On Death

This post… Hoooooooo. I wrote this a few months ago, before I had actually started the blog. Since then, I have been uncertain about whether or not I actually want to post it. As if not posting it somehow made it less real, if that makes sense.

This is a peek into my brain. Fully in keeping with the utter honesty that I’ve promised.

And boy is this a weighty one.


I found out about the Order of the Good Death today. From what I can tell by their website, it’s a group of end-of-life professionals dedicated to bringing back the concept of “Memento Mori” as something to be embraced as natural and good rather than feared. To quote from their website, “The Order is about making death a part of your life. That means committing to staring down your death fears- whether it be your own death, the death of those you love, the pain of dying, the afterlife (or lack thereof), grief, corpses, bodily decomposition, or all of the above.  Accepting that death itself is natural, but the death anxiety and terror of modern culture are not.”

It hit me like a ton of bricks.

This is something that I’ve got to explain in depth, as it concerns major events in my life that helped define me as the person I am today. Brace yourself, dear reader, because we’re going in-depth with this, my own amateur analysis of my experiences.

The concept of death was introduced to me young. It is for a lot of people, and mine was one of the more classic introductions, the death of a pet. In this case, the cat had been with my family as long as I had been alive, and certainly as long as I could form cognizant thought. He died when I was still in elementary school, so “cognizant thought” may be pushing it, but I was fairly advanced for a child. I never really thought about death before that, even though I was already reading at a High School level and beyond, so I had certainly come across it before in literature, but had never really paid it much mind. It was a story element, one like any other, to be appreciated for what it lent the plot. My pet was no story element. He was a real, breathing creature whose existence I had taken for granted, and then he was gone. My parents had my brother and I write a short letter about our feelings to Roy to be buried with the body in a shoebox in the backyard. Seeing as I only really had literature as a way of experiencing death, I wrote a short fantasy piece to him in the letter rather than putting down the feelings I didn’t know how to express. My parents questioned why I didn’t write down my feelings, and I responded that “I thought it would make him laugh.” To this day, I am uncertain as to why I said that, or why I was anthropomorphizing him, but I’m certain that it speaks volumes to someone with the proper training in child psych.

The incident haunted me for years. It would not be unfair to say that it broke me for a while. Not a great thing to happen to a kid, certainly. I became obsessed with the concept of death, it invading my every thought. I started watching much more TV because the bright colors and wacky audio deadened my brain to the panic I was feeling. However, nothing is so easy to remember as something you are trying to forget, and it came rushing back often, breaking what little stability I had regained. I grew up in the specter of 9/11, and this misunderstood panic that gripped me was only multiplied by that. My elementary school was under 20 miles from an airport, and every plane that passed overhead would trigger a new panic attack. Actually flying in planes was a fear that took me years to overcome. Since my stability of mind was seriously eroded, I even ran out of a spelling test in tears because I had written it in cursive and the teacher requested it printed. I kept myself together by constantly repeating to myself on the lonely walks in between home and school or a friend’s house that I wasn’t going to die, that they would find an immortality drug or something of the sort, that it was all fiction. I went through the usual stages of existential crisis, entertaining the thought that I was the only person and everyone else in the world were simply there to define my reality, questioning everyone about what happens after death, momentarily coming to terms with my own mortality only to panic again when I realized that all of my loved ones were also mortal and had less time left than I, etc. etc.

In other words, highly standard and healthy thoughts for an elementary schooler to grapple with. As I am writing that last sentence, I am honestly unsure how sarcastic it is meant to be. Again, I’m not trained in psychology, so I don’t know. It felt too early for me at the time, but I’m uncertain there is ever a good age for it.

What brought me out of the funk was a good friend of mine, whose company I often sought as a distraction. In my usual desperate manner, I asked him if he believed in reincarnation. He gave it only half a second’s thought before replying “I dunno, but I think I’d like to come back as a horse.” Those words have stuck with me all these years. I won’t say I got better instantly, but it certainly helped. It wasn’t even the words themselves, it was how utterly unconcerned my friend was about the thing that had been quietly destroying my life for a few years. I haven’t talked to this person in years, but as a kid he seemed to be one of the most down-to-earth individuals I had ever met, and his lack of concern told me at that age that it wasn’t something worth worrying about.

Death popped up a few more times in my life in prominent roles. When I was solidly in my depression, I asked my parents to get me someone to talk about it. Full of the 90’s mentality that talking to a “shrink” was weakness and insanity, I asked not to see a therapist. Instead, against my better judgement, I went to my mom’s parents’ priest. I hadn’t really thought of religion as important at this point, since I had read bible stories and judged them to be boring, terribly written literature. Mass with my mom’s family and holiday rituals with my dad’s family were just that in my mind, family rituals, unconnected to anything but ancestral history. Christianity, on the other hand, was a pushy moral code and myths that most people got huffy about if you called them mythology. So I was understandably concerned about going to said priest. However, he didn’t try to convert me or anything, and instead just read to me from a children’s book called “Freddy the Leaf,” in which a leaf on a tree watches his loved leaves die off before accepting the inevitability of his own demise and perishing.

Needless to say, since I was already a wreck, this didn’t do wonders for me at the time. Part of it was that I was almost begging him to lie to me, to say that death was made up, an elaborate and inconsiderate prank. Part of it was that, although he left religion out of it, he talked to me like a child of my age, while my parents had raised me, for better or worse (better I like to think), talking to me as though I was an adult. In any case, a ton of crying took place, and I left the meeting deathly quiet, a quiet that persisted internally for a few days/weeks/months. The timeline is a little uncertain for me, since that isn’t really a mental space I like to revisit. I was convinced that either he had lied to me in that condescending tone, and death was a myth, or death was real and therefor there was no point in living. That was the only time in my life that I had seriously considered suicide, but I didn’t consider it for very long.

Another event was the death of my great-grandmother in my early high school career. She had been a little over/under 100 (and had lied about her age for several birthdays, so I can’t say off the top of my head), and had asked us to come down so that she could see us before she died. I had many legitimate reason that I gave for not making the trip, but the core of it was that I was terrified. She had been old for as long as I had known her, and had all the troubles that came with that, restricted movements and fragile bones and the like. The casual racism held over from outdated morals I can only speak to second-hand, since she didn’t really mention such things when I was visiting. She even teleconferenced in to one of her birthday parties because she was in the hospital. But when she was actually dying of old age… That was something that I couldn’t face. I said that I wanted my memories of her to remain of her joy for life and the like, which was true, but I also wasn’t prepared to face a relative wasting away before my eyes.

At her funeral, I made some small speech about how in performing in “Fiddler on the Roof,” I had come to recognize some more aspects of my Jewish heritage that I hadn’t really thought about before, and with that realization, I offered a slightly tear-choked “L’chaim.” I said “L’chaim” because the Nana Betty that I had known was a person that probably only I remember, an incomplete figure full of life, always eager to take us out to eat, or play cards, or give bright-red staining kisses as a way of saying hello and goodbye. “To life,” because I wanted to remember a living woman, one whom I had only ever seen with the eyes of a child, but who had always been vibrant and alive, even when confined to bed-rest.

A few more times during high school I again returned to that state of deadened depression. One of my friends in the theater died of Muscular Dystrophy, and I mourned him silently. Then, the school faked several students’ deaths for a day, complete with watching a wrecked car being pulled away from school grounds as a med-evac helicopter flew off, culminating in an all-school assembly on the subject of drunk driving which was set up as a wake for the “dead” students. Afterward, we returned to our classes and talked about how the assembly made us feel.

I still find it hard to put into words how that whole setup made me feel. During the mocked crash, I was snarky and sarcastic, wondering how much the cost of the fuel for the helicopter was costing, and saying that the campaign was pointless, that those who weren’t going to drive drunk didn’t need this and that it wasn’t going to make anyone stupid enough to drive drunk reconsider. During the assembly, I was mad enough that, should I have felt so inclined, I would have made a solid effort at literally spitting venom. I was a theater student and reading at a post-collegiate level, but even those qualifiers weren’t necessary to see what was going on. This was theater, and bad theater at that, pulling no punches on melodrama and manipulative heart-wrenches. I was pissed that they could so devalue death as to use it as a cheap scare-em’-straight tactic (I also grew up with DARE. I might have the slightest bit of misanthropy directed specifically at those who attempt scare-em’-straight campaigns.). Once we were back in class, I was both deeply sad and resentful, and upon being called upon to express how I felt, I spitefully commented on my displeasure that the whole school was called out to mourn these fake deaths, but the passing of our friend went without notice. Several of my friends and my teacher were quick to assure me how inappropriate that would have been, and they were right of course, but reason means nothing in the face of childish rage and sorrow.

The thing is, at this point it wasn’t so much death that scared me as it was concept of the cessation of being, of “Oblivion” if you’ll forgive my getting poetic. Death was simply an event to my mind, one like any other, but the nothingness to come… That still terrifies me. I’ve never bought into the concept of death as being at peace, because I don’t see life as inherently strife-filled. I’ve had good days and bad, but I’ve felt on all of them. I, the creature that I am, experienced things. The death of self is what I fear more than the death of flesh, because I am addicted to sensation. I feel, therefore I know I am alive. I want to keep feeling. Who wants to live forever? I certainly wouldn’t mind.

I’m a more educated person than I was when these fears first came upon me. I have lived enough as a thinking human being with a developed mind that I’ve begun to think in certain patterns. For example, I’m an existentialist. I don’t believe in any inherent meaning to the universe, but rather than despair in that fact, I say that it gives me the ultimate power of determining the importance of aspects of my life however I choose to determine them. I define meaning where there is none. What some people call pointless things, I exalt in as the most important things I could be doing. And, since I am always changing, always learning, I can alter that perceived importance at will. Along with this, I have accepted the fact that there exists no strong evidence for existence after death, and that the Oblivion I so fear is the likely outcome of death. I’ve more or less come to terms with it, though I do on occasion have a small relapse where I sit up in bed, swearing softly and unable to sleep for fear of the little death not releasing me this time, that I am closing my eyes and won’t awaken.

And then I come across this Order of the Good Death. The title of the organization grabs me immediately, for it is theatrical and fantastic, evoking vague mysticism and Victorian themes. It sounds like something out of a game or fantasy novel, and I love it. Reading their philosophy brings me joy, because these people are trying to help other people with the very thing that emotionally crippled me for years. Heck, even though I was too young for them to help, I wish that people like them had been around when I was in the depths of my crises.

I want to say that I espouse their philosophy personally, that death is not to be feared. I really do, and to be perfectly honest, I can say that with far more sincerity than I could in previous years of my life, but I’m not there yet.

I am, however, getting there. I have improved by leaps and bounds, and have risen far above my starting point. Memento Mori? I can’t forget it. But no longer does it dominate my thoughts, nor deaden my emotions. I can write about it, I can talk about it, and most importantly, I can live my life despite it. So what if it must come, if life must end? I say L’chaim, and with that I send the air that I breathe rolling out into the greater world. I too must one day rejoin the greater world, my atoms disconnecting only to reconfigure in a new and glorious form. And as for Me? Well, I suppose I’ll just have to wait and see. I’m still in favor of eternal life though, just on the offhand chance the transhumanist sciences pull through for us. But if they don’t, then, well…



Live Theatre and Transience

I am a theatre person.

This can mean many things of course, but for me, it is a summation. I am a Master Electrician/Lighting Designer for live theater by trade. I have acted in the past, and still use the skills that I developed in my everyday life. I like to talk and write about theater. A review/discussion of theatre that I wrote was featured in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s “On the Bricks” e-newsletter (The essay can be found here, on my mom’s blog. Wait, did I just cheat myself out of an easy update? Dang).

I enjoy attending live theatre.

Live theatre is something that doesn’t easily let go once it gets its hooks in you. It is something that is not easily defined or explained, because so much of what one takes from it is defined by the viewer’s own experiences. It is a reflective medium, where two people can draw completely different themes from a show depending on what they see of their own lives in the production, and the culture the play is being produced in. At the same time, it is a show, where a plot is laid out with all possible theatricality for the pleasure of the audience. In some cases, it is a medium of dissidence, of questioning authority. It can be aggressive, pushing the boundaries of what some consider acceptable in their entertainment, forcing the audience to feel, as I like to call it, “artistically uncomfortable.” Theatre’s faces are as many and varied as the faces of humanity.

All of these things can be accomplished in other mediums, to be sure, but to my mind, seeing something live is like falling into a different reality (Which is not to say that you can’t do so with other mediums. I am a voracious reader. I love cinema. I am writing about theatre. Let me be flowery, dangit!). It is a shared reality, in which you are intimately connected with the other members of the audience as well as with the performers.

It is something you will never quite capture again.

That transience, the fact that the moment a performance closes, no other performance will be exactly like it, is what so many people like about live events, theater especially. Hoo boy, do I feel it too. Unfortunately, it can also be one of the most frustrating things about it.

Example: I have had Willkommen, the opening number from Cabaret, stuck in my head all day. I missed the memo on seeing a lot of classic plays or their cinema counterparts, and Cabaret was no different. When I think Cabaret, I am transported to the tiny Oregon Cabaret Theater, an intimate dinner theatre sort of venue, where I was first exposed to the production (One thing you quickly learn in college: Never turn down a free meal or a free show.).

Cabaret 2015 – Sierra Wells, Layli Kayhani, Galloway Stevens, Leah Kolb, Kerry Lambert (photo: Tom Lavine)

Galloway Stevens’ rendition of the song twisted its way into my mind the first night I saw it, and has taken up residence. I think Cabaret, I think this production. Some days, when I have such a piece stuck in my head, I will jump on the internet and look for videos of the play in question, trying to recapture the magic.

It never works.

Cabaret is a show with history. It is a show designed to make the audience “artistically uncomfortable,” and succeeds in doing so quite handily. It has been on Broadway twice, as well as having a movie, all of which are quite popular. In a talk-back my senior class had with many of the cast of this show, Galloway mentioned how the character of the MC had too much history for his rendition to be entirely his own.

When I look back at recordings of the other productions, I see influences, sure. But I only saw one production live. I watch these famous, critically acclaimed productions, and from the first verses of the opening number my brain is screaming that it’s wrong, it’s ever so slightly off.

There is nothing wrong with these famous productions. The actors are quite skilled, and their interpretation of the character is as valid as any other. That being said, the only version I have seen live has established itself as THE interpretation, and my higher brain functions are overruled if I try to think about comparing the performances critically.

It is an involuntary response created by the connection I felt to the live performance, one that is simultaneously magical and infuriating. I can’t recapture the magic of the moment no matter how I try, but the moment is still with me. I love the fact that I was there to experience it, and can distinctly recall everything I loved about the production.

At the end of the day, there will never be another production quite like it. Better, worse, but never the same.

Transience is the word that most use to describe it. Something is beautiful because it is fleeting. Personally, I do not accept that particular thought. To be certain, the experience I had was both beautiful and fleeting, but I reject a causation between the two.

There will never be a performance exactly like the one I saw. I treasure the memory I have of it, and in keeping the memory, I give that performance eternal life. I can’t recapture the magic of seeing it live, as much as I try, but the echoes of that feeling carry on.

My mind is full of these experiences that I refuse to let fade. A hall of glory, part museum, part mausoleum, and constantly in search of new additions to the collection.

As I think about it, at least some of the experience draws from the fact that no art exists in a vacuum. Just as Galloway could not help but judge his performance against the MC’s that came before, I could not help but judge them against the MC I saw first.

<tangent> There is a peculiar trend among theatre-goers that I have talked to in which they recommend looking up a show before seeing it. That way, if one sees a show they do not like, they have no one but themselves to blame. I, on the other hand, quite enjoy seeing theatre with no preconceived notions. There is something about the unprotected experience that draws me in like a moth to the flame. Sure, it’s an easy way to get burned, but one has to accept some risk to get the raw, unadulterated emotion that I love so much. Heck, half of this post has been about seeing Cabaret with no prior knowledge of it. It was seriously one of the most enrapturing theatre experiences of my life thus far.</tangent>

I will now gush.

The Oregon Cabaret Theater is a minuscule space, made even more so by the fact that it is in Ashland and as such is being compared against the OSF. For the purposes of Cabaret, the size is a strength rather than a weakness. The performers wove in and out of the audience in the pre-show, and rather than it being a disruption of the audience-stage barrier, the barrier never existed in the first place. The space is designed for dinner theater, and as such the tables and seating had been modified to seem an extension of the set, complete with phones which the performers could use to call and talk to the patrons. From the moment you walked in, you were in the world of the play, the velvet-and-sequins nightlife world of the Berlin That Was.

The lack of barrier meant that the hardest hitting moments of the performance were never more than a few feet from you at most, the joy, desperation, and fear of the characters was in your face. You could not turn away, and your only recourse should you be overcome was to do as the play’s lines suggested and walk out. No one did, of course. The show deliberately invoked the train wreck effect, masterfully crafting an unsettling scene that the audience could not look away from. Nor did anyone want to.

One of the most fabulous things about the show was revealed in the talk-back, in which the cast discussed the fact that the Cabaret Theater normally did light, fun shows, the sort of thing people expect in their dinner theater spaces. The fact that Cabaret was so subversive in its very production only made it all the more wonderful. For a lot of people I talked to afterwards, the surprising and powerful show really put the Cabaret Theater on the map for Ashland tourists. Their serious show had the effect of making people take them seriously. I love it.

Ok, enough gushing now. I have ranted long and hard about this, as I tend to do with my passions. Time to release it into the wilds.


Addiction Culture: Coffee, Nicotine, Alcohol, and other social drugs.

My thoughts for the week are directed towards the way that U.S. culture embraces the idea of addiction as a method of either coping with life or simply living productively.

When I was in High School, I struck upon the idea of running a survey at the national level looking for correlation between drinking coffee and cigarette use. I personally have neither the time, money, nor education required to run a scientific survey of the sort, but I would be very interested in seeing the results.

The core mentality that I am putting under the microscope here is analyzing what the people of the U.S. consider as “healthy” addictions. For example, coffee. Caffeine is the simplest and most wide-spread addiction of our time, and it follows a classic drug-use formula. Consumption followed by result, leading to a fall and crash that can be staved off with additional consumption. It creates such a chemical dependence in users that I have it on word-of-mouth from friends in the medical industry that many hospitals use some amount of caffeine in nutrient drips.

Mull that over for a bit. A substance that creates a chemical dependence in users is so commonly used that medical professionals work under the assumption that a person passing through their place of work will be dependent on said substance for baseline functionality.

As a drug, caffeine may not have as dramatic effects as, say, cocaine, but it is an addictive drug nonetheless. The withdrawal symptoms are an accepted excuse for antisocial behavior, especially in the mornings. Corporations provide this drug to their workforce free of charge in break rooms, because use is expected to maintain productivity. It is a commodity that advertises itself, and accessibility is what allows businesses like Starbucks to prosper.

So, what about cigarettes? Time was, and not too long ago either, that cigarettes were the social norm. Though vast campaigns now exist to eliminate their usage, limit their advertising, and restrict their accessibility, the remnants of that social norm are why there are still designated smoking areas, why smoke breaks are still provided. Once again, we see the addictive drug cycle as well; Use, Result, Fall, Withdrawal. Add in all sorts of “fun” cancer in the mix, and there you have it.

Where does alcohol fall into the mix (heh)? Alcohol is “the social lubricant,” the substance that enables social interaction by dropping barriers, and going out for drinks after a long day of work is considered to be a ritual by which coworkers get to know one another. Meeting a potential romantic interest over drinks is classic, or a business partner. Alcohol addiction is rarer, perhaps, than caffeine or nicotine addiction, but it is separate from the others in and of the fact that it is not considered as socially acceptable. Yet, even being less acceptable, it is still accepted as a part of someone’s identity should it not affect their public persona. Hence the “High-functioning Alcoholic.” To be clear, it is still not a “good” thing for a person to be, but the general public (i.e. coworkers, bosses, casual friends, etc.) will generally not attempt to intervene unless the effects spill into the person’s public life.

So, three common drugs that are intrinsically linked with modern society. Three different acceptance scales in reference to said drugs. Yet all are based on the same pattern of addiction. This pattern is one that is encouraged, especially as a respite from a working culture, by society as a whole. The actual addictions are not publicly supported, but the pattern itself?

Take a job. Any job. The worker is expected to show up at times that mean waking up far before the worker would prefer to. The worker is expected to be awake and productive from the moment they enter their place of work, so they take stimulants. They continue taking these stimulants throughout the day, increasing their intake as the effects start to fade due to overuse. The jitters caused as a side effect are stressful, and just increase the stress of work while being tired. To take the edge off, the worker takes a break with a calming inhalant. Sure, the inhalant irritates the lungs and creates a noxious odor, but the calming agent is worth it to get through the day. Of course, breaks run out eventually, and as the calming agent leaves the system, the worker becomes irritable. The jitters don’t leave, the stimulant has stopped helping, and work becomes more and more stressful. Finally, the day ends, and the coworkers want to go out in order to decompress. The worker feels compelled to join them, as it would be rude to refuse, but with the accumulated stresses of the day and the brain chemistry that has been repeatedly chemically altered throughout said day, the worker doesn’t want to think. So, they take a substance that numbs reason, and does so socially.

The worker is productive, and the management that never sees the worker grants them employee of the month.

This is the issue I have with the pattern at the core. Rather than address issues that cause stresses, such as the workday described above, society instead pushes a pattern of substance use that temporarily treats the symptoms of the issues. However, the stimulants and depressants do not stop demanding their use when the work week is done. The pattern, once set, is difficult to break, on a chemical level as well as a behavioral one.

So, patterns of addiction are encouraged in order to maintain an expected level of productivity, though the addictions in question are vilified. The less extreme withdrawal effects, the less the addiction is vilified. They all are, in their own ways, expected addictions. Anyone dealing with life without one or more of them is considered the outsider to the norm.

Soooooooooooooooooooo, why?

Why is it that we can’t as a society push for healthier living habits rather than forcing ourselves and our fellow workers towards unhealthy habits as coping mechanisms?

The only answer that I can come to is money. We have a system set up that is in dire need of repair itself in which a person has to take up unhealthy habits just to be able to feed, clothe, and house themselves.

Where we start fixing that is beyond me. But consider the case of the experiment involving the mouse and the heroin-water. A mouse that is alone would drink the heroin laced water frequently and quickly perish. The mice that were placed in a community of other mice, given creature comforts, and were generally comfortable/happy, avoided the drugged water entirely.

Addiction cycles are based on systems that keep people unhappy and uncomfortable. In order to solve the cycle, introduce a better system. Build community, remove worry, and support one another.

If anyone wants a place to start building a happier community, let me know. I have been working towards the happiness of others for years. I have watched addiction cycles form and break. I want people to be happy, for themselves as well as for me.

I hope that people want me to be happy as well.