Death Becomes Us

Death on a pale horse - Gustave Doré, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Ahh, death. One of two things in life that are unavoidable.

Every one of us is born, and we will die. A prospect many find terrifying. Perhaps it’s because in modern first world countries, we are far removed from death. It’s not a part of our daily lives like it was for our ancestors.

They contended with plague-ridden corpses piled high in the streets during the Black Death of the 1300’s. They lived with the horrendously high rate of death for mothers in childbirth and their newborn infants.

In Victorian times, it was even normal for nana Margaret’s pallid body to be laid out in the parlour for a few weeks after her fatal bout of consumption.

It's fair to assume that a greater familiarity with death would take some of the terror out of the process. But there’s still that nagging uncertainty: What happens after we die? What about my body? My soul?

The Body

The question of what happens to one’s body can be answered in life. All you need is a will to specify what should be done with your remains, and today there is a wealth of options.

You could go for the classic coffin burial and store your skeleton underground. Or have your body cremated and the ashes planted with a tree or blended into a twenty-foot-tall concrete statue of your likeness. Immortality anyone?

Let’s not forget pulverization and liquification. There’s no better way to remember Uncle Joe than with a human smoothie on the mantlepiece!

Then there’s my personal favourite, the sky burial.

Vultures - FishOil at English Wikipedia. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Sky burials were practiced in regions of Tibet, India, China, and Mesopotamia for millennia before religions like Zoroastrianism were marginalized. Zoroastrians and Buddhists believe in the transmigration of spirits—a cycle of rebirth—which means that the body need not be preserved after death as it is merely an empty vessel.

The body of the deceased is left exposed to the elements and the scavenging of wild animals, particularly carrion birds like vultures. Nature helps return the corpse quickly and efficiently to the earth, limiting the potential spread of disease.

Tower of Silence - Inside the tower of silence, Bombay. Flickr

The ancient Persians even erected special structures called dakhma, or Towers of Silence, where bodies were left exposed to scavengers on a raised dais. Once the bones had been picked clean, skeletal remains were deposited into a central pit to decompose further.

Human lives are expensive. We take a tremendous amount of resources from the earth to sustain ourselves. In death, a sky burial allows us to give something back. The body decomposes, fertilizing the soil, and nourishing the animals that eat from it.

No burning of fuels or expensive real estate required!

Sky burials are an appealing option for those conscious of the footprint they leave behind, but there’s a small problem. Under Canadian law, a sky burial is viewed as desecration of a corpse…

Well, we’ve all got a friend willing to do a couple years in the clink for us right?

The Soul

For 5000 years or more, religions from all corners of the globe have tried to answer the soul question. No matter what belief system you adhere to, a common thread is that there’s a part of us that is immutable and will persist in some form after we die.

Whether that’s rebirth in a new body, the continuation of life in heaven (or hell), or something else entirely is dependant on the beliefs of the individual. Whatever you believe, having faith dispels some of the uncertainty of death.

For the devout, they need only concern themselves with living according to their religious tenants to be guaranteed a safe place for their soul to reside.

But what if you’re an atheist? You’ve got no faith in a higher power, no promise of life eternal. You may even baulk at the idea of a soul.

Consciousness should be your main concern if that’s the case. Will it be lights out and the end of all perception? Or could our consciousness rejoin the collective oneness of the universe?

You’ll just have to wait to find out!

Universe - Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

---

Nicholas Kungl - is a Professional Writing student at Algonquin College who has always been fascinated by the darker side of life. He started out writing scenes for tabletop RPGs and his friends got a kick out of it. Eventually, he wondered if anyone else would too. He spends his free time doing yoga, listening to music, and wandering green spaces with his dogs.

The Terror of Existence

Ghosts and demons. Vampires and witches. Zombies and mummies. Classic horror monsters share at least one thing in common. They’re all imaginary! We suspend disbelief when we see them on screen or in books, allowing ourselves to be scared, but we know they exist only in the theatre of the mind. Turn the T.V. off —Dracula’s as good as dead. Fictional scares don’t compare to the true horrors of real life.

The Terror S1 AMC NETWORKS Copyright: © AMC NETWORKS

AMC’s The Terror exemplifies the terror of existence through the fictionalized account of the 1845 Franklin expedition, in which two British navy ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, were sent into the Canadian arctic in search of the northwest passage. The ships were frozen into the ice near King William Island, a region known today as Nunavut. After a year of waiting for the ice to melt, the ships were abandoned, and in 1848 the remaining crew set out across the frozen wasteland in search of salvation. They were never seen again.

In the series, the crews of Terror and Erebus are constantly hunted by a supernatural polar bear monster called Tuunbaq. The creature seems to be nature’s wrath incarnate, sent to scour Europeans from the frigid landscape. But the bear becomes almost incidental as the sailors face more insidious enemies: consumption, scurvy, lead poisoning, and the land itself.

Consumption

TB Poster - By Rensselaer County Tuberculosis Association. - U.S. National Library of Medicine. Public Domain.

Tuberculosis, or consumption, is a bacterial disease that commonly affects the lungs and is spread from person to person through the air. It earned the name consumption because of the rapid weight loss associated with the disease. Other symptoms include chronic cough with blood filled mucus, fever, and night sweats. Tuberculosis is fatal if left untreated.

In the first episode of The Terror, Dr. Goodsir remarks that they’d already buried three sailors on Beechey Island. When archaeologists discovered those remains in the 1980’s, they concluded the men had indeed died of tuberculosis.

Scurvy

Scurvy is caused by a lack of vitamin C in the diet and was identified by the Egyptians as early as 1550BC. The first signs are often purplish bruises, followed by bleeding along the hairline and gums, tooth loss, skin lesions, the opening of previously healed wounds or scars, constant hunger, weakness, aching limbs and joints, and eventually—death.

Have You Scurvy? – Scurvy, Atlas Obscura

Fortunately for the Franklin expedition, scurvy was nearly beaten by the time the ships departed from England in 1845. Each sailor was given a daily ration of lemon juice to ward off the disease. But as the expedition dragged on and rations ran low, it was only a matter of time before everyone felt its effects. Sailors died at their posts or keeled over on marches, never to rise again.

Lead Poisoning

The expedition was well provisioned with a three-year supply of tinned soup and vegetables as well as salt cured meat. Stephen Goldner, the man awarded the tinned food contract, was given a mere seven weeks to complete the order. In the rush to get it done, the tins were sloppily sealed with lead solder that contaminated the food within.

Symptoms of lead poisoning include nausea, diarrhea, numbness, mood disorders, abdominal pain, and inflammation of the brain. The latter being particularly dangerous in a survival situation as it effects the ability to think clearly and solve problems. Several of their bodies were exhumed, examined, and found to contain up to ten times the normal amount of lead in their bones.

The Arctic

Man Proposes God Disposes - Edwin Landseer - 1864

The region surrounding King William Island has winter temperatures as low as -40°c, with only four months of the year—June to September—being above freezing. Prolonged exposure to severe cold can cause frostbite, hypothermia, and death.

In the show, sailors protect themselves from hypothermia by burning the oil used to fuel the ships turbines. But crewmen sent on hunting or scouting parties were still subject to the ravages of frostbite. This is starkly depicted in a scene where doctors casually snip off a sailors blackened, dead toes.

Can it get any worse?

Oh yes! All this amounts to increasingly bad decision making and impaired judgement as the sailors try to work through the challenges of surviving in the arctic. Civilization is discarded in the pursuit of survival; they turn on one another. Battling threats from within, and the forces of nature itself, they’re doomed to die.

What makes this story truly terrifying isn’t the supernatural polar bear monster. It’s the perilous lives of the sailors. It’s knowing real people suffered and died under some of the most unforgiving circumstances imaginable: lost, freezing, starving, poisoned, and diseased, with no hope of rescue.

That is the terror of existence.

---

Nicholas Kungl - A Professional Writing student at Algonquin College who has always been fascinated by the darker side of life. After all, what stares back at you from the abyss is ever so interesting, don’t you think? He spends his free time doing yoga, listening to music, and wandering green spaces with his dogs.