Die, Die

The argument being, how can those who have known life as an enjoyable march toward the grave possibly fight those who view life as the miserable journey to paradise?

Americans are fascinated by death, obsessed with it, but even our domestic terrorists -- the Unabombers, Eric Rudolphs and Timothy McVeighs -- can't bring themselves to die for the causes they profess so much belief in.

Americans are predominantly Christian, and Christianity teaches that a wonderful afterlife awaits the faithful, but if any Christian truly believed that, he wouldn't battle against death. Why put off an eternity of peace, love and topless angels strumming harps for another forty years of war, hatred and Julia Roberts movies?

Yet, Christian Americans aren't lining up in front of funeral homes or Army recruiting offices. They're buying "The Sixth Sense" on DVD. They're watching "Autopsy: How Freddy Krueger Really Died" on HBO. And they're creating Web sites dedicated to the clump of cells that maybe, kinda, sort of could have been people, if you squint and look really hard.

There are those who create Web sites devoted to the "deaths" (but they're in Heaven now!) of humans who lacked personality, intelligence and usefulness.

The dead infants are shown in their custom-made coffins. They are being held uncomfortably by the siblings who will undoubtedly go on to resent Mom and Dad for spending so much energy pretending that Payton mattered. They become Internet Angels, complete with graphics letting the world know when they ascended to Heaven and a soundtrack provided by Eric Clapton.

It's not so much that these Web sites reflect the American idea that there is no such thing as a personal matter. That's obvious. Nothing is sacred, and we think a person must be hiding something if she refuses to bare her soul to the world. Let it out, dear, we know you want to.

What these sites show is that people in industrialized countries, particularly the United States, are unable to cope with the reality of death because they've been sheltered from it.

We see images of dead humans across the world on the nightly news -- when the nightly news can be bothered to inform us of the existence of The World -- but they don't register. Death is what happens to other people. Americans "pass." Aunt Hilda "passed" after a three-year battle with cancer. It sounds so nice. No one mentions, because no one stuck around long enough to find out, that Aunt Hilda's three-year battle with cancer involved a port in her chest, shingles on her back, a steady stream of vomit and diarrhea, and a zipper scar across her stomach.

But Aunt Hilda's in a better place now. Of course, I don't want to go there yet. I'd rather stay in this shithole. Gotta hedge my bets in case there isn't a better place. What if this is it? Fuck.

In the past, people cared for their sick and dying relatives. The kids helped empty Gramps's bedpan, and the stench of Granny's rotting corpse made the paint peel as far away as the basement bathroom. Death was a reality. It wasn't a clean and gussied up corpse on display in a $5000 coffin.

In Florida, a 37-year-old woman lingers in the purgatory of a vegetative state. To the world, Terri Schiavo is dead.

Her brain ceased to function 11 years ago. She cannot drive a car. She cannot vote. She cannot read my site. She cannot fantasize about jumping from her bed and running back to her old life.

She is no one. She is nothing.

But her parents refuse to let her go. She might wake up. She might twitch a finger. She might swallow food on her own. She might say the magic words, "Kill me, you bastards."

There is a difference between life and life. When my grandmother was dying of lung cancer, she lived, she survived, but she didn't live. A 68-year-old former prison guard crawling on her hands and knees in the snow because she fell and was too weak to get up is not how someone wants to live.

But we hold on. We love our family members. We love our friends. They're in there somewhere. They still exist. They have to.

The religious fanatics -- born-again Christians, mostly -- say that human life is precious. The women who miscarry are often religious fanatics, or they find Jesus after the placenta rips. To them, life is precious. Humans are superior. We're the top of the food chain.

But what gives us that position? Why are we king?

Most would argue that it's because humans can think. We can reason. We can create moral systems. We have values. We can love. We can hate. So, if all of that is lost -- if we're no more than a brain stem -- how can we view the person as having a life comparable to that of you or me?

In my family, people die at home. I watched family members slowly lose their grip on life, and because of that, I'm comfortable with death. It can happen suddenly or it can take years of changing adult diapers before the inevitable occurs, but eventually, it happens to everyone. It happens to the old. It happens to the middle-aged. And yes, it happens to Harvard graduates working in skyscrapers. It might even happen to someone you care about.

But with the wonders of modern technology, death has become abstract. Stick Pops in the hospital, visit him once a week and wait for the phone call about his "tragic passing."

Sometimes, though, death shows up on one's doorstep in the form of a stillborn infant killed by Mommy's antibodies, and because people have not experienced death firsthand, we're treated to nauseating memorials. These memorials aren't testaments to the grieving process. They're a psychiatrist's wet dream.

Creating a site for a four-month-old fetus that died 10 years ago is hardly indicative of a normal grieving process.

Celebrating the birthday of a clump of cells that could have been mistaken for a pig fetus isn't the sign of someone who is learning to cope.

Had my boyfriend's cousin been a five-month-old fetus instead of a 10-year-old boy, I'm sure his aunt would have joined an Angel Baby webring. Instead, nine years after her son's death, she still signs cards with the kid's name, she once had an airplane banner fly over the house to wish him a happy birthday, she had his name and his favorite toy tattooed on her thigh, and she wears an image of him on a pendant.

Her two living kids are screwed up because how do you compete with a dead brother who surely would have cured cancer had he lived? That's a lesson that the siblings of these Angel Babies will learn soon, and we can only hope that their local newspapers publish online editions because I'm sure we'll eventually hear about them again.

But at least his aunt has a reason to mourn. She had an actual child. One who lived and breathed. One who had quirks. One who had developed a personality. One whose potential was becoming obvious.

And that's what these women are really mourning: lost potential. You can't seriously mourn something that never was. You might as well go on a crying jag each time a bird egg fails to hatch. Our lives are finite, but potential is endless. While their kids would have likely been as nondescript and mediocre as their parents, their potential was unknown, and thus, their parents are free to fantasize about a life that never was and probably wouldn't have been.

They are holding on to the selfish dreams they had for their children. Their son, the neurosurgeon. Their son, the Major League baseball player. Their daughter, the CEO of a major company. Their daughter, star ballerina. Now, they'll never get to live vicariously through these children.

For these women, they're not learning to overcome their losses. These sites don't assist in the grieving process; they merely prolong it. They're stuck in the "why me? why do people have to die, God?" phase, and it's become an unhealthy, albeit entertaining, obsession. I'd kick in $20 toward psychological treatment if it meant a decrease in the number of sugary-sweet MIDIs on the Web.

Americans publically mourn the private loss of what could pass for a pig fetus because our wealth has spared us the horrors of death, and if nothing else good comes from the terrorist attacks, perhaps it'll put a stop to the sugary proliferation of dead baby sites.

Nah.

Providing jack-off material for white misogynists since 1997.

The Misanthropic Bitch does not encourage feedback. All submissions, though, become property of the Misanthropic Bitch. Submissions may be published or reused in any other medium.