3 Getting to Know Death

My Mom died and all I got was this free churro.

– BoJack Horseman, BoJack Horseman Season 5 Episode 6 “Free Churro”

I’ve never been to the funeral.

The one that actually feels like a funeral to you. Not the kind where you feel like the awkward outsider looking in, thinking well somebody died, that sucksas your family members grieves. I’m talking about the kind where you’re just standing there and thinking fuck, what do I do now.

Sure, I’ve been to funerals. Two, in fact. One was for my paternal grandfather, who I only met a few times in my life. I can barely remember it. The other was for one of my many great-uncles, who I also only met once or twice.

The clearest memory I have from that day is my Grandma sobbing over the body at her brothers wake, screaming out his name. She was the only one at the funeral who acted like that: an awkward, ugly, fumbling display of intense grief. It didn’t last long because of one of her other brothers got up to lead her away, but that image of grief stuck with me.

I hope thefuneral never comes. I know someday it will.

It’s like, up until now, death has somehow forgotten me. But not my family.

Like my cousin Paul, who I’ve always called an uncle, who lost his parents in the span of a week. His mom, to natural causes, and his dad, who hung himself a week later.

Just last month, I got a text from my mom telling me one of my uncle’s own cousins had hung herself in the garage. Just like his dad.

I read the text as I was brushing my teeth, getting ready for school. By the time the toothpaste was swirling down the drain, plenty of other worries had overcome the momentary sadness I felt for this person I had never met.

Now this is depressing shit, but I feel suddenly pressed to write about it for two reasons.

One is that I’ve been spending a deal of time writing a piece on my Dad and his father, which is a story both painfully sad and true – something I’ve never really experienced. The other reason however, is not a true story. It’s a television show.

The opening epigraph of this piece comes from the recent season of BoJack Horseman. Specifically, “Free Churro,” where BoJack gives a monologue about getting over the death of his emotionally abusive mother at her funeral. For nearly twenty minutes the camera remains locked on BoJack as we watch him sort through his mess of a relationship.

By the end, death becomes a joke as he focuses on the fact he got a free churro for telling a cashier his mom died. Then there’s the final punchline of the reveal that BoJack is at the wrong funeral; that he just cut himself open for all to see and that it doesn’t even matter. It’s a television show, sure, but shit like that cuts deep.

But, it’s no less meaningful just because it isn’t real. And I couldn’t help but think of my own Dad as being in the same position of BoJack at his father’s funeral.

BoJack is, admittedly, a terrible person; a self-loathing, wallowing, and self-destructive drunk. He’s nothing like my dad, and not just because my Dad isn’t an anthropomorphic horse. And my Grandfather wasn’t abusive; he was difficult, distant, and hardly there, but he was, according to my Dad, a good man who tried. He was just a little broken inside.

Still, his death has always unresolvedly hung heavy over my Dad. He’s never really talked about it, but as a child, you notice these things about your parents. Like just how messy those first few days after my Grandfather’s death were for my Dad. Still, at the funeral, he managed to say a few words despite his uncertain grief.

I wish I could remember what those words were. I realize my Dad probably wishes he could forget. Then I got to thinking how close my own Dad came to dying. And then I started thinking on how I’d never really thought about how close he came to death.

It was January 15th, 2015, and my mom was driving me and my brother to school. Since it was my last year in high school, I was able to have the luxury of spares, which I had first class of each semester. This meant I could hitch a ride when my brother got dropped off at his school.

Just as we were pulling up, my Mom got a call. Something had happened.

My Dad had a fall, and she had to go: this was all the information I was given before I was dropped off. Imagine being dropped off at school and, just as you’re getting out of the car, you find that your Dad has had an accident. You know nothing about this accident; it could be serious, it could be nothing. All you know is that your mother looked pretty serious and suddenly you’re stranded at school with the knowledge that your Dad might be hurt or dying or dead.

It wasn’t fun.

I walked to class in a daze, noticing that there was a shattered window. In class, I learned from my friend Kees that it had somehow been punched out by another student and Kees had seen it happen. That the student stormed out of class, yelled some expletives, and sent his fist flying through the glass.

The rest of the day was a blur until my Uncle Paul picked up my brother and me from school to take us to the hospital. He filled us in on the details: that my Dad had been whipped into the ground by a poorly secured lift.

The injuries were not life threatening, but no less serious. For all intents and purposes, he was a broken man. Every word, every movement, was soft and slow, as if he was on the verge of falling apart. He couldn’t even breathe properly without a chest tube.

It would take a week not only for that chest tube to be removed, but also for him to take a few measly, painful steps. It would take six months until he could move without a walker, and another six until he could walk without a cane.

If he had been a foot higher, or fallen at a different angle and landed on his head, he could’ve died at forty-three. He could’ve died due to the negligence of whoever set up that lift.

As it happens, that student ended up in the emergency ward right beside him, yelling and cursing at nothing in particular. By the time I arrived, the boy was already gone. One of the first things my Dad did though was tell me about him as he tried not to laugh.

My Dad had almost died. And he was laughing.

It seems a cliché to write about death. What is every teenager and young adult, after all, if not death-obsessed. And I’m sure many writers can relate to the idea of angst-ridden death poetry in their teen years.

I’m not writing about death in that way though. At least I don’t think I am. I like to think I’m reflecting on the absurdity of life, near-death, and death, perhaps to get closer to some approximation of how much of a tangled mess these things are.

After all, I was inspired to write this essay by watching a show about a depressed, alcoholic horse who was a famous actor in the nineties – that must mean something. Or I at least hope it does so I can convince myself I’m somehow offering some new perspective.

In order to do that though, I need to explore my own experiences with death, minimal as they may be. So here goes:

To my knowledge, I’ve had three near misses with death. When I was a baby, I was hospitalized with a very serious bout of pneumonia. I don’t really remember this. I wasn’t even aware it happened until my mother mentioned it offhandedly one day years ago.

The second, I was a kid on the verge of my teenage years: eleven or twelve or so. I had stayed the night at my cousins in Dresden and my parents just arrived to pick me up. Having spent most of the day in the basement, I wasn’t aware of just how black the clouds were and how windy it was when I left the house.

The instant I got in the van, the wind picked up without warning and I can still vividly remember the van actually tilting before my mom got in the passenger side. Being a child still, I immediately began to beg my parents to stay and wait it out. Despite my protests, we continued to drive anyway and as we turned the corner moments later, we were greeted by a rather large fallen tree down the road a bit, right at a stop sign. Had we left even a minute or two earlier, that tree could have landed right on top of our van without warning, then who knows what could’ve happened.

When the subject of this event comes up now, the thing that my parents always circle back around to is my screaming. And they laugh about it as if it were just some childish overreaction. They laugh about as if the winds weren’t strong enough to make a fucking tree fall on the road.

The third, and final, is rather recent: just last year in fact. I had an evening class at the University and I was driving home to my Aunt’s, with whom I was staying for that school year. As per norm when I was driving, I was blasting an album of some kind – I don’t remember what it was.

My route home involved taking Pillette all the way down to Grand Blvd, where my Aunt lives. As I approached the intersection with Tecumseh, the light barely turned red seconds before I would’ve felt safe crossing. Seconds later, an ambulance sped past, not even slowing down and then the realization hit me: I almost fucking died.

Whether it was due to my music, or the fact that its sirens weren’t on (even as it sped past, I didn’t hear it), I had no awareness of that ambulance which didn’t even slow down for safety. At the speed it was going, I almost certainly would have suffered great, if not potentially fatal, injuries.

My life was saved by the happenstance of the light turning red and, had I walked slightly faster to my car on campus, or drove just a nudge faster, that ambulance would’ve hit me. As it stands, at the time of my writing this, this is the only time the thought of my death had ever seriously crossed my mind.

You’d think that this would’ve lead to some sort of life epiphany or at very least a simple realization that maybe I shouldn’t blast music while driving at night in a city. It didn’t.

I sat there for about a minute after, waiting for the light to turn green. When it did, I drove on without missing a beat and, by the time I was home, the event was already pushed to the back of my mind. I had almost died and it seemed, at the time, little more than some inconvenient thought.

I stop and think about that moment sometimes. I’ll be walking up the stairs or washing the dishes or some other mundane activity and I’ll suddenly feel the need to freeze in thought in order to fully understand, once again, that I almost died that day. Admittedly, I probably look ridiculous in these moments, as if I’ve been afflicted by a sudden, benign seizure.

Then, I start doing whatever I was doing again, go on with my life, and forget about my contemplation until the next time it strikes me.

Writing about death is as serious as it is a joke.

It’s a thin line between offering insights on death and cliché wallowing’s. It’s one thing to reflect on death, it’s another to pretend you have something new to offer on the subject.

BoJack Horsemancould have chosen to have BoJack just give a painful, honest eulogy on his mother’s death at her funeral – that would have been powerful enough on its own. But it’s been seen before, and it’ll be seen again.

Instead, he pours his feelings out over the wrong casket and to complete strangers. It’s not just a punchline, it’s a snot-filled snort right in the face of how we approach death; a complete disregard of what’s proper.

I’m reminded of a song by Mount Eerie, a solo project headed by Phil Elverum. After the loss of his wife to cancer, Elverum did what some might consider tacky: he released two albums entirely about his grieving process.

The result was two collections of a series of loose, grieving thoughts strung together by exceptionally bare instrumental work. In the opener “Real Death,” off the first of these two albums, A Crow Looked at Me,Elverum wastes no time in confronting the irony of what he’s doing:

“Death is real/ someone’s there and then they’re not/ and it’s not for singing about/ it’s not for making into art/ when real death enters the house/ all poetry is dumb”

Of course, he is singing about death, even if he says it’s not proper. Of course, A Crow Looked at Meis art; it’s a cohesive album strung together by the theme of his grief for his wife. Of course, poetry is struck dumb in the face of real death, but that doesn’t stop Elverum from using Joanne Kyger’s “Night Palace” as the cover for the album.

Of course, death is real. And every reaction to it is as equal as any other.

I might not understand what it means to face real loss yet, but I’m no stranger to death. The stunned daze I was in as that ambulance sped past isn’t nothing. The retrospective acknowledgement of how that tree may have landed on our van isn’t reaching. The uncertain feelings I felt seeing my Dad in that hospital bed aren’t invalid. Even the apathy I felt at my Great-Uncle’s funeral or upon learning about that woman’s suicide isn’t some callous disregard of death.

I know death: it’s sad, bitter, ironic, messy, unfair, and a joke all in one. I just haven’t gotten to know it personally yet.