Losing It
Death extends beyond human bodies to almost everything. Can we accept it by degrees?
Words by Michael Wilmarth
‘O look, look in the mirror/ look on your distress;/ life remains a blessing/although you cannot bless’
— W. H. AUDEN
I think a lot about dying. I have for a long time. It must have begun with my first panic attacks, which do a tremendous job convincing me each time that I am at the end of my rope. But even before I was a teenager with a diagnosis, I remember sensing deep wells of emptiness in the night sky and in the beige hallways of the hospital; it was death, before I knew the word.
Karl Ove Knaugaard, in book one of his seven volume series, begins with a long reflection on death. Why do we go to such lengths to hide our dead? he asks. “It cannot be death itself, for its presence in society is much too prominent,” Knausgaard says, referring to countless TV shows and the news cycle, which are conveyor belts of lifeless bodies in the abstract and the slightly less abstract. The metaphor trails off with more questions than answers.
People sometimes describe breakups as ‘mini-deaths,’ not because anyone has ceased to live, but because a relationship you knew no longer exists. What is a relationship if not a shared life? By that measure, one of epochs and abstracts, death extends beyond human bodies to almost everything. The moment when you read the previous sentence has just died, for instance. My hairline is receding, which is to say that my old hair follicles are dying—the way I used to look, dead.
When I saw the first unflattering photograph of my hairline, I promised myself I would not go out of my way to restore it. I have a vast body of experience to remind me that holding on to something after it's lost is a surefire way to feel worse. I would let my hair go. When I told this to my good friend, an engineer, he was beside himself. “But we have the technology!”
It is true that I do other things for my body to counteract age and impending disease. I am a gym rat, perhaps the worst kind, wearing sleeveless shirts and admiring myself in the expansive mirrors. I grunt when I move weights, and I walk with a cadet’s posture to accentuate my form. I do not miss a day for fear that I will lose definition—that I will lose beauty.
Ram Dass, the renegade Harvard professor turned holy man, talked frequently about the entrapments of Western culture; we worship youth and beauty, for example, which will inevitably fade. Ram Dass would often refer to a skin cream ad which declared, “They call them aging spots, I call them ugly.” For him, this represented the opposite direction in which our thinking needed to go. “You realize what we’re doing is making nature our enemy?” he said during a lecture in the 60s. That question struck me. Nature is birth, life, and death – each step is undeniably part of the process. Our goal, Ram Dass said, was to be able to turn that phrase around: They call them ugly, we might say, I call them aging spots.
Sally Mann’s “Body Farm” was first shown to me in an introductory photography class in college. The class came close to falling apart, some students were angry. I tried to look unphased, which I guess was a tough-guy response. Something in me, however, was shifting unpleasantly. The intimate portraiture, first seen in her famous work with her children, was turned on human corpses in a wooded area on the University of Tennessee campus that were being used for forensic studies. Bodies were strewn about, peeling like soft, old fruit. I decided to look back recently to see if her work would have the same affect on me years later. I pulled it up on my phone, and it was as if a large dormant mass inside of me had begun to rattle. Nature, it seems, remains my enemy.
Listening to people like Ram Dass reminds me of a time in my youth when I got to put on a fireman’s gear at a community event. With the helmet, hood, pants, gloves, boots, and an air tank, I was wearing about 45 pounds. I took a couple of labored steps before I thought I might fall over. Then, as a punchline, they handed me an axe and an enormous radio that put the load over 75 pounds. I was only good for being photographed (which I hated) and laughed at (which I loved) until I crumpled beneath the weight.
Applying profoundly relevant pieces of Eastern philosophy can feel the same way; the dissolution of ego is like full-firefighting gear, and spiritually, I’m still a feeble child. I’m paralyzed under the weight of a twenty-minute meditation. I crumple beneath the thought of dying. Gandhi said, “Whatever you do in life might seem insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.” So, I’ll put just the gloves on, and maybe the helmet too, if I can. I will try to resist Hims and Keeps and the mercurial trends in clothing and tech. And when I am old and have aging spots of my own, we’ll see what I call them.
