About Death — Solid Maybe

“One death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic.” – Joseph Stalin

On January 20th, 2013, my brother Jesse died alone in his apartment. Through his adult life, he had struggled with alcoholism and addiction. It hadn’t crippled him, he held down a good job with some hiccups, even excelled at it thanks to his amazing intellect. He was the smartest person I ever knew, but maybe that’s just my younger brother admiration talking. In the end, it was simply a wrong concoction of pills that killed him. Or at least that is what we can glean from the little we know. So much to do with his death consists of unanswered questions. As he hadn’t been to work in days, two colleagues went to his apartment to check if he was okay. When he didn’t answer the door, they asked the neighbors if they knew if he kept a spare key. The neighbors mentioned there was a hiding place that Jesse would store the key in. They found it and opened the door only to be stopped by the door chain. The smell coming out of the apartment was so strong, that they already knew to call the police. They arrived and found my brother’s body in bed, already decomposing after having been there for 4-5 days. All of this was relayed to me when I called the police the next day. My father had called me that morning to say the police had knocked on my parents’ door earlier. As parts of my brother’s body were already in such bad condition, they had to treat the case with all options on the table, including homicide, though they assured me that this was just a formality and that it did not look like it was, nor did it look like a suicide. This meant, however, that we had to wait for the autopsy for a final confirmation before we could go see him or get into his place. This was the only thing on my mind, to be close to him or things that were associated with him. In the meantime, my father came to town and I met with friends and friends of my brother. My wife flew in from Brazil to be with me and help my family in this insane time.

After a few days, we were able to pick up his keys at the police station. Besides wanting to be somewhere where we could confirm this was all really happening (until then we had only had phone calls or visits from the police), we also needed to get his wallet with his ID and health insurance card, so that we could begin the bureaucracy that death entails. Walking up the stairs to his apartment my heart beat very hard and I couldn’t hear much except the blood coursing through my ears. I wanted to be strong and went ahead, but when opening the door we were all overwhelmed with the smell of death. As I turned the corner from one room to the next, I saw his bed where he had died. The unreal rainbow of colors on it was extremely disturbing. Dark reds mixed with violets and green, shades of blue, greys and large swaths of severe black. The black is what stuck in my mind. There were four of us and we all went into shock. I went out into the hallway to lean out the window and breathe in fresh air, anything but the rank, heavy smell that soaked every object in the apartment. My brother’s best friend soon joined me there. My wife began cleaning things away, while my father started searching for Jesse’s valuables. All of this was done at high speed, in a kind of hysterical focus. I felt ashamed for having left the apartment and went back in to face the task of collecting what needed to be collected and taking on the visceral traces of his death. We tore all the windows open and began trying to look through his things to find his wallet, or maybe a suicide note. By opening the windows, we caused a draft which meant that the doors kept violently slamming shut. We didn’t talk to each other, we shouted. When I look back, I can see how in shock we were and that we were all acting in extreme panic. It was a very manic situation. I tried breathing through my mouth so as not to smell the horrible stench, but then I could taste the air on my tongue. It was thick, metallic and sour. In my mind, I had the very clear thought that I was tasting death. Everything in the apartment, his clothes, the papers, felt heavy and damp, as if soaked in the extremeness of the situation. We finally found his wallet and there was no sign of a suicide note. After we left, we found the nearest café and each drank two whiskeys, one straight after the other, but I didn’t feel any difference except for a very slight calming of the nerves.

We ended up having to hire a company for crime scene cleanups to clean and disinfect his place. They had to cut out floorboards where fluids from his body had seeped through the mattress and dripped on the floor. They sealed the windows and fumigated his apartment for three straight days. I remember the men from the company asking my father whose apartment this had been and their faces when he told them that it was his son. Their condolences, like everyone’s in the weeks to come, were so earnest that it hurt because it made his death more real. They assured us that after they were done, the place would be the same as before. I was hopeful that it would be, as I wanted a shirt or something from my brother that carried his scent or something else that could remind me of him when he was alive. Just like all the other small hopes we had during that time, it was dashed and his apartment just smelt like the substance they used to disinfect it with. I have both of those smells locked in my memory, the decomposition and the disinfectant.

As with everything to do with his death, we had to wait even longer to finally say good-bye to him. All I wanted to do was see him one last time, but the day before we were supposed to see him, the woman from the funeral home called and suggested it would probably be better not to, as his face had already begun to blacken from the decomposition. As we walked towards the room where they were keeping him the smell reappeared and grew stronger and stronger. This time, my mother and younger brother, as well as some close friends were there. I felt bad for my mother and brother as they were unprepared for the smell. I had hoped it would somehow be taken care of and that the funeral home could have done something, but that is death – you can’t reverse any aspect of it. This time it was easier for me and I was even able to spend some time alone with the coffin that held my brother in it.

Since then, the different emotions and physical experiences come back up from time to time, though they have lessened significantly. In the immediate aftermath, they came on very strongly. I had retrieved his jacket from the apartment, but it was soaked in the smell of death and disinfectant. I couldn’t be near it without smelling both so I took it to the cleaners. When I explained that I needed to get a smell out (I didn’t go into detail), the lady put it up to her nose and then asked what I meant. I repeated it over and over and she kept saying she couldn’t smell anything. I tried it and I could. I only slowly realized that it didn’t smell that way and that it was just in my head. Similarly, once when I was returning home and walking up the stairs to my apartment, much the same way we had walked up to my brother’s, I began to smell the smell of decomposition. My heart started to race and I panicked a little. Later I asked my wife if she had smelled it too, but she said she hadn’t. Again, it dawned on me that I'd had an olfactory hallucination. I have friends who experienced abuse in their childhoods and the ensuing trauma, and they had told me about their panic attacks, the derealization and dissociative states. I had felt that I understood these accounts, and I myself have dealt with disorders and their consequences, yet it took this experience to open my eyes to this other, visceral spectrum of mental effects this type of pain can cause – one which I could not understand until I had personally experienced it.

Jesse’s death left so many questions, with so much unfinished business and things to be said, that it remains a truth that can I only accept slowly, in pieces, and something that I know my mind will never allow me to fully accept. One of my most immediate realizations though, one that I had while driving away from the funeral home and looking out the window at all the people going about their normal, daily business, was that every life is filled with so much sadness over the years and that every death is a tragedy in one way or another. I have had friends die, before and since, been close to death myself, I’ve struggled with other friends’ addictions and pain, but the completely visceral experience of my brother’s death changed me as a person and my outlook on life. Seeing, smelling and tasting death and knowing it was that of one of the most important people, allies and friends in my life, has made me reflect on, and balance, ideas and actions differently. It changed me as a person and how I approach other people. When I think of this singular, prolonged experience, and then imagine what kind of gruesome ordeals people have dealt with throughout history – all the long and brutal wars, the massacres throughout history, the people trapped in besieged cities, natural disasters, entire landscapes drenched in that horror – I realize why people who live through such appalling insanity always say “never again” or manically look for reasons to make sense of why such a thing should happen. Anyone who experiences death physically has traces left on them, those who experience it in excess have been to the other side.

When I was very small, an older German woman would look after me and other children during the day while our mothers taught at the school next door. At 13, she had been forced from her home when the Soviets were pushing through what is now Poland. She saw her father, a farmer, shot in the head and then began making her way away from the fighting. She would only manage to find a new home and settle down somewhere at age 18. On her way, she passed Dresden just days after the bombing. They were turning everyone away, saying that there was nothing left for anyone there. From miles away, she said, it already smelled like burning buildings and rotting bodies. A whole city drenched in that smell. I recently spoke to an older man over the course of a train ride who, eager to talk, recounted his family’s entire history from the last hundred years. He was a child at the end of the war, living some 50 miles from Dresden in what is now the Czech Republic. The day after the bombing, he said it looked as if it had snowed outside, the ground was blanketed in the burnt pages from books and ashes of the city that had been sucked up by the firestorm and rained down on their village. This happened all over Europe and Asia in that war and has happened all over the world, again and again throughout history. We see the pictures, but we don’t register the physics of it, the sensations, the smells, the corporeal perceptions that highlight an individual’s helplessness, the simultaneously unnatural and very natural sounds, and extreme emotions that stream through the body for months and years at a time. This is why it is worrisome that, currently, there are so many people who play lightly with ideas and movements that can easily lead to conflicts and situations where thousands or more could die. I feel, or feel that I know, that each one of those deaths entails the same spectrum of pain that I and my family felt, if not a whole other dimension of physical experiences and traumatic memories. History will be brutal with us if we do not manage to master this time of transition.

Civilian mass grave in a forest cemetery on the outskirts of Berlin. One of thousands around the world from that war (the bottom reads “as well as 7 unknown”).

If we take the time to look down through history, we see how it regularly erupts in violence and chaos and then very slowly returns to some kind of order. The causes are manifold, from simple power grabs, religious fervor to shifts in climatic conditions. From the first known “dark age” around 1182 BCE to the Mongol invasions and conquests, the Bubonic Plague, any and all Chinese civil wars, the Thirty Years’ War, the arrival of the Europeans and their microbial companions in the Americas, and so on – they have all meant the death of millions. The shock of these experiences, the very physical aspect of how death was experienced on a daily basis by all those who had to live through it (read any first-person account of the listed events above and they are guaranteed to be stomach-turning), ensures stability for a while. There is always a feeling of never wanting that scale of tragedy again. In our time, we have seen this sentiment carried on from the world wars, yet the average length of a human life seems to be decisive. Once enough times has passed so that people do not have a direct feeling or memory of war or subjugation, the next generations generally do not feel as disinclined to violent conflict or power politics at the cost of others as a means with which to achieve certain ends. This is happening now, but this is not a necessity – we can know the cost without having to pay it.

Do we really need to smell the smell of the concentration camps, of slave ships, of sacked ancient cities, of no man’s land in Flanders, of Tokyo after the firebombing, of every city destroyed by earthquakes, fires and floods? Do we really need to relive people having to get off roads near battlefields and war-torn towns because they have become too slippery from the fat of decomposing bodies? Do we need to experience our nerves run raw by listening to people scream incessantly for days and months on end, the squalor of refugee camps on Greek islands, or along the U.S. border, to understand the implications? Do we need to directly experience the oppressive atmosphere in Chinese internment camps, the empty, soulless lives along the Ukrainian front, of migrants lost in African deserts? The smells, sounds, and sensations of death, of loss, of powerlessness in the face of your dead or brutalized child, parent, partner, loved one – all of our modern institutions were built, at least in spirit, to avoid these experiences. Our cultures, religions, and daily lives are constructed as a firewall against the helplessness and certainty of loss that is an essential element of life.

Yet, in the past five years or more, we see leaders being ever more willing to let hundreds or thousands of people die or suffer for geopolitical standing (see Syria, Yemen, or the Ukraine), with each one of those deaths tearing a family apart. Millions have been forced to leave their homes. The conflicts, deaths and forced flight leave a trace on these people and their families for generations to come. These are seeds that will only bear fruit in 20 or 30 years. What will history see when it looks back at our actions in this time and what we initiated through our lack of oversight or understanding for what death really entails? Now, with the global society and population so large, the costs of large-scale human tragedies are immeasurable. History shows us that we are used to standing by while thousands or millions die, but the interconnected nature of our present world means that this isn't necessarily an option anymore, at least not morally. Pointing fingers does nothing, clinging to outdated ideologies exacerbates the problem. All one has to do is take a step back and soberly account for the fact that the leaders of all the most powerful nations are people who are more than willing to take mass suffering into account so as not to have to think about certain questions more than they want to, that they are more willing to inflict death on others than to deal with the nuisance of what their own cultural values actually call them to do (this applies across the political spectrum). No matter their reasoning, they willingly calculate the suffering of others to solidify their personal power. Like regents of old, ones we were taught were of the more despicable kind, suffering and death becomes an effect of their mood.

We don’t even need to grasp for great ideals, just a basic understanding of ourselves, to at least try and save more people from having to go through the horror of seeing and experiencing the death of loved ones in such cruel ways. A single death as a tragedy and a million deaths as a statistic definitely rings true when we look at how we react to geographically or historically distant conflicts. Yet it neglects the fact that each one of those statistics encompasses a universe of pain for the families and communities, affecting and changing them and, ultimately, their societies, ensuring that those changes will tumble down from generation to generation, laying the foundation for the identities and conflicts of the coming centuries. Even though we are bound to being human and there is currently no escape or cure, for that, we have enough history, accumulated knowledge and experience to avoid having to move through another civilizational suicidal impulse. We cannot be complacent when people play light with the deaths of others. Each death triggers an exponential avalanche of emotions and reactions from those affected by it, and there is no turning back from that and no bringing back what has been lost.