Our Life Story

I was reading my latest novel on the BART today, the classic Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton, when I realized that the majority of the books I've read lately deal with death. The capacity varies, but the matter is nearly always at hand. I tried to count how many books I have read since May graduation, and I can recall 18 specifically. Of those, 7 dealt with death. The two best also dealt with it most intimately, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safron Foer, and The Hours by Michael Cunningham.

In the last two months, 4 of 6 were about/dealt with death; Cry, Extremely Loud, You Shall Know Our Velocity, and Saving The World. And incidentally, I didn't finish the 2 that were not, Emma and The Screwtape Letters, before shelving them for later.

The next books I'll get to? One about the execution of the Rosenbergs and two about war in Africa.

There are 21 books on my "favorite books" list on Facebook. They are:

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (Suicide) *
Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (Angst, but no death)
Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell (War, including the death of at least 5 main characters) *
Les Miserables by Victory Hugo (War, including the death of at least 5 main characters) *
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey (Insanity, death) *
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (War, so it goes.) *
The Stranger by Albert Camus (Murder, execution, existentially)
Being Peace by Thich Naht Hanh (Wow. Peace. Not war! Not death!)
Lord of The Rings Trilogy (Epic battle between good and evil, some death involved)
The Color Purple by Alice Walker (About life and love)
Threads by Patsy Brookshire [You may know her as "Grandma or Patsy"](Some secrets and mild scandal, but no death) *
The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo by Peter Orner (Life after war in Namibia)
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran (Wisdom)
Mary Through the Centuries by Jeroslav Pelikan (History/Theology)
A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn (Oppression and xenophobia, of which death is a result)
The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff (Theology)
No Future Without Forgiveness by Desmond Tutu (About restorative justice after Apartheid, including crimes of murder)
The Courage To Be by Paul Tillich (Seeking Being in the face of non-being! Non-being just happens to be death)
The Hours (aforementioned) *
Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (Pizza and prayer, but no death)
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (aforementioned) *

So, 9 of 21 definitely about death or feature lots of it, and in 3 death is auxiliary. More than half. Of my 7 top (*), all have a certain morbidity, save my gramma's book (and of course she's up there! She's my gramma!)

This is not new either. I went through phases where I'd read three or four books on a subject: In fifth grade I was enthralled with the holocaust after reading The Diary of Anne Frank, I went through a Salem Witch Trials phase in seventh grade, and harbored a slight obsession with the death of the Romanovs my senior year of high school.

Perhaps I am over analyzing this trend. Maybe this sampling is proportionate to the number of books written on the subject. After all, death looms large in the human experience and psyche; obvious fodder for a storyteller. I did a little test. I search "death" in Amazon books and pulled up 523,946 titles. Love got 576,000. "Life" got a whopping 1,079,988. Though, these are just by title and I'm sure there must be overlap. (Maybe you can size up your favorites and tell me if I'm normal or macabre.)

I'm not sure how to explain this. I suppose I do enjoy a well-articulated exploration of death, dying, sickness, finitude, non-being. I don't think there is some latent depressed goth within, but an appreciation for our frailty and mortality as well as our capacities to live. How do we respond to the inevitable conclusion? This is a question driving every religion, and part of the reason I studied them. It is endlessly fascinating.

In our world, in our day to day lives, death is so present, and yet so distant. So at hand, so powerful, cruel, peaceful, astonishing, our relationship with it so bonded and yet estranged. There are so many precautions taken everyday to avoid death, and most we do not even think about, like band-aids and sidewalks. And while we may not ponder our fragile existence every time we open a first aid kit or look both ways before we cross, we are choosing not to die. It is that intricately woven into our lives, but it is unusual to focus on it. Maybe that's why I enjoy the focus, it is unusual but yet so obvious. When someone can capture our curiosity, grief, or surrender, it can be the most achingly beautiful of truths.

One such moment in literature is, of course, in The Hours. I must have read this passage over 5 times when I had finished the page. It still gives me goosebumps.

"We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep-it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.
Heaven only knows why we love it so."