The Art of Death

by Edwidge Danticat

  Mumia’s case is a cause célèbre to many in the United States and around the world. His eloquence on many subjects, including capital punishment, makes him a good example of what is lost if a person who can still contribute his thoughts and ideas to society is put to death. Officer Faulkner’s family and the Fraternal Order of Police consider Mumia’s outspokenness as a way of taunting them and degrading the deceased officer’s memory.

  Mumia has written several books while in prison and has given dozens of interviews addressing subjects ranging from homeschooling to terrorism. In 2014, he gave a commencement speech to Goddard College graduates from behind prison walls. His early prison writings, which began as a series of commentaries for National Public Radio, were compiled in his 1995 book, Live from Death Row.

  The book opens with the lines “Don’t tell me about the valley of the shadow of death. I live there.” There’s something very hip-hop about Mumia’s opening declaration. It sounds like lyrics the rapper Kanye West, or, in my day, activist rapper Chuck D from the rap group Public Enemy, might have written.

  In Mumia’s prison, the death row inmates are placed in a concertina-wired cage called a dog pen and spend two hours a day outdoors. When their loved ones visit, they cannot touch them. A fifty-year-old inmate on Mumia’s cellblock commits suicide by setting himself on fire. Another resigns himself to his fate and demands to be put to death.

  America’s death row inmates find it hard to muster up hope, Mumia tells us. They have no future to look forward to. At the end of their term is death.

  “Much has been written and much has been said about ‘life’ within prison,” Mumia writes in a chapter called “Spirit death.” He continues, “The mind-numbing, soul-killing savage sameness that makes each day an echo of the day before, with neither thought nor hope of growth, makes prison the abode of spirit death.”

  In December 2011, after being moved from death row to the general prison population, Mumia wrote a letter to the death row inmates he’d left behind.

  He recounts some extraordinary transformations he’s witnessed, some of them comparable to what the lawyer experiences, and the banker witnesses, in Anton Chekhov’s “The Bet.”

  “I’ve seen guys who couldn’t draw a straight line emerge as master painters … I’ve seen guys come from near illiteracy to become fluent in foreign languages; I’ve met teachers who’ve created works of surpassing beauty and craftsmanship.… You are all far more than others say of you, for the spark of the infinite glows within each of you.”

  Many people use euphemisms when talking about capital punishment, as Albert Camus wrote in “Reflections on the Guillotine.” They speak of it the way people once spoke of cancer. They whisper. Camus believed that if the idea of death truly made capital punishment a deterrent for criminals, we’d still have executions in public squares, would broadcast them on live television, or at least describe them in greater detail in newspapers. Camus quotes two doctors who were eyewitnesses to executions by guillotine:

  “The blood flows from the blood vessels at the speed of the severed carotids, then it coagulates. The muscles contract and their fibrillation is stupefying; the intestines ripple and the heart moves irregularly, incompletely, fascinatingly. The mouth puckers at certain moments in a terrible pout. It is true that in that severed head the eyes are motionless with dilated pupils; fortunately they look at nothing and, if they are devoid of the cloudiness and opalescence of the corpse, they have no motion; their transparence belongs to life, but their fixity belongs to death.”

  Camus describes other accounts of decapitation, in which a cheek blushes after it is slapped, even though the head is no longer attached to the body. A man who’s just been beheaded answers when his name is called, or the head dies right away, but the body is still shaking at the cemetery twenty minutes later. All of this, Camus suggests—the understatements, the exaggerations, the precise medical details, as well as the executions themselves—arise out of a common and shared terror, our collective fear of death.

  Some of us are so afraid to die that we make sentencing other human beings to death, and eventually killing them, the ultimate penalty. This is why the condemned person who refuses to cower before death—who does not weep before the crowd, who does not tremble before sitting in the electric chair, who refuses the blindfold, and does not plead for mercy from the firing squad, who smiles as the noose is placed around his neck, who refuses the last rites from the earthly representative of heaven, who laughs as the kindling is lit and fire engulfs her body—is seen not only as a heretic but as incorrigible and hell-bound.

  Meursault, Camus’s hero (or antihero) in The Stranger, is such a person. After being condemned to die for killing a man, Meursault realizes that each of us is born with a death sentence, anyway: that we are all condemned to die. Meursault doesn’t deny his fear of death. He simply accepts it.

  “Deep down,” he thinks, “I knew perfectly well that it doesn’t much matter whether you die at thirty or at seventy, since in either case other men and women will naturally go on living—and for thousands of years. In fact, nothing could be clearer. Whether it was now or twenty years from now, I would still be the one dying.”

  In “Reflections on the Guillotine,” Camus seems just a bit more hopeful than Meursault. “There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs,” Camus writes, “until death is outlawed.”

  Close Calls

  Over the course of my life, I’ve had a few close calls, incidents that a second or a minute later might have changed my life. Or might have ended it. I have never experienced the classic near-death experience, though, the one that includes an out-of-body moment when one’s spirit floats away from one’s body to hover in a state of heightened awareness from the ceiling or some higher plane. I have not passed through a tunnel or seen a super bright light. I have not had a “life review,” in which everything I’ve ever seen, done, or experienced has flashed before my eyes. I don’t know what it’s like to have almost died and come back, only what it’s like to momentarily feel that I might possibly have come close to dying.

  When I was in my midtwenties, I bought my first car, with a six-figure mileage, from a friend of my father’s. I was a reluctant driver—a terrified one, really—and an overused lemon was not a good starter car for me. Once, when I was driving along a busy street in New Rochelle, New York, the car turned on its own and headed toward a garbage truck in the opposite lane. There were only a few inches between us when both the truck and my car miraculous stopped. If the garbage truck had hit me, I might have died.

  A few years ago, I was standing on the landing of the steps in front of a friend’s apartment in lower Manhattan. The front door was an entire story above the ground. It had snowed a few days before, then warmed up, and then the temperature had plunged again. Black ice covered both the steps and the concrete below. I’d just pulled the door shut, and had my back to the steps, when I suddenly felt myself slipping. My arms flailed and for a moment I felt as though I were flying. I somehow managed to catch the railing before free-falling all the way down. Had I plunged backward and landed headfirst on the concrete, I might have been at least brain-dead.

  There was also the time soon after my mother died when I looked up from my cell phone while riding in the passenger seat of our family car and realized that my husband had accidently driven onto the wrong side of a highway ramp. Had any cars been coming off the highway at high speed, nothing could have saved us. That particular brush with death made me think of all the close calls that I and a few people I know have had over the span of a lifetime. Some of those close calls happen so quickly we barely notice them. Others are so intense that they change the way we think not just about living but about constantly being close to dying.

  Every once in a while, a friend with whom I have traded such stories will send me links to “close calls” videos on YouTube. In these videos, people cluelessly walk into the paths of speeding cars, buses, and trains tha
t somehow don’t hit them. Dangers graze but don’t annihilate them. In that one moment, it looks as though these people were covered with some invisible death-protection shield. Or, as my mother might have said, “It wasn’t their time.”

  I have wanted to sit down and tally my close calls. (There have been a few others involving being caught in the middle of a police chase, a near drowning, and a dodged bullet during a drive-by shooting.) But I have been afraid to do it. What if I tempt fate by paying too much attention to it? What if becoming fully aware of the frequency of such moments makes me terrified to leave my house? What if I start wondering if my house is even safe? After all, fifty-foot sinkholes have been known to spontaneously appear in Florida living rooms.

  I once sat next to a woman in a commuter turboprop plane, who as soon as the plane landed started thanking God at the top of her voice. At the start of the trip, this same woman had refused to change seats with another passenger who was traveling with a friend.

  “This is how they’ll identify my body if the plane crashes,” she said apologetically, though loud enough for everyone to hear. There had been some recent crashes involving the same type of plane in different parts of the world, I later found out, so her fear was justified. Surviving a routine plane ride had seemed like a close call to her, something to be extremely grateful for having lived through. She couldn’t fully trust that the plane would land and we would all walk off and go on with our lives.

  She had a point. After all, don’t most catastrophic events suddenly interrupt perfectly ordinary days? The “ordinary instant,” Joan Didion calls it in The Year of Magical Thinking, her memoir about her husband’s sudden death from a heart attack and the process of writing about it.

  “Confronted with sudden disaster,” Didion writes, “we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames.”

  Unless a person is being executed, death rarely announces its exact place and time. Against the backdrop of the ordinary, it often feels abrupt, exceptional. And even if the circumstances right before death are extraordinary—if one is getting married, for example, or giving birth, or had just climbed Mount Everest—how could these otherwise-exceptional events not pale in comparison? Death always wants to hog the stage. It cannot help itself. But it does not get to hog every stage. After all, death cannot write its own story. While we are still alive, we are the ones who get to write the story.

  Among the first words Didion wrote after her husband died were Life changes in the instant.

  The ordinary instant.

  September 11, 2001, was an ordinary day in New York—until it wasn’t. As was January 10, 2010, in Port-au-Prince, as was January 17, 1995, in Kobe.

  Nou tout a p mache ak sèkèy nou anba bra nou, my mother had been casually saying for years. “We’re all carrying our coffins with us every day.” Or “We are all constantly cheating death.” This is how I usually translated that Creole phrase to my mother’s doctors and nurses whenever she asked me to, usually after they had tried to reassure her, during some agonizing diagnostic test or another debilitating chemotherapy session, that everything was going to be okay. “Media vita in morte sumus,” might have also been another suitable translation. “In the midst of life, we are in death.”

  The French essayist Michel de Montaigne was apparently afraid of death until he had a near-death experience of his own. One day he was thrown off his horse after colliding with another rider. He ended up unconscious for several hours and believed himself to be dying. Then, as he recovered from his accident, Montaigne realized that dying might not be so bad. He’d felt no pain, no fear. The limbo state of being alive while feeling dead is what he had found most intolerable.

  “I can, for my part, think of no state so insupportable and dreadful, as to have the soul vivid and afflicted, without means to declare itself,” Montaigne wrote in his essay “De L’exercitation”—translated as “Use Makes Perfect”—in which he discusses his near-death experience.

  This is perhaps why we have so many tales of near-death experiences, firsthand testimonials as well as fictional accounts, whose authors are attempting to understand what it is like to exist in a body that’s hovering between life and death. There’s so much to imagine, so much to project onto that inexplicable void of people’s medical purgatories as they swing between living and dying.

  “The poets have feigned some gods who favour the deliverance of such as suffer under a languishing death,” Montaigne writes. The gods of which he speaks might appear as dead relatives or heavenly figures, angels or spirit guides who offer the choice of either staying or going. Some writers, like Dante in Inferno have us travel through several circles of hell, if only to possibly emerge frightened but cleansed, kinder and wiser than we were before.

  While medical professionals attribute these same type of visions and apparitions to neurochemicals working overtime, many of us would like near death or half dead experiences to be real because we’d love to have a second shot at life. Or we would love to see our loved ones miraculously return from the brink before it’s too late. “Do not go gentle into that good night. / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

  Writing about near-death means trying to penetrate that space where death could be imminent but living still remains a possibility. Whereas death is the end of life as we know it, and as others around us are living it, having a near-death experience means someone’s been given an opportunity that most other people haven’t. Survivors might rightfully feel anointed. Or guilty. A few might even wish they’d died, even though their survival had seemingly required supernatural interference or assistance from faith, if not fate. Their lives should have greater meaning now than mere existence. Or should they? Maybe there’s some larger mission to complete, something better to do, someone to love, or mourn.

  Although it’s not a typical near-death narrative, my favorite “close-call” book is Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, a novel that is, among other things, about a man who escapes death only to spend the rest of his life mourning the woman he loved. Burned beyond recognition, the so-called English patient, Almásy (who is actually Hungarian), ends up in the care of a young nurse, Hana, who looks after him in an old Italian villa at the end of Word War II. Bedridden, Almásy is constantly thinking of Katharine, the married woman he fell in love with while exploring and mapping the North African desert.

  The English Patient is a war novel as well as a postwar novel. Even though the war has ended, all the characters are still living with the constant likelihood of sudden death, particularly from the hidden explosives or mines that the retreating Germans have left behind. Kip, the Sikh mine sapper and Hana’s lover, is the one who must dismantle those explosives, whether they’re hidden under bridges, in statues, or in pianos.

  Kip is constantly living in the shadow of death. The life expectancy of someone new to his job is ten weeks. Hana too has seen a lot of death as a nurse during the war. After helping Kip with one of his trickiest mines, Hana breaks down and declares:

  “I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die. And I thought if I was going to die I would die with you. Someone like you, young as I am, I saw so many dying near me in the last year. I didn’t feel scared. I certainly wasn’t brave just now. I thought to myself, We have this villa this grass, we should have lain down together, you in my arms, before we died.”

  The breathlessness of this declaration has always moved me, the shorter sentences mixed in with the longer ones, then the purposeful repetition and variations of the word “die” for even more emphasis. Reading this, I think, Whom would I want to be with before I die? Whom would I want in my arms? Or whose arms would I want to die in?

  Certainly my husband’s.

  I would be hesitant, though, to subject my two daughters to watching me die. Would they be able to carry that memory with them for the rest of their lives? Would
they be able to carry me?

  Hana’s declaration also brings up the inescapable link between sex and death. One way the French refer to an orgasm is as la petite mort or “the little death,” an antidote to Freud’s “death-instinct,” or what he saw as our longing to self-destruct and return to our preexisting state through war and other means. Sex would have been another way for Hana and Kip, after having just barely escaped death, to continue to circumvent la grande mort, “the big death,” and to counter one of Freud’s other notions: that we’re not convinced of our own mortality and can’t imagine our own deaths. (Though having watched my mother die, I can now perfectly imagine my own death.) Hana and Kip cannot escape their mortality. It confronts them every day in the devastated landscape around them, and in the dying faces of their comrades and friends.

  “In a painting of his imagining the field surrounding this embrace would have been in flames,” Kip thinks soon after Hana falls asleep in his arms.

  Yet both Kip and Hana survive. And the English patient continues to live, even though some of his friends have died. But always shadowing the survivors of this internal and exterior war is one of Almásy’s favorite words from his native Hungary, félhomály, “twilight,” perhaps Milkman and Pilate’s twilight, or the type of twilight that the French call l’heure bleue, “the blue hour.” Maybe it’s the gloaming, or what Joan Didion refers to in Blue Nights, her memoir of her daughter’s death, from acute pancreatitis twenty months after her husband died, as “the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres,” and that Michael Ondaatje calls “the dusk of graves.”

  This type of sorrow-filled dusk offers itself as an atmospheric bridge between life and death. It is the dying of the light against which we are constantly raging, the light over which death might indeed have some dominion, as it is part sunset, part nightfall, the eventide or prologue to the end. It is, as Didion writes, “the fading,” so it would not be unusual for it to linger over the holiest of places, places even holier than Chartres, or Haiti’s Notre Dame de l’Assomption, or any other designated holy place.