed to be on her terms. People came to her, she did not go to them.
She had always been pragmatic regarding death, so it was no surprise when, on her 98th birthday, she told my mom and aunt that she wanted to look into the Our Care, Our Choice Act Hawai’i had enacted six months earlier. Her health had been declining; mentally she was sharp, but physically her legs and eyes were giving out. She would rather be dead than unable to do laundry and cook. After some brief research, we determined that she met all but one requirement to move forward with the process: being terminally ill.
The next few months were a blur of travel to Honolulu from the mainland. We split our time between getting her affairs in order, and medical scans—trying to find something, anything, to make her eligible. She had already survived colon cancer, and for a brief moment, when a dark spot appeared on a scan, we were all genuinely hoping that grandma had breast cancer. She did not. She was annoyed. Eventually her doctors declared her congestive heart failure as terminal enough, given her age and quality of life after she had fallen in the shower in August. She was elated. She picked her death day.
In November, more than 100 people came to the house for her celebration of life. Friends and family, mostly local, but many from the mainland, lined up to pay their respects and tell her how much they loved her. She took note of who did not show up.
Then her death day arrived. Around 12 p.m. on December 9, her doctor called to say that he was running late but would be there ASAP. Mildred was upset: She was hoping to be dead before 2 p.m. She was more upset when she found out that her three medicine doses needed to be spaced out 30 minutes apart. By the final, lethal dose, she was out of patience and barely waited for my dad to tell her it was the big one before she had finished it. She was ready.
Her doctor noted that it was the most peaceful death he had ever witnessed and we should all be so lucky to go out on our own terms, surrounded by exactly who we wanted. That was Mildred, always in control. I sure do miss her. EVANNE HALL
Deaths Are Not the Same
There is this idea that all death is just death. And all of us are dissolved, in the end, by this oneness: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. We were persons in life; we are all just nothing in the universal nothingness of death. Death is the ultimate democracy: Elon Musk will go the same way as a person living in a tent near what remains of Rainier Mall, which was destroyed by a fire in 2023 and is now an economic graveyard. But this is not at all what happens. A death is not dissolved into the great all-for-one. The death of an individual is as singular as their life.
Recall how a Looney Tunes character, when fleeing Wile E. Coyote or Elmer Fudd, punches a hole through a brick wall in the perfect shape of its body. Death does this to its survivors, but the shape of the dead’s departure doesn’t correspond with the shape of the departed’s body. Instead, it corresponds with something that’s intrinsic to the space they took up in you.
But that doesn’t mean that the shape of their departure can be predetermined.
Because this is hard to explain, I must use my personal experience of loss. All of the members of my first immediate family are dead. My mother, father, sister, brother—gone. I loved them all equally but each entered death unequally.
In a way, this is to be expected. My mother, in life, was not at all like my father. She was practical, and, though a professor, ran a popular bar in the middle of a city (Gaborone, Botswana), a fact that embarrassed my father because he saw himself as a bit of gentleman: read books, drank good whiskey, and philosophized about the nature of humans and the world in general (he was, above all, a theologian). Business was beneath him.
And so it is: A death is as singular as a life.
My mother’s departure left me deeply reflective. The hole she left in me was philosophical: What is death exactly? Do we go anywhere? Will I ever see her again?
My mother did not believe in hell, but my father did. You would think, then, that his death would make me more philosophical than my mother’s.
Instead, his departure was worldly, all business: the accounts he mismanaged, the secrets he hid from me, the clumsiness of it all. And so the hole he left when exiting life turned out to make me more upset, more worked up, than sad. He should have done this, he should have done that, he shouldn’t have been so aloof. The hole he left was frustration, and my frustration with his ghost will go on until I’m gone.
My brother’s death hit me much harder than expected. I thought I was never that close to him (he was 12 years younger than me and died in 2019 at the age of 37). I didn’t like his music or his bands, and I thought he was born lazy. But, my God, his death to me had the drama and power of Jesus Christ being nailed to the cross.
He did not want to die. He wanted more time. And he did not hide, to me and others close to him, his absolute fear of the nothingness that was fast approaching him. He looked at death with horror. And so the hole he left is still raw, still painful to me
My sister’s death, which happened two years ago, I feared would hit me with a force that surpassed that of my brother’s. She was only two years younger than me. I spent the greater part of my life with her. But her death didn’t blow me away. And I now know why.
Though she’s gone—I have no illusions about that—the hole she left was so large, it was unimaginable. I just can’t process the scale of her departure. Indeed, if I were to see her in a bar on Pike or Pine or somewhere in London, the city she lived in before she died, I would not be in the least surprised. CHARLES MUDEDE
Sharks, Cherry Pie, and the Art of Dying
Sometimes I think about post-mortem earworms. The thought will randomly cross my mind while I’m driving and I’ll frantically make a note for a playlist for when I’m dying. Crystal Castles. “Summertime Sadness.” “Bittersweet Symphony. “Gentle techno and all the kinds of things I listen to while driving or in the shower. In case we cling to the last things we hear, I want my earworms in the afterlife to be the ones I loved in life. I’m not sure, but I think this is important enough that it should probably go in people’s wills.
Death was never foreign to me: I grew up touching cold, stiff bodies because my father was a Methodist minister who officiated weddings and funerals all the time (and I was a curious kid). I hated weddings because everyone seemed stressed. I loved funerals because there was always cherry pie afterward. There were a lot of funerals in our tiny west Kansas community, where elderly German American congregants dropped like flies about once a month. My mom wasn’t a good cook, so I was always excited to hear that one of the parishioners had passed. We would eat well.
Somewhere between the latticed crust and the open caskets, I learned what death was supposed to mean. I was 5 the day we filed out of a funeral home and I asked my dad. He pointed to a beetle lying upside down on the sidewalk and explained that both the bug and the body we’d just left behind were empty shells. But it was okay, because: heaven.
I don’t believe in heaven anymore, but I do believe in art. As a recovering pastor’s kid, I think a lot about the parallels between art and religion. The role of an art community is not unlike church. Art has the profound ability to transmit otherwise ineffable feelings that hover over the precipice of the sublime. It can invoke altered states, ecstasy, moments of transcendence. But can it help us comprehend death?
A lot of art skirts mortality without quite touching it. Munch’s mourners in lachrymose shades of blue and black tell of grief. Hans Holbein’s grinning plague skeletons are the great equalizer. Egon Schiele’s subjects are imbued with a sensual death rattle—Eros and Thanatos enmeshed, skeletons half-visible beneath the flesh. Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead looms, ensorcelling, dragging the viewer inward with a terrifying gravitational pull.
In 1960, Yves Klein—creator of the famous eponymous shade of blue—created the photomontage Leap Into the Void (Le Saut dans le Vide). The iconic black-and-white image shows the artist suspended midair after flinging himself from a second-story ledge. His body is nearly horizontal, frozen above the street. Another figure pedals away on a bicycle, oblivious to the apparent catastrophe unfolding behind him.
Something Klein captures in this image feels correct: I think we’re all a little bit Klein—flying, dying—but also the guy trying to just mind his business and stay upright on the bike, unwilling to look death full in the face.
But there’s only one artwork, for me, that perfectly gets at the paradox of dying: Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.
It might just be the title that’s doing the heavy lifting. The work itself, a 14-foot tiger shark preserved in a tank of murky emerald formaldehyde, has been famously fraught, in terms of holding together; the flesh of the beast, first interred in its tank in 1991, wasn’t properly preserved, and it eventually fell off the bone. In 2006, the old shark was replaced with a brand new one—this time embalmed.
The work’s physical failure is inseparable from its conceptual success—the material integrity (or lack thereof) functions in tandem with the mental gymnastics put forward by Hirst in the title. As such, I put forth that it’s the most perfect vanitas ever created: An unparalleled vanity that underscores the hubris of an artist trying to fuck with death like that in the first place.
I’ll probably die without ever understanding death, and I’m okay with that. In the meantime, don’t lose my playlist and pass the cherry pie. AMANDA MANITACH
Our Little World
One year ago this month, I said goodbye to my beloved kitty, Vangelis, at the veterinary emergency room in the middle of the night. I am a very “good in crisis” type of person, but after the clinician told me he was gone, I stood alone in the empty waiting room and wailed in a way that felt ancient and uncontrollable.
In the following days and weeks I was numb, and trying very hard to present as a “normal” amount of sad.
After all, I’d had three years to prepare for this—Vangie was diagnosed with congestive heart failure at the age of 1. I became a CHF medication expert, and I doted on him. I tried to memorize his entire being with enough detail I could holographically project him back into my life at a later date. I had not wasted any of our time together. I thought, then, that I could circumvent some of the mourning process. We had already been through so much.
Instead, I was spun into a state of grief that felt disorienting in its magnitude. This grief felt erratic, white-hot, and embarrassing; I blubbered at the wrong times and dissociated at the wrong times. I broke out in hives and my lymph nodes were swollen and angry.
My friends were lovely and caring, but I was acutely aware that any amount of time spent in mourning, beyond a week, felt “prolonged.” This was made all the more surreal because a dear friend/mentor had died just a month earlier. After his passing, though, there was an entire community who missed him terribly—we could check in, gather, talk about it at length; eventually he would have a massive celebration of life where we could begin to integrate this loss.
My kitty only had his little world. Our little world. The thought that only a small handful of people would ever really understand how perfect and extraordinary he was felt like a universal error.
Somewhere in the cremation paperwork, I was handed a brochure called Understanding Loss and What Happens Next.
Brochures? At a time like this? I expected antiseptic language, corporate reassurance. But, because I did not, in fact, “understand loss” and could not imagine “what happens next” I gave it a read. The writing was so simple and so caring it caught me off guard.
“Give yourself grace and embrace your emotions,” it began. “Grief is not an obstacle. It can’t be avoided or outsmarted. The only way to get to the other side is to go through it.” Of course this was information I’d encountered before, but the simple and careful way it had been put together moved me. There was evidence of human attention behind it. Someone—or likely several people—on the other side of this brochure, had sat down and tried to anticipate what a devastated stranger might need to hear upon leaving an emergency veterinary hospital without the animal they brought in.
They had been there, you could tell. They had not known my pet, but they had known theirs, and in our grief, we had something in common. “By pet parents, for pet parents.”
This little piece of printed writing, which I came to call “the grieflet,” reminded me that grief (even wild, deranged-feeling grief) is a healthy response to loss, no matter what our culture of denial would have you believe. Without trying to diminish it, it helped me begin the process.
“For a time, thoughts of your loved one will invoke feelings of sadness…But one day you’ll wake up, think of them and smile. It might seem far-fetched in this moment, but if you embrace your emotions, that moment will arrive.”
On a sunny day, I made a piece of artwork for my kitty that said “I loved my life with you.” I wrote him a long letter and buried it with his ashes on Mount Rainier. Now every time I see the mountain, I think of Vangelis. EMILY NOKES
