The Invention of death

amy olberding

The dead leave behind a world transformed because they are not in it, but they also leave behind the world as they designed it. I realized this the first time I was alone in my grandparents’ house after their deaths. They were gone, but the clock that marked their hours persisted.  

Theirs was a grandfather clock in the old style, full of chains and weights, forceful in announcing itself. Grandpa bought the clock second-hand as a gift for Grandma and it was a noisy extravagance. It is a clock you cannot be near on the hour, at least if you want conversation uninterrupted. As a child, I remarked the clock most on Christmas mornings, as it tolled the hours we waited for my grandfather to finish the morning milking and thus the real commencement of Christmas. The milking could not wait, so I would, counting the chimes with restless impatience.  

To hear that clock chiming in a house emptied by death was not just loud, but shattering. I thought at once of Christmas and milking and the scent of turkey roasting, all gone. So too, I thought: How could I not have known? How did I fail to anticipate on those Christmas mornings that we would not always go on just so, that the chimes I heard as hastening toward the finish of milking would someday stubbornly chime on, insensate to the end of all milking?   

Philip Roth uses the phrase “the invention of death” to describe how death registers when it begins to come for one’s own. We live of course with the tedious and unexceptional fact that all people die, but death can be radically novel, some miserably new event loosed upon the world, when it steals those whom one has, unaccountably, assumed would just go on. We mostly just take the world as we are given it and expect it to persist. But it does not persist and loss is not simple subtraction, but some far more complex calculus that transforms the known world itself. These thoughts are obscure, efforts to reach for understanding in experiences visceral and raw.  

The basic form of the trouble is just the way that a clock once my companion in joyfully awaiting Christmas is transformed by death into a mournful instrument sounding a dirge into a hollow, empty house. And, since death was always there and was not just now invented, one wonders if the dirge was also always there, a sostenuto under all the rest. It was in the first chime after Grandma opened the enormous clock my grandfather had laboriously wrapped in gift paper. It was there as cow after cow was milked, less for the milk itself than to get finished and start Christmas. These are my mournful thoughts.

Death is not just invented upon loss; it invents. Because of how it transfers ownership of worlds, death renders the ordinary strange and changes it into challenge. Death transforms a familiar old clock into a choice: Do we keep it? Do we keep it going? The material world another made is abruptly made one’s own – to maintain, to undo, to reorganize, to break into parts and distribute. The dead leave us with their things to sort and order, even as death reorganizes what their things might mean. Some of what the dead leave will seem changed by sentiment into charmed objects, symbolic totems of affection without its proper object. Some things will seem burdens to bear, impossible to discard but impossible also to keep. Some things will just be enigmatic, objects that one did not know existed until the intrusion of death compels the living to intrude into the closets, drawers, and boxes of the dead. Most basically, how do we understand the stuff of lives that have no more use for stuff?

Lately I have noticed popular articles on “Swedish death cleaning,” a practice in which the not-yet-dead do much of the labor their deaths would otherwise create. Anticipating one’s approaching end, one casts a critical eye upon one’s material world and seeks to thin it, to disperse one’s stuff ahead of dying: You reorganize the world so someone else won’t have to. The logic of this, and the struggles of the bereaved it seeks to avoid, is captured in an article with a title announcing the hard truth: “Sorry, Nobody Wants Your Parents’ Stuff.”

To be sure, it is a regrettable truth that many now have far too much stuff. Worse still, much of our abundant stuff is not particularly special, but rather mass-produced and cheaply made – things acquired not with care or deep delight, but because they were on sale at Target. Death surely does transform such items too, but they are more likely to be cynically seen: What, after all, was the point of seeking, buying, and keeping this when we are mortal? If our homes are filled with impersonal and disposable detritus, then I suppose Swedish death cleaning is an idea as good as any other. But I count myself relieved that my grandparents did no “death cleaning” and instead just died, leaving their world for others to undo. My grief needed the work and whatever understanding work might bring.

Philosophers have always tried to help with understanding, have long carried on about just what death is. Indeed, philosophy offers its own variation on “death cleaning,” conceptually excising the mental detritus that might inspire irrational fear in we mortals. The most prevalent forms of philosophical death cleaning instruct us that death is nothing. Death will, literally, be the end of me, and so what remains are the questions that attach to such a conclusion: What kind of nothing is it – the kind of nothing that ought to bother me while I still live, or the kind of nothing that ought not? If most of the philosophy books about death published lately are witness, there is a lot to say here. I find none of it to purpose.  

One reason death can seem freshly invented in loss is because the death we find in our philosophies is not the one we find in life. The death cleaning our philosophies have yet to do concerns loss – those deaths we must in fact endure and live through. This death is emphatically not nothing, but a novel, awful something – worse still, something we are obliged to do. Bereavement inaugurates problems one cannot navigate with thought alone, for the “detritus” is not mental, or not merely so. There is instead a material world at hand and one must find a way to travel it. 

Taking apart the world another built illuminates the disquieting frailty of all we build and do. This is useful to see, but it is also a lesson readily found in less laborious ways – the entire world stands ready to deliver the message of transience if we but pay attention. The understanding that interests me is more particular than this. It resides in the strange new intimacy of death’s fresh invented world, the way we understand more of what we have lost, even as it’s lost, because of what it leaves behind.

When I cleaned out the trunk in my grandparents’ bedroom, I found the usual stuff of trunks, old quilts and blankets, but among them there was more. There was an embroidered handkerchief, with “To My Wife, with love from Lynn” worked in tidy chainstitch, its border sewn to note the work was done near Hope, Arkansas, on military maneuvers in 1941. Before my grandfather’s hands grew gnarled from milking, he stitched a neat hand. In hours his army buddies used in playing cards, he worked affection for his new wife Ruby in tan thread. He was never one for cards, but he was always one for Ruby – he told me late in life that once he met her, “it was all over for me.” The handkerchief betokened the beginning of his end, the start of “over.” I wish I’d seen them then.

The trunk contained his army uniforms too, both rough and dress, each folded carefully and untouched for years. However carefully he’d packed them, though, in his dress uniform pocket he’d left behind an antiquated packet of Juicy Fruit gum. My grandfather must have bought his Juicy Fruit as a young man on some occasion that called for his dress uniform. Perhaps he bought it to freshen his breath. The military did much for his breath. When he joined, his allotted equipment included a toothbrush, the first he ever owned. So too, the army did much for his finances so he could spare the change to buy some gum. All this I could suss out, but what I could not sort was why he didn’t finish it. He had a lifelong thrift born of poverty. He was never one to buy what he would not use, never one to buy what he would then forget. That gum wanted a story to go with it, or at least I wanted a story to go with it, some explanation for why it was bought and then why it was never finished.  

The handkerchief made sense, the gum did not, except as the modest marker of all I now will never know. I’ve never much liked Juicy Fruit, but still I wished to try it. Grief is like that – sometimes provoking temptations ridiculous and strange just to have something, anything really, to dilute the intensities of loss. Or perhaps it is that since the world itself has gone strange, one just wants to be strange in it – conceiving a desire to chew gum older than one’s mother because it’s just not clear what else one can want in the new conditions. I ultimately did not try that gum, though I lingered over the wanting long and hard. In the fancies of sorrow, I decided it was portent and concluded that I ought not chew a portent. 

Grief’s temptations are many, but in that gum I found the one I like the least: the way the living can consider the dead in some completeness. In their deaths, my grandparents’ lives achieved a finished totality, like stories that had run their course and thus like stories I could tell. Their lives began, persisted for a bit, then ended, and I can make of this a sense and order. We the living can be the biographers of our dead, organizing in memory just who they were and who they were to us. This too is an invention of death, an understanding found only when the resistance that others offer understanding is gone. The lives of sense and order we can give our dead can only be given them when dead, when they no longer live to swerve away from what our narratives can well permit. When my grandparents lived, I did not understand them. For any sense and order I assigned them was ever subject to revision. There were always bits of them I did not know but they could tell me – bits that, once told, rearranged my sense of who they were. And there were always bits I’d never know, though I could know such bits were there. These were another sostenuto, but one I always heard – one can know another well enough to know that there is much one does not know. When they lived, their lives were never what I made of them, but what they did.  

The dead leave their things and leave their lives. Death, in its invention, transfers ownership of each. My grandparents’ things were mine to sort, their lives now stories I could tell. But because I had the former, I could set aside the latter and tarry longer in what was not yet lost, the tones of all I cannot know humming through their things. I could hesitate and linger with what was neither mine nor memory’s, but instead the stuff of mystery. This, then, is understanding, if there is any to be had. 

Something I have lately done may trace out well beyond its rightful temporal place. Perhaps I have left something in a pocket, or in a drawer or trunk forgotten. Perhaps it waits there now, to be discovered when I am dead, a grandchild I cannot yet imagine the one to find and puzzle over it. She’ll want a story too, and she won’t have anyone left to tell it either. We live in mystery and even when the dead are gone, this bit of them abides. Death does not invent this, but neither does it end it.