Dear Reader, I Saw My First Dead Body Today
I have to tell you something: your priorities are all wrong.
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My Grandad died this Thursday.
I know, I know. He was 90 years old and dying is what grandparents tend to do.
Except he was joking with me at home on Monday, and I was gently ushered in — by a nurse I must look about 16 to, reluctant to take me alone, asking if my uncle is my father, are you sure? — to see his dead body in Side Room 2 on Thursday.
72 hours.
My uncle held my hand and I felt his clench, involuntarily, around my own. Even experienced adults do not like to look at a dead body.
There is something uncanny about it — the bardo space between loved one and meat. Cooling, but not yet cold. I wanted to say, but that’s not him.
It took me a while to realise it wasn’t a paid poor imitation actor who was going to jump up.
I am not writing this piece to burden you with grief.
I just have to grab you by the shoulders and tell you this:
Everything you are so invested in is bullsh*t.
There is only a brief window, fresh from Death, we can see clearly enough to say this in. Still in the clothes I put on when he was alive.
Before I forget again, too.
Our Carousel Ride
Most religions state that life, Earth, is a fleeting illusion. At most, a temporary train stop we can learn from.
Religion
- Buddhism: Dukkha (suffering, incapable of satisfying, painful) is an innate characteristic of existence in samsara. (Source)
- Christianity: Dear friends, I urge you as aliens and temporary residents not to give in to the desires of your old nature, which keep warring against you. (1 Peter 2:11)
- Islam: Know that the life of the world is only play, and idle talk, and pageantry, and boasting among you, and rivalry in respect of wealth and children; […] the life of the world is but matter of illusion. (Al-Hadid Chapter 54 Verse 2)
- Hinduism: The soul is misled by matter, and subsequently entangled and entrapped. This tendency is termed maya (illusion). Under this sense of false-ego (false-identity) the soul aspires to control and enjoy matter. (Source)
Whether we believe this or eyeroll, the message is surprisingly clear and consistent.
Bear with me.
Even 100% secular and modern perspectives acknowledge the pervasive emptiness, the illusory hollowness, to most of life:
Culture
- “In this staunch little portrait, it’s hard not to see the human in the finch. Dignified, vulnerable. One prisoner looking at another.” — The Goldfinch (2013)
- “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate, so we can buy sh*t we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place.” — Fight Club (1999)
- “The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask you to pretend.” — The Age of Innocence (1993)
I say this not to be misanthropic or nihilistic, but actually, to introduce a very liberating and life-affirming idea.
Most of what stresses you is a game you are free not to play. In fact, a game it might do you a lot of good not to play.
Too often, we only notice in Side Room 2. This is another early, gentler reminder.
This is a temporary fairground ride. 🎠
We keep ourselves very busy — with money, with goals, with films and stress and laughter and good food — to avoid staring this fact smack in the face.
Life is fleeting, ridiculous, fragile, here and gone. I’ve just seen the body that said so.
So…Reader, why are we taking it so damn seriously?
Why are you wasting time like you’re not going to end up in Side Room 2?
The Hamster Wheel
I’m 22 years old. Not a guru with The Answer. Just winging it too.
All I know is this: we are a culture that is trapped in a materialist hamster wheel.
Every time I walk down a city street filled with McDonalds and homeless people and £4.99 for an hour of Wi-Fi and no water, no toilets, no trees, no kindness beyond a cold rush of scammers and advertisements, I think: what the hell is this?
Why are we doing this to eachother?
Why let fathers spend time with their newborn babies, install a water fountain or a free public toilet or let 40 hours a week be enough to feed everyone, know our neighbours, when we can…install advertising screens on the pavement, and make a minority of people obscene amounts of money working the majority of people to death instead.
As the TikTok kids say: for what?
As anyone who’s tried on the golden handcuffs can attest, there comes a point where money traps rather than liberates you. The hedonic treadmill is as real as tolerance to increasing dosage of an addictive drug.
If you chase material success, chemical joy, or public acclaim, you will continually crave more and stress about losing it and then you’ll die anyway. Yeehaw.
If capital is our God, that is all that’s going to be left as we each die alone in cost-efficient rooms.
An ideology that promotes perpetuating suffering as normal and good, the just world fallacy:
- If someone is in poverty or working a sh*t job, well, they deserve it.
- If someone is sick, they must be lazy.
- If someone is in the office, not seeing their ill mother or wife: wow, so brave, right choice, good on you Kevin!
We both know that’s not quite true. Certain beliefs let us live with ourselves.
Whatever our guiding compass should be — it is not this.
Why I’m Telling You This:
I’m glad I visited my Grandad on Monday.
Because the last time before then I saw him, I was working late on a business after a day of training. I turned up late and exhausted and irritable to his 90th birthday meal. Saw how silently sad he was about it.
I would have always — always — regretted that. I squirmed under his gaze even on the day.
But what a good capitalist I was being.
The truth is that most of us submit to money as ideology because we don’t have a choice.
Homes are expensive. Food is expensive. Rent goes up. Bills to pay, mouths to feed, commutes to drive, mortgages to meet.
We run on the hamster wheel, obediently, furiously, to survive. We rarely get the time to look up and breathe and cry, hold on, where are we going!
This isn’t a call to arms to say, right then, this sucks, let’s sack it all off and just watch Netflix and starve. Far from it.
A work ethic is important. Noble, even. It gives us meaning and purpose and connection with others for worthy goals greater than ourselves.
A work ethic is a power, a willpower. A desire to live.
You have a choice about where to use it.
Whoever you are, however practical and no-nonsense, once upon a time you were just a kid who wanted to do good. You dismiss your old self as naive, when the truth is, you were and remain inherently oriented to goodness.
As much as we can, I believe we must concentrate our brief lives upon our most natural and original desire: work that enriches the lives of other human beings. Work that eases suffering.
Work that lightens. Work that provides tools and maps and joys and first aid for our own and other people’s living.
Work that provides a small but vital oxygen pocket.
Creating new paths. Lending a hand. Holding down the last good fort we know.
Teaching eachother. Helping eachother. Feeding eachother. Making eachother laugh.
Reminding eachother we are known and cared for and going to be okay. Even in a palliative care ward or an office.
The Choice
Work doesn’t count as only a 9–5.
(If your 9–5 sucks, please remember: it ain’t over til Side Room 2.)
Work is also:
- Bringing your friend groceries when they are sick.
- Listening to your partner tell you about their stressful day, even though you’re stressed and tired too.
- Making a cup of tea for a visitor.
- Keeping your mind and body strong with therapy, gym, cooked meals, honesty, creativity, rest.
- Visiting your elderly parents or grandparents.
- Translating Polish to English for your mum who doesn’t understand.
- Tucking your son into bed and reading him a goodnight story.
- Taking a leap of faith.
- Not being a dick to your coworkers.
- Breaking a bad habit.
- My Uncle hugging me as he arrived even though he wanted to cry too.
Work is trying to be a decent person. Despite everything.
Work is tiring. Work will, more than occasionally, make you snap or cry. Work is hard. Work will make you crave your mum and a hug and a nap for 17 years.
You will mess up and not work well and forget things and insult someone you care for. You will buy stupid things for £9.99; you will worry about electric bills; you will promote the very shallowness you despise. You’ll want to yell about how unfair and exhausting and rigged it all is to the ceiling!
I do not dispute these things. I’m saying: this work is still worth it.
Work is a quest for honesty and compassion in a system that does not value the pursuit of either.
Work is the regret of the harm we inflict on others. Work is slowly learning from our mistakes. Work is a stubborn refusal to accept money as your God even when the whole world tells you how cool and awesome and honestly, totally, worthwhile that is, and hey that’s crazy you feel empty doing a slidedeck at 2am now lol, want a bourbon?
Work is the furious defence of love — not the “love” that attracts people to sleep with eachother, but the love that makes you stroke your partner’s hair even when they’re smelly or tired, the love that makes you smile at and thank a stranger, and the love that makes a family cry around their dead Grandad — as the only truth that matters.
I have no grandparents left now.
If I didn’t visit him recently, I would have been haunted by being late to his final birthday.
Instead: he told my Mum how glad he was I visited on Monday, how fast I talked, and that he didn’t like my coat (ha) just before the oxygen mask.
Joking on Monday. Two weeks and he’s out on Wednesday. Dead by Thursday.
We are not all stressed about mortgages and deadlines and nonsense forever. The speed and beauty fades, so much of it never mattered, poverty and pain and indignity are surmountable with good humour and collaborative grace, and even world wars are survivable.
We never truly accept that we are on a brief fairground ride, except mid-trying to recognise the body of someone we loved.
Most of it does not matter.
Love and good work do.
Whatever happens next Thursday, please, choose the work that matters this Monday.
