Death

A Bedtime Story

Prologue: When we go to bed, some never wake up again.

Imagine going to sleep.

The End.

How does that feel?

The unfortunate Story of a wrongly placed Snail

I was still a child when I grasped the concept of death for the first time. I had inadvertently stepped on a snail.

I felt awful. Everything about the experience was wrong. The Sound. The Feel. And the Result.

Seeing life pass from something is tragic. In one moment, something is alive, full of plans and dreams and purposes. It is happy or sad or both (we don’t actually know what snails feel). Then, in the blink of an eye, a little universe is collapsed by a giant foot like Monty Python’s opening logo.

It’s one of the moments where you wish you could just go back 5 seconds in time and place your foot somewhere else. It wouldn’t matter, you’d stand anyway. But the Snail would thank you.

Unluckily, unless you’re playing a video game, death is final.

I don’t think it’s too bold to call the first encounter with death a life-changing experience. From the moment I introduced that snail to the grim reaper I would go out of my way to save miniature animals. Smashing a fly? No. Hunting a spider with a vacuum cleaner? No. Walking on my toes when the street is crawling with earthworms? Yes. And not because I fear my shoes are getting dirty.

It’s irrational, I know. Earthworms get sunburned from moonlight and when they are exposed to the sun, they die of skin cancer. But at least I am not to blame if worms are killed by celestial bodies.

The Quantum Mosquito

I’ve broken my secret vow to safeguard the life of miniature fauna once though.

In 2011 I was on summer vacation with my mom in Canada when a giant mosquito (they are much larger there) had infiltrated our rented motor-home. I was unwilling to kill it. But moms have a way of making people do stuff, even if they don’t want to (like brushing teeth… I always hated brushing teeth as a kid).

Under the influence of a superior force I ended my decade-long abstinence from killing and brought the insect’s own tiny little story to a crushing end. Many miles away in Switzerland, but only a few hours later, my beloved grandpa died unexpectedly from a stroke.

You might argue this isn’t Cloud Atlas or Midnight’s Children, where everything is linked.

But in my 15-year old brain it was. Also it wasn’t. Like Schrödinger’s dead or not dead cat. I knew there couldn’t be a connection. But it felt like one.

That’s typical for early me: As a child, I thought I could influence everything by even the smallest wish or act. Freud might argue this is because childhood is like the superstitious early age of mankind, but I (and most anthropologists) think that’s philosophical nonsense. Still, death and superstition have a long history together. Witches were burnt on the stake when someone fell ill unexpectedly, or when cattle died.

And here’s the fault in my early grasp of the concept of death: I found it easier to assume I had remotely killed my grandfather through a quantum mosquito than to acknowledge that death has no reason, apart from some organs refusing to work by a whim of the universe or an obscure butterfly effect. If we have the choice between a mosquito and a butterfly, why for heaven’s sake would we choose the blood-sucking one?

Much of that superstition gets lost when we get older and a deeper understanding of the world we live in. As we grow up, our perceived size and might shrinks. The center of the universe moves away (for light years) and we learn that we are just a tiny dot on a tiny spot in a tiny assortment of dotted spots in a big black nothing.

Let me ask you, did you ever notice all that nothing when you look up to the sky?

Interlude: The Ramifications of Life in the Universe

There are questions that seem as old as mankind: What is the meaning of life? Do we have a purpose in this universe of dead nothingness? How should we live before we die?

I believe, to understand death, we need to understand life.

The laws of thermodynamics suggest that life is helping the universe achieve total entropy (a fancy word for disorder), since we are causing our surroundings to be less organized in exchange for our privilege of having infinitely structured bodies and metabolisms.

From another point of view, evolutionary theory recommends procreating. Handing our genetic construction plans down to our children and grandchildren. Probably for them to continue to cause more entropy.

So, if life causes chaos, does death cause order? There is a saying that death is the great equalizer. Yet disorder can be equalizing too.

Let me illustrate this by looking at the evolution of the universe. While being considered infinite, it is not without end. Astrophysicists talk about the heat death of the universe. Or, alternatively, the big crunch or the big rip. We actually have the choice from a multicolored assortment of theories, yet most of these scenarios will not happen before billions of years from now. Others however could happen anytime. If the universe so happened to not be in its lowest possible energetic state right now, not more than a supernova at the wrong place (like an unfortunately placed snail) is needed for everything to be shaken up.

While this might not be the end of the universe, it might be the end of us and every other life form.

Ultimately, the final end of the universe is entropy in its finest form, when all particles are distributed equally and far away from each other causing all movement to stop. Just like death. Other than former stages of the universe, its death is truly eternal.

We’ve arrived now at the end of history.

But don’t go to sleep yet. I’m not finished.

History is written after the Fact.

Like so many tales, my little bedtime story continues even after death.

Let us go back to the living.

As an archaeologist death is part of my job. If people die, I learn.

Because life reflects in death.

Medieval European stillborn babies, buried in the shadow of the church so the rain, sanctified by hitting the church roof, baptizes them eternally, tell us about human wishes and fears 500 years ago.

Burial mounds of the scythes in central Asia, crammed with gold objects (that now fill entire rooms in Russian museums) and also containing the world’s oldest Persian carpet, shed light on human longings and perception of social status in antiquity.

Dead bodies buried on Hart Island or floating in the Ganges river show us the corona virus is real.

When we find human remains, they do not only tell us about the particular life which ended on that very spot. They often also tell us about their time, their surroundings and allow us to peek into their universe.

The saddest Christmas

When we work with death, such as I do, most of us manage to distance ourselves from what we see. Mourning every dead baby below the edge of a church roof is not productive. Especially if you’re paid to remove them — archeologists are basically reverse undertakers.

When our loved ones are called away it is almost impossible not to get emotional in some way though.

As survivors, we experience death as living on with our gone one’s story lines no longer intertwined to ours, after their presence moves from the present to the past.

My grandpa had once told my mom that he didn’t want to die after my grandma, because he wouldn’t be able to live without her.

After he died, my grandma, discontent with living alone, moved to my aunt’s house, in a small town not far from where I live. In the Middle Ages this location was known for shortly reviving stillborn (probably the effect of some kind of prestidigitation) so they could be baptized and didn’t have to be buried under the church’s eaves.

Later, in 2018, my grandma was brought to the hospital.

My grandma had once told my mom that she would not mind if she, my grandma, just died that night. When we went to the hospital on that Christmas Eve, this was what we expected to happen.

There was no snow faintly falling through the universe as her soul swooned slowly. I remember holding my grandma’s hands while she lay motionless in her bed and I felt miserable. I was used to visit her at least every two weeks in her nursing home, where she moved to by her own wish a few years ago. Sometimes we didn’t really know what to talk about. Sometimes she told me about her childhood on a small farm during World War II.

“I went up the hill with my sister and we watched as the French city of Tours was burning”, she would tell me, relating a German Air Strike.

But when someone dies, the stories die with them.

Not all of them are of historical significance.

My grandma never forgave herself that when she was keeping my grand-grandma company in her last moments, her mother died while she went to the toilet.

This didn’t happen with my grandma. She was surrounded by her daughters when she went to the afterlife. I myself wasn’t there, I remember being at home and reading Cloud Atlas at that moment.

As a consequence, I never heard a story from her again. Her past and present died with her, and so did our shared future.

To this day, my grandma’s remains lie beneath three (artificial) monolithic stones on the cemetery of my native borough, which was initiated by the grave of a roman military official in the 4th century AD and has been used to bury people of all social backgrounds for 1700 years ever after. We can only guess how many different stories lie buried beneath.

And where all their spirits went, we do not know either.

Epilogue: When we die, our Stories come to Life.

There are many ways to deal with death.

One of them is to dream up an afterlife.

Heaven and hell. Nirvana. The underworld.

In human history there have been many attempts to explain death. To justify it. To make it not look like an end.

But assigning a meaning to death is as futile as trying to prevent it. We simply do not know what’s on the other side of Styx. We only know what happens on this side when we die.

It’s the stories that remain, be it as a tale you tell your children or a bedtime story for your medium followers. Be it as a headstone in the churchyard, or be it even as a small fragment of a bone found by archaeologists.

There are stories that tell of love, stories that tell of grief, of childhood or of happiness. Or maybe only of what they ate before they died.

The stories endure, even if they, not unlike the whole universe, end at some point.

And like that, my bedtime story ends.

Maybe we’ll wake up tomorrow to tell another one.