I scour the Internet for something to feel, and see an image I shouldn’t have seen.
Judith O’Dea as Barbra in Night of the Living Dead (1968) dir. George A. Romero.
I recall witnessing Death-with-a-capital-D first hand, at a very early age. The image of my uncle bounding down a creaking staircase, an eyeball loose as though an extra from Night of the Living Dead, became a recurring nightmare for weeks and months. I told a friend, and she laughed.
Ever since that day, my Mother emitting a howling shriek while I run fearful into the street, I’ve had a heavy-heart kind of preoccupation with Death. To see, to understand, to look into the eyes of the figure strewn across the floor.
I love you, Georgie.
My Brother, fairly recently, emptied his bedroom - clearing away the old in search of something new. Within that pile of ephemeral objects, dust-coated, worn and often ordinary, lay a small, slightly-larger-than-palm-sized Buddha. A relic of Georgie’s home, which only ever sat above the fireplace. I have felt, and continue to feel, that this object - weighted with a flocked velvet base, stomach worn away by wishes for good luck - has somehow entrapped his Earthly being.
It’s only now, this once distant visual memory in my arms again, that I realise this is where it all comes from, reader. The offerings, the talismans, searching for signs in the English dark, it’s all here in this glossed, mahogany figurine.
It’s become a shrine of sorts - encircled by a box of pewter, gold rings and holy water - and I aim to only think positively when I hold it, savouring the memory of when he was once here. A Cindy doll for my birthday, complete with a baby-pink bicycle. Sweets and crisps and daytime TV. Jerk chicken, rice and peas on willow patterned crockery.
Moira Shearer in The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
I have always, always tried to understand Death, reader, and I can never get there. Sometimes I wish I could fall briefly into the abyss, memorise all sights and sounds and return to Earth, scrawling panicked notes on scraps of paper.
That feeling will never leave me, that loss.
It swells like rosebuds.
I think of all the artefacts that loved ones have left me, and how overwhelmed I feel by their beauty. How, at the time as a child, I never gave those objects a second thought. They enact a tether: from me, writhing in anguish amidst the smoke and soot of Walsall, to them, in a place I cannot describe. I wish it were tangible. I wish I understood the scent, the touch. Not the act, but after.
In light of events now, and somehow long ago, Death-with-a-capital-D remains an ever-present subject which envelops my mind. These weeks have been marred by it, maddened. Celebrity deaths tend to hit hard, for you parasocially associate that individual - or rather, the image which they’ve meticulously crafted - with a very particular part of your life. A rain-soaked kiss beneath a bus station, clinked drinks glasses and stout-soaked ochre at the local, drunk singing in the back of the taxi with a friend at 5:00am.
Marilyn Monroe in Niagara (1953) dir. Henry Hathaway.
Music, especially, enacts a companion piece to those fragmented moments. A soundtrack to girlhood. Stripped of their agency amidst the trauma of fame, these figures enact a stand-in for all girlish wants and desires. A prince to fawn for, a pin-up poster to ritually kiss before I fall asleep.
From the outside looking in, fame feels both a painful curse and a conscious decision, a trade off which one subscribes to in exchange for inordinate wealth and power. To paraphrase Schoepenhaur, as before, the good cannot be without the bad. What hurts, for me, are the ‘what ifs’. The questions which whirl away in my mind all these years later, and the unravelled panic which inevitably follows. What if I got there sooner? What would have happened? Would they still be here?
‘I don’t know how to describe the grief I’m feeling’, an adoring fan mourns earnestly, allowing their tears to wet the keyboard. Others, lovers of suffering and public humiliation, see this incident as insidious entertainment - a strange kind of spectacle to pry apart, like vultures.
Death, in online spaces, is deeply accessible. I recall, as a child, seeing Marilyn Monroe in the bed of her Brentwood home, the fractured head of John F. Kennedy, and Elvis Presley in soft focus, laying in a cotton-lined casket. I wonder why these images appeal to us. I recall a conversation with a friend, in which we discussed car crashes, and the mutually human and inhumane want to peer through the window, to examine the detail.
Through all of our advancements, Death remains the singular truth we cannot decipher. When all else ends and we’re stripped from the world, where do we go? What do we become?