Your Dried Out Bloody End of Life Tissues
Actuality, Avoidance, and the Consequences of Policy
I.
“Conceptual emptiness was cool to talk about,
Back before I knew my way around these hospitals”
- Mount Eerie, “Emptiness pt. 2”
Two days ago, three volunteer prison guards lined up fifteen feet away from 67-year-old Brad Sigmon, who was standing in another room next to the electric chair that the prison still kept around, unused. The guards put the muzzles of their guns through three holes in the wall and shot Brad through the chest. He had a bag over his head and a target pinned to his shirt. The bullets ripped through his skin and his ribs and his heart. His viscera and blood splattered onto the wall behind him, like a toddler’s paint activity or a demonic Jackson Pollock. The target was torn to shreds.
After a minute, a doctor came out and pronounced him dead. After the body was wheeled away and the witnesses were escorted out and the protesters outside went home and the guards who shot him had showered and said whatever prayers they could muster to whatever god would listen, a janitor entered the room and thoroughly scrubbed the last remains of Brad Sigmon off the wall and the floor. When the next person enters that room to die, it will be as if Sigmon had never been there.
II.
“We never found him. We found human bones and animal bones. We found the rotting corpses of five people scattered among the boulders. We found the cold remains of a fire with a human femur and two human skulls lying among the ashes.
“At last, we came home and wrapped our community wall around us and huddled in our illusions of security.”
- Octavia E. Butler, “Parable of the Sower”
In the first volume of his Proustian, 3,600-page autobiographic novel Min Kamp, Karl Ove Knausgård focuses on the death of his father. The volume opens with an extended meditation on death. It ends with him standing over the dead body of his father. One of Knausgård’s recurring themes is the over-intellectualizing of everything in a post-modern, post-religious world. He talks about “death as an idea, death without a body, death as thought and image, death as an intellectual concept”. Death is “all around us”. Our news programs are practically dedicated to “massive, ubiquitous, inexhaustible” reports of death around the world.
But death is always detached. Never tied to the “body which lies rotting somewhere”:
“This aspect of death, that which belongs to the body and is concrete, physical and material, this death is hidden with such great care that it borders on a frenzy, and it works, just listen to how people who have been involuntary witnesses to fatal accidents or murders tend to express themselves. They always say the same, it was absolutely unreal, even though what they mean is the opposite. It was so real. But we no longer live in that reality. For us everything has been turned on its head, for us the real is unreal, the unreal real. And death, death is the last great beyond. That is why it has to be kept hidden.”
Elsewhere in the book Knausgård talks about a hypothetical town that does not hide dead bodies—does not cover them with blankets at the scene of an accident, does not ferry them off the sidewalk or roadside so people can go back to working and shopping and living. He says that this would not be a town, but would be a hell. Never mind that this hell would reflect reality “in a more realistic and essentially truer way” than how we currently live. We do not want to face death, we do not want to see it, so we engage in “the collective act of repression symbolized by the concealment of our dead”.
III.
“Any funeral I ever attended in a city finished in cremation. In our town, there was no option but burial, so I never knew until adulthood that many see this as a particularly Catholic, particularly ghoulish, practice. My friends who grew up in cities found it grossly morbid to bury a body rather than burn it. I don’t know why. They would shudder, speaking of worms and decay, appalled in some existential way. Perhaps it was the slowness of decomposition they found so horrifying. We don’t want to think of our bodies slowly breaking down, of our tissues leaking softly into earth. We want death done with, vanished like smoke into air.
- Charlotte Wood, “Stone Yard Devotional”
On January 29, 2025, the International Rescue Committee closed down operations at nine hospitals serving Burmese refugees who had fled to makeshift mountain camps across the mountainous border of Thailand. The IRC received funding for these life-saving operations from the United States Agency for International Development—immediately after the inauguration of Donald Trump, the new political appointees at USAID issued “stop-work” orders to virtually all humanitarian aid operations across the globe.
Pe Kha Lau was a 71-year-old refugee from Myanmar, who had been having breathing issues for several years. She was hospitalized and receiving oxygen when she was told that the hospital was being shut down and she had to leave. Hospital workers disconnected her from oxygen and her son came and carried her back to their home. The oxygen machine sat unused in the hospital. The hospital workers finished ejecting their patients—like a reverse Noah’s ark—and locked the gates behind them.
Three days later, on Saturday night, Pe Kha Lau started having breathing troubles and asked her daughter to take her to the hospital. This had happened before and had been easily resolved with a brief hospital stay and some supplementary oxygen. Through tears, her daughter told her that the hospital was closed. The next day, Pe Kha Lau died. Her children had to figure out burial arrangements. Her son, a day laborer, had to figure out how much time he could take to prepare his mother for burial before going back to work. His mother laid in their home, cold and lifeless, with shriveled lungs and wrinkled skin and a body that had survived war and persecution and a flight into the mountains. She was finally at rest in the shadow of the hospital that could have easily kept her alive. By now she will have been buried, perhaps with a small burial marker. Her bed will have been cleaned and perhaps given away. Her clothes will have been distributed to people who need clothes. Her children will adjust their budget to have one less mouth to feed. They will adjust their hearts to living in a world without their mother.
None of the people responsible for her death will ever speak her name or visit her grave. They will raise their children and go on vacation and go to church and never think about a small corpse being lowered into the rocky soil of a refugee camp as her children and grandchildren weep in the cold and stare at the hospital that remains locked and lifeless down the street.
IV.
“…& in the Defiance (town) paper I read a story about the heroin epidemic & the headline said “WE WILL NOT LET THIS DESTROY US” & above it is a picture of a mother pulling her young daughter’s frail body close to her chest in front of a worn-down house & in her eyes is a determination & in her eyes she is daring all the devils of hell to come & take what is hers & I thought about what it must be like to name yourself after a town that has become a ghost factory & play songs about surviving all manner of haunting & Defiance (band) hasn’t made a record in six years & the last one sounded like they were trying to get out of each other’s way & I heard they played in some Indiana dive last spring & I heard the pit was wicked & later that week there was another drug bust in Defiance (town) & there are times when destruction is not as much of a choice as we think it is & man, I barely made it out of 2006 alive & in the Defiance (band) song “Oh, Susquehanna!” the chorus that everyone sings goes “and I wonder / what do they do with the bodies / and I wonder / what do they do with the bodies / and I wonder.”
- Hanif Abdurraqib, “Defiance, Ohio is the Name of a Band”
As much as Knausgård situates himself in a post-Christian sort of morose atheism, his thoughts on death are remarkably aligned with another titan of modern thought—Joseph Ratzinger, also known as Pope Benedict XVI (the one who looks like Emperor Palpatine and really liked cats).
Long before his reign as pope, Ratzinger was a theologian and professor at the University of Regensberg, where in 1977 he published a small book of theology called Eschatologie—Tod un ewiges Leben (published in English as Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life). He opens a central chapter (“The Theology of Death”) with the dramatic statement that “Bourgeois society hides death away”. He contrasts what Pieper calls the “materialistic trivialisation of death” with the relentless efforts of modern society—from hospitals to funeral homes to newspapers—to make the processes of death “technical tasks technically handled by technical people”.
Ratzinger, like many of an older generation, lived during the transition from an ancient way of life (in which most births and deaths occurred in the home) to the sanitized, modern approach in which “sickness and death are becoming purely technological problems to be handled by the appropriate institution”. He speaks of the home in Western society as a glorified sleeping bag, as a place where families repose at the end of the day but that is effectively dissolved during the day as we all go our separate ways. It is no longer a hub of life and the troublesome complications of life, of birth and sickness and death.
Instead of highlighting this as a mere problem for the dying, or an unfortunate quirk of modern life, Ratzinger warns that “when human sickness and dying are reduced to the level of technological activity, so is man himself”. How we feel about the living is determined, he warns, by our attitudes to the dying. If we continue refusing to confront the question of death, of repressing or trivializing it, our feelings as a society toward human life will grow increasingly callous.
V.
I’ll die / ‘cause my eyes see in technicolor / and I feel nothing / and all you will say is, “He was a lost cause”.
- Blvck Hippie, “Technicolor”
One time, as I was buying a tasteful load of groceries in a tasteful grocery co-op in a tasteful suburb of Washington, D.C., I stood in line with a woman whose t-shirt read “POLICY IS MY LOVE LANGUAGE”. It has been years but the memory always leaves me discomfited.
On one hand, I understand. I am surrounded by policy wonks, by brilliant young minds who spent years in school to understand the hows and whys of the world, how the r-naught of a new disease impacts the spread of that disease across communities and borders, how a shift in health funding at a federal level will result in cuts to health centers nationwide, how an obscure amendment to a statute will have significant downstream impacts on vulnerable populations. I participate in endless conversations and debates about policy priorities and how X action and Y decision will lead to Z catastrophe.
On the other hand, love cannot exist in the abstract. At the end of the 2014 move Calvary, Brendan Gleeson’s character (an old Irish priest) is held at gunpoint by one of his parishioners, who admits to having been molested by a priest as a child. Gleeson’s week has been a nightmare—his church was burnt down and his dog has been murdered in his front yard. The gunman asks if he cried when he found his dead dog, and Gleeson says that he did and that he loved his dog. The gunman then asks if he cried when he read in the newspaper what his brother priests had been doing to innocent children like him. Gleeson admits that he didn’t. That he was “too detached”.
There is currently much (but not enough) in the news about the ramifications of policy changes and the impacts of funding cuts. By necessity, we will speak much of the numbers (X thousands dead, Y million cut off from critical aid, etc.). We will rage about numbers and call our congress members and yell at them to grow a spine and do something to prevent the numbers from getting worse.
But the numbers are just an abstraction. They are a mental shortcut to approximating devastation that only exists at the individual level. Pe Kha Lau’s children do not think of their mother as the first death toll of the 2025 USAID budget cuts. They do not see her death in terms of budgets and “stop-work” orders and the The Impoundment Control Act of 1978. She was their mother, she loved them and nursed them and held them when they hurt themselves and attended their school concerts and threw them birthday celebrations and attended their weddings and then fled across a dangerous border with them, and when the United States government decided that she was a number and not a life, they carried her from the hospital and cleaned her body and buried her in the ground.
Policy is not a love language. Numbers are not reality. Reality is watching your mother struggle for breath and trying to get her to drink a little bit of water but knowing that she won’t make see the morning because a rich white man in Washington, D.C., thinks that a line item for “IRC - Medical Assistance” looks like a waste of money. Reality is a delivery driver bringing fried chicken and a piece of cheesecake to a prison without knowing that he’s delivering a man’s last meal. Reality is a janitor picking the right cleaner to wipe Brad Sigmon’s blood off the wall where he was shot to death.
Avoidance of death, Pe Kha Lau's story, everything in this article, made me reflect. Thanks.