Death, What is it Good For?

On life's ultimate purpose.

***This post, although not a review, contains spoilers for Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. TW: It focuses primarily on the concept of death. 

Do you need a little pick-me-up?

A little motivation to start your day, week, or new year on a productive note?

Maybe you want to start a blog (heh), or practice for that marathon. Maybe you have a final project due on Thursday. But maybe instead you open an app on your phone and scroll through the many posts to find a time-lapse of people studying, or a vlog of a stranger crossing the finishing line of a 26-mile run, or a Reel of someone finishing that godforsaken Harry Styles crochet jacket project. 

Maybe you begin to think this isn’t for you. Or maybe you think: what do these people have that I don’t? Maybe you’re wondering what the perfect solution is to this predicament and how you can tackle this without having to open up a self-help book. Well, good news! I have the answer to your maybes, and it isn’t 200 pages long. 

It is, quite literally, the idea of Death. 

Death is a very simple complex idea that our mind immediately rejects. Our brain actually shields us from visualizations of our death as a form of optimism bias. Death can happen! As long as it doesn’t happen to me! Or my loved ones!

I’ve been thinking of this constantly the last few weeks after having just finished Pet Sematary by Stephen King. It is an excellent horror novel about grief that can haunt both literally and metaphorically, and how this poisons the Creed family after their move to rural Maine. Louis Creed, the main character, is a doctor that has regularly confronted death. To him, it is an idea that is close, considering his profession. But it is also distant. The eyes that close, the limbs that go limp, and the mouth that breathes its last breath are all from people unfamiliar to him. A little bit like those statistics you see online. When it’s not happening to you, how real can it be?

As a result of Louis’ ‘comfort’ with death, he has no issue explaining this concept to his five-year-old daughter. His wife, on the other hand, wants to shelter their children from the idea of their mortality. To her, death is more than just a statistic or something in the newspaper, because Rachel Creed watched as her sister, fighting a long battle with spinal meningitis, choked to death. By teaching her daughter about her mortality, she feels that she is speaking it into being. 

There are many concepts that we can’t accurately put under an ‘Explain Like I’m Five’ tag. Love, dreams, melancholy. Sure, maybe we all use the same words to describe these concepts. But even then, their definitions are much more cloudy than we first think them to be because they often depend on our own individual experiences. We know what these concepts mean intrinsically. But the blue I visualize in my mind will be just a tiny bit different than the blue that you visualize. It doesn’t mean it’s not blue. To you, love might be a person or a place or a book, depending on your position in life. To someone else, love is just the release of oxytocin in the body— nothing more, nothing less.

When Louis explains the idea of death to his daughter, he is at a point in his life where death is not much more than something you try your best to prevent, but ultimately must accept in the event that it occurs. He explains it with an air of reasoning behind his voice:

“What we know is this: When we die, one of two things happens. Either our souls and thoughts somehow survive the experience of dying or they don’t. If they do, that opens up every possibility you could think of. If we don’t, it’s just blotto. The end.”

Blotto. Nothing more. Nothing less. Simple as that.

Rachel Creed is not convinced of this, and not many of us are, either. Rachel would much rather not think about what happens to our thoughts and ideas after we die. To her, death is her sister coming after her for the opportunities she has to think and feel and move without pain. 

In her current position, she wants more than anything for life to be a one-way ticket. So she pretends, like many of us do. We go on with our hopeful assumptions. We assume that when we go to bed tonight, we will wake up tomorrow morning and complete everything we didn’t have the chance to do today. We assume that finishing our dreadful final exams is worth it because in three years we will achieve our degrees and pave the way for innovation. We assume that all the work we put in saving up for our future homes/cars/vacations/kids will be productive because in ten years we will drive these cars to our fancy homes waiting for our kids in New York to call us after dinner at a local Nobu. 

Things change once death inches closer, either toward you or your loved ones. When Louis’ son eventually dies, his opinion on death is not nearly as apathetic as it was. He no longer accepts fate and the inevitability of death that he lectured his daughter about. Because, in his eyes, a completely preventable death has happened to his own child, too young to even comprehend mortality only to lie in the casket. The villain he constantly refers to, Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, has followed him beyond just his wife’s experiences and his work life. It has followed him home.

To resonate with the grief that Louis feels, King convinces us, within a few pages, that Gage’s death is just a sick joke. This works because, as readers, we would rather not think about a little kid dying, especially from the point of view of their parents. He’s not dead, dummies! Gage is saved from being hit by a truck and grows up to study at John Hopkins and make the Olympic swim team. What a wonderful life that would have been, and what a sadistic thought Louis has that exacerbates his suffering. 

Oftentimes, when filled with uncertainty or, more often, regret, we think of a potential or alternative future. Five years is the golden timeline. When we don’t know what our path is, we try to solve this by making a five-year plan. To cope with the stress we have in our daily lives, we often ask ourselves whether the problem we’re facing will matter in five years. Unless we are sick or counting on it, we very rarely think back and say, well, will I get to see the next three? Because our brain doesn’t let us go further than the dreams we have in a deep sleep we may not wake up from. 

If I were to tell my mom something I planned to do in three years' time, she would say this: إذا الله عطانا عمر. If God gives us the years. Sometimes, when we talk about the future, she reminds me that she and my father will not be here forever, and it fills me with grief just thinking about it. I absolutely hate even the mention of such an idea, because it is something I will never want to accept. 

As humans, we fantasize about partners, dream jobs, and everything in between. We would rather think about lives so far from our own than something that is tauntingly close. Louis often thinks of what life would have been like if he worked as a First Aid doctor at Disneyland, where innocence is eternal and nothing bad ever happens. Can we escape death at Disneyland?

“There was, even, Oz the Gweat and Tewwible himself here— he might be glimpsed walking around near the monorail’s point of egress into the Magic Kingdom or peering down from one of the flying Dumbos with his flat and stupid gaze— down here Louis and Gage had come to know him as just another amusement park figure like Goofy or Mickey or Tigger or the estimable Mr. D. Duck. He was the one, however, with whom no one wanted his or her picture taken, the one to whom no one wanted to introduce his son or daughter. Louis and Gage knew him; they had met him and faced him down in New England, some time ago. He was waiting to choke you on a marble, to smother you with a dry-cleaning bag, to sizzle you into eternity with a fast and lethal boogie of electricity.”

Oz, the Gweat and Tewwible. Understandably, we only ever think about the Tewwible part. I actually gloss over the Gweat part every time I read it. What is so great about death is that every action we make is an action closer to it. The more conscious we are of this, the more we prioritize the actions that matter. The ones we want to be defined by. In the end, we spend our lives building up our resumes, which follow us in the form of eulogies. 

With each reminder, I cherish time much more often than before. I visit more. I stay out of my room. I say yes when my mom asks if I want to go to the grocery store or Winners or the mall for the nth time. I’m making an effort to learn more about chess, exercise, and the simple life so I can talk about it with more fervour with my dad. One day I will muster up the courage to go on a -10 degrees hike with him. I take his advice more often when it comes to school, work, and my professional/personal growth, because I realize I shut it down in high school when I shouldn’t have. I am reminded that one day I will not have the same opportunities but only the regret of not saying yes.

This doesn’t just apply to my family relationships. Upon reflection, I’ve had a complete change in my academic mentality since my high school days. I remember more days when I was propped on a desk in a textbook than days with friends who had so much love for me, love that I did not appreciate at the time. I was an academic perfectionist, and when my teachers and family told me this, I took it as a compliment. My attention to detail and 110% effort were what got me my grades… Surely I wasn’t going to stop now? Post-graduation, feeling like I have amnesia because I do not remember anything beyond the pedestal of high school grades that don’t mean jack-shit to me now, I am almost regretful. 

I say almost because if I did not have this high school experience, I think I eventually would have during my university years, arguably the prime time of my life. Hindsight taught me to cherish more than the academic praise I slaved for when I was younger. My education is a really big priority for me, but the difference between great and above and beyond is not. Nowadays I’d rather sacrifice attention to detail to create memories I would otherwise not have with people I value very much. 

Now, this is not me advising you to pull out the yes card at every corner. In fact, after learning about my own mortality, I also learned that yeses come with their own quality. Am I saying no because I’m lazy? Or because I don’t genuinely enjoy my time doing this? Could I better make use of my time if I say no? I’m starting to consciously think about these decisions and whether they provide me with the growth I’m looking for. I think that the more life we live, the more we think about these opportunity costs.

Regardless of what you believe in, we can all agree that the next five years aren’t a promise. Not to start and end this with more maybes, but maybe this is what we need. Maybe what we need is to be life’s party poopers, constantly reminding ourselves that we will die until the day that we do. Maybe in doing so we are, paradoxically, the life of the party. The life of studying what you love or running that marathon or learning that skill, or whatever you want to be known for in your past, present, and future. Mortality is a package with a ‘handle with care’ label, certainly, but once we take off that bubble wrap it’s easier to see what’s inside: the person you want to be in this quick blink of time.