Postmodern mourning comes with the dubious gift of video.

This gift might be wrapped in the safe and solid fourth wall: a photo and video montage of the deceased, their favorite song rolling over footage of softball games and wedding dances, brave waves from a hospital bed. Alternatively, it could come wrapped in something as metal and off-putting as aluminum foil, presented in first person with full eye contact from the beyond.

Rapper XXXTentacion led a brief and legally embattled life, dying after twenty years and four studio albums. Shortly before his death, the artist born Jahseh Dwayne Onfroy filmed a music video for his song “Sad!” The video, presented at the rapper’s real-life funeral features footage of Onfroy walking past his own corpse, displayed in casket. The funeral was small, consisted mainly of family and other recording artists. The average morbid moonbat can listen to the song, but stripped of the original imagery. YouTube requires the viewer to click through a warning about suicide and self-harm in the lyrics before it will play.

This is not a strictly 21^st century power move from beyond the grave, however. Andy Kaufman famously addressed his own funeral with a sing-along, accompanied by clips of his appearances on Saturday Night Live played for family and his fellow comedians in a synagogue in Great Neck, New York. Marvin Gaye sang the National Anthem at his memorial in 1984, attended by many of the great Black musicians of the 20^th century including Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Smokey Robinson, and Diana Ross. In 1986, actor, musician, and producer Desi Arnaz left a video urging his fellow smokers to quit before it was too late because it was way too late for him. Just the year before, king of The King and I fame Yul Brynner left the same notice with the chilling message: “Now that I’m gone, I tell you: don’t smoke.” (Note: I agree with Desi and Yul here. I’m still alive and I don’t smoke. Coincidence? Check back in a few decades.)

Nor is this the velvet-roped VIP experience of dying and memorializing. Anyone can record a video when they know the end is near, as Andy Moss did. Twenty-nine year old Brittany Maynard, afflicted with incurable brain cancer, made a video explaining her choice to die on her own terms and her own timeline, avoiding the painful and degrading wait for the reaper to finally get around to her. Gestures like these might make it easier for people to share their final thoughts with the people they leave behind without the pressure and emotional overwhelm the last moments of life invariably offer. They can also be watched multiple times, if people wish to revisit. But in the end, this is a concept of more utility to the dying than to the survivors. This practice might give one a chance to reminisce and celebrate a life well-lived. But think of the possibilities! One could also leave a truly withering tell-off to a funeral guest who can’t possibly get the last word now. Or lay a curse.

The current age of content means that many habitual video essayists, gamers, streamers, and other types of new media creators have access to share their plans to end their lives, and sometimes follow through. These videos can be fascinating and heartbreaking, giving that horror-movie urge to yell at the screen. Don’t go in there. Call a friend. Researching them for this article gave me a strange feeling; talking-head videos are an addictive simulacrum of intimacy, because we crave familiar faces and voices. The ancients did, too. When someone has died, even someone we never knew, this familiarity crosses over into the category of memory. But unlike 25-year-old streamers having a bad run of days, video never dies. Look, I’m not going to link to any of these. Most of them are deleted and buried, and that’s for the best because this shit is contagious. If you’re having a hard time, there is help available.

And now for something completely different.

For those who don’t crave video, whose grieving wish is simply to hear that beloved voice just one more time: be careful what you wish for. In 2019, an Irish man left an audio recording of himself asking urgently to be let out of his casket as it’s being lowered into the grave. Craic kills.

The ancients couldn’t conceive of jokes like this. They didn’t live the lives of constant surveillance from both within and without that we willingly accept and often court these days. Explaining to our ancestors that we’re getting camera-ready for a reading of the will would sound incomprehensible to them, no matter how we tried. But those of us who live in the age of digital video will also mostly die in the age of digital video.

If we’re lucky.

This is, to date, still the most devastating thing anyone has ever said to my face about my tastes. But it wasn’t the first time a man had tried to explain this band to me.

Aenima, TOOL’s second studio album, was released in 1996. I was fourteen years old, living on my own, washing dishes in a pizza place at night. I was angrier than I could possibly put words to about my life. I didn’t understand why I didn’t have parents like everyone else, and I didn’t know if I’d be able to finish high school at all (spoiler alert: I dropped out.). I was exclusively listening to music that sounded as miserable as I felt. A friend played Aenima for me in her earwax-gold Toyota, sliding the disc into the car’s hungry mouth and letting it roll.

Something has to change,
Undeniable dilemma
Boredom’s not a burden anyone should bear

I had so many unmet needs in my life that I was terrified of ever saying what I wanted out loud. Relief washed over me when I realized Maynard James Keenan would say it for me.

“There’s two kinds of rock music,” he said. He was the kind of guy every kid had to beat like a low-level dungeon boss before Joe Rogan bought the concept and went national with it. Blacklight posters and the stink of weed. Greasy unwashed hair and a mall katana. Loud, boorish opinions he thought of as refined tastes and broadcast without the slightest encouragement. “There’s cock rock and there’s pussy rock.”

I thought he might be another dime-a-dozen Hole hater and was preparing to launch a limp invective against Courtney Love, but it wasn’t that.

“There’s the kind of rock you make because you’re mad, and the kind you make because you want to get laid.” Satisfied as any man is when he alone cleaves the Gordian knot of human existence into a simple binary, he chugged on his three-foot bong before continuing. “They can both be good. But if you’re angrier than horny, pussy rock sounds like dogshit. If you’re hornier than you are angry, cock rock just sounds like complaints. TOOL is cock rock, obviously.”

This garage dweller had just introduced me to several concepts at once, and I thought about it at length as I played and replayed my own copy of Aenima in the months that followed. First, I had learned that music was gendered, both in its creation and in its enjoyment; a fact I had never really considered though I had spent the early nineties gobbling a steady diet of very misogynist hip hop. Second, I had learned that most men had two emotions they were comfortable with expressing: anger and lust. Third, I had come to understand that for the rest of my life, men were going to explain this band to me.

He had a lot to say
He had a lot of nothing to say
We’ll miss him

“TOOL is really beyond most people,” the guy on my bus who would not shut up was saying. “The drummer is this guy named Danny Carey and he’s like a math genius or whatever. He like invents new time signatures. They’re called like polyrhythms or whatever. The radio only plays the simple stuff like ‘Sober’ because the dumb little bitches who like Limp Bizkit will get those, but they don’t play the good stuff off the album.”

“I have the album,” I said, under the mistaken assumption that this was a conversation.

“I understand it because I’m in AP Calc,” he continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “I can like sense how complex it is. Plus the lyrics are like esoteric. Maynard is basically a philosopher and writes about like logic and the nature of existence. It’s really mind-blowing when you get into it. You should read the liner notes.”

“Yeah, I noticed that the hidden track is kind of a parody—”

“It’s not just like ‘waaaahhh Mommy doesn’t love me,’ like Korn does.”

TOOL’s lyrics were about profound interpersonal pain and disillusionment, and of that I was unshakably sure. I was living it. They were about climate change and the hypocrisy of turning art into a business. But I didn’t matter what I knew, or what I was living. What mattered was that I was going to get lectured about TOOL for the rest of my life.

KROQ was playing “Sober,” with its trenchant baseline and glorious rising action like a furtive, guilty sex act about once an hour, and it seemed that almost as often, some boy at school, some man at work, some stranger on the street was trying to tell me a fun fact. The music video for “Prison Sex” was so evocatively disturbing that one kid I knew told me his therapist had shown it to him to see if it would get him talking about his childhood trauma. It had, he explained. It had broken the seal.

“If my mom had told me the truth about putting my dog down, I’d still be able to trust her now. But she just manipulated me! Like the doll. It’s such a crazy video, it like unlocks your worst memories about your parents.”

I nodded. I didn’t have a therapist. Or a mother, anymore. When I watched the video, I felt a little jealous that the kid-puppet was getting so much individual attention.

As I approached legal adulthood, I tried to let go of things that were beloved of the most annoying men on the planet. I listened to more women, I hid my interests in science fiction and fantasy. I wanted to be allowed to like a thing without being graded on it. I wanted to wear my TOOL t-shirt without getting asked to name three songs; a thing that never happened in my Veruca Salt t-shirt.

I was 19 when Lateralus, TOOL’s third studio album,was released. I was about to get my heart broken by my first internet boyfriend, and I could feel the loosening of that bond even over AOL Instant Messenger.

I know the pieces fit, ’cause I watched them fall away
Mildewed and smoldering, fundamental differing
Pure intention juxtaposed
Will set two lovers’ souls in motion
Disintegrating as it goes
Testing our communication

I had the lyrics set as my away message, challenging him to talk to me about our problems. When he messaged me, I was ready.

“So, you’re listening to Lateralus?”

“Yeah, I’m just really feeling the album, you know?”

“Did you know that the art for the album is by a guy named Alex Gray? He paints what it’s like to be on LSD and engaged in the worship of the cosmic body. I’m getting the poster.”

If you search for it, deep in your memory, you will find the sound of a door shutting on AIM.

I’ve kept up my love through Keenan’s iterations, buying the albums by A Perfect Circle and seeing them in concert, adding Puscifer to my playlists, since we don’t really do albums anymore. I’ve stopped telling men that I listen to TOOL. The band came up in conversation with a friend of mine, I can’t remember why. All I can remember is that this friend is stylish and classy and has a vinyl collection; the kind of man who declares something cringe and no one present will ever touch that tainted thing again.

“Oh yeah,” I said, my angry 15-year-old cringe self tucked somewhere safely inside me. “That’s TOOL.”

Cool stylish guy laughed a little. “TOOL is just Radiohead for Juggalos.”

I didn’t mention the Radiohead albums I owned and violently loved. I didn’t say anything at all.

But it was them.

I always think of them this time of year. It happened in the spring, only a few years after we had gotten married. I’d gotten to know his grandparents, who were lovely people. His grandmother taught me how to make dinner rolls by hand. His grandfather loved my corny collection of WWII jokes. I was invited to Sunday supper in their double-wide dozens of times before the end came.

No one saw it coming, not even me as skeptic and outsider. Grandpa was beginning to slip, cognitively. He showed a little impatience, a little agitation. Grandma was a ball of fire who demanded motorcycle rides and told us Glenn Beck was her boyfriend. (I didn’t vomit when I heard that, because I might be a heathen but I am the very least polite.) I have a very good nose for domestic violence and I never got a whiff of it in the house. Patriarchy galore, gender roles like an iron maiden, but no overt physical violence.

Until that day.

The family members who lived closest sometimes dropped their kids off with Grandma and Grandpa while they went to work. Those who went over that day found the door locked and nobody answering. We all expected something might have happened. At their age, even a minor fall could spell doom. Privately, in couples and family groups, we had all said some version of the same thing.

“One will die and the other will follow right after. They’ve been married 75 years; they’ll probably leave this life holding hands.”

Grandma the fireball left this life after numberless stab wounds and a couple of hammer blows to the head. Grandpa was finishing himself off in his tool shed when they found him. He lasted less than a day in the hospital.

The news shattered us. Nobody knew what to say, or even where to look. A 75-year marriage with that many children is not just A Model; in a community like that it is The Model. When I married my husband, his grandfather gripped my hand with the terrible strength of a dairy man and told me we needed to work toward their number of years as our goal. I wasn’t planning to live that long. I guess he wasn’t, either.

Images of it will never leave me. I was one of the few to enter the house after it became a crime scene. I helped my sister-in-law find the clothes Grandma had wanted to be buried in. A knife as it’s raised in the act of stabbing someone multiple times casts off blood with each strike. The numberless stripes of maroon ran upward over the headboard, to the wall, and some to the ceiling. The mattress had to be taken away by a hazardous wastes company. To find her clothes, we slid open closet doors done by Jackson Pollack in red. The familiar and domestic was rendered utterly profane all around us. Her powder-blue prim bathroom an abattoir. The hallway hung with pictures of progenitors surrounded by their half-dozen wives each a hopscotch trail of gore.

I knew that most of them never saw what I saw, but they knew what I knew. The funeral was a gaslight so big you could see it from space. I’ve been to services now for people who have died by murder and suicide, but this is still my only double feature. Sometimes people talk about violence and sometimes they talk about mental health. Some eulogies call for justice and some entreaties are just altar calls to ask you to keep living, not to follow those who opted out.

The murder-suicide of my husband’s grandparents was not mentioned at all during the funeral. The circumstances of their death were completely elided from the proceedings, which were some of the most surreal moments of my entire life. I felt fractured and insane in that soft pastel church (powder blue bathroom) listening to hymns (cast-off blood on the ceiling) “Nearer My God to Thee” was his favorite (the tool shed) and so a beautiful soprano (that must have been where he got the hammer) was singing it up like silk arrows to the rafters (must have been a knife from her own kitchen) while we all sat there like this was normal.

When it ended, the Mormons fed the family a rainbow-colored array of Jell-O salads and some comforting platitudes about how family is forever in the Celestial Kingdom. I thought about that, their version of heaven; where I’d be allowed to live in Heavenly Father’s projects while my in-laws could visit us from the nice Pearly Gated neighborhoods, but we’d never be allowed to visit them.

Forever is a long time.

My best friend listened to me unload the David Lynch dream I’d been through, and then made us a gift that somehow made me feel normal again.

It was a glass-front shadow box. Mounted inside it was a rusty hammer. The front bore a safety-style placard that read in case of marital strife, break glass.

I was taking all this in from a room with a view and a luxurious jetted bathtub when my ex-husband called me to tell me his father had died.

The relationship with in-laws is an odd one. As a person who has striven all her life to have nothing in common with my own parents, I am always wary about meeting the parents of a partner. Most of the time, one immediately notices what the partner got from each of them, what it’s likely to become. It’s useful information, but it’s not always good news.

John had prepared me to meet his family: his mother loved him and his father was ashamed of him. The whole family was LDS; John was not. He was absolutely the black sheep and he was announcing his intention to marry a pagan who was still legally married to her first husband. I thought it was going to be bad, but it was so much worse.

John’s father was a short geriatric bodybuilder who was not only ashamed of his son, but also his father, his body, and nearly everything he had ever done outside of his three beautiful daughters. The first time I met the man who would become my father-in-law, I knew three things.

The second and third I could do nothing about. The first was something I could scarcely abide, so I tried. I figured out what books we had both read and attempted to engage him, but I chose fantasy titles that he was ashamed of having liked. I listened to his and his father’s stories, cultivating enjoyment of their farm-town folksiness and learning to set them up for their transitions in the inevitable retellings. But my enjoyment was never believed as genuine, I thought because of our cultural differences but now I believe was just that same shame. I picked up through painful revelation that Blake was ashamed possibly most of all, of having married a fat woman. As a fat woman, I represented something he hated in himself; something he was ashamed of having passed on to his only son.

The son, too, was a constant source of shame. John was queer and tattooed and effeminate, despite years of fatherly cruelty and martial arts training. John was an underachiever with brilliant test scores and disappointing grades. John returned from a two-year mission in South America to confess he had lost his faith and could no longer be part of the institution that governed his family’s every milestone, every cornerstone, every headstone.

Perhaps most shameful of all, John was sick. With a host of childhood illnesses, John alienated his father by producing the most shameful condition: weakness. Blake couldn’t abide weakness in any man, no matter how sick or how disadvantaged that man was.

No surprise then that he met his own sickness with a stubborn refusal to seek help or submit to care. When John called me to tell me his father had died, I wanted to be supportive. I wanted to ask my former partner in life whether he was ok, whether he needed anything. I did not say “of course he fucking died of something preventable since he thought it was a sin to show someone where it hurt.” The truth about the dead is often uncomfortable.

I never really got over Blake disliking me, and our differences only deepened. I was open in disdain for the LDS funding of anti-LGBTQ legislation, and I was happy to speak my mind if asked. I not only resisted ill-planned attempts to convert me after I was married, but answered them with points too well-researched to argue with.

There was only one thing we ever got along about, and the paradox never failed to delight me: my father-in-law, devout lifelong Mormon and only three degrees of separation from Brigham Young, was kind of a pagan, himself.

Blake had an office in his empty nest, and he hung there a plaque that read “harm none.” This is recognizable to those in the know as the short form of a phrase known as the Wiccan rede: “an it harm none, do as you will.” Beside that there hung a broom, and always, always an edifice of some goddess or another. John told me his father was a fierce believer in the female godhead, obliquely referred to in the LDS “deep doctrine” and analogous to the Jewish mystical concept/goddess Sophia.

In between open dislike and cordial silence, I shared with my father-in-law a series of beautiful pagan moments. He wanted to have ritual for the spring solstice so we did, out on the tender grass with freshly-planted saplings, a bowl of pink rose petals beneath our cakes and apple juice (never wine, he did not stray so far.) He sent one of his daughters to me on the full moon, asking for my blessing for her imperiled pregnancy (she was spotting; it was only comfort) and wept when I gave it. He nailed up a green man that looked like his own face: merry and bearded and veiled by some secret we could never guess.

Blake took me once to his secret place, his place of power. In the mountains above the desert where we lived, it was a green valley with a huge living California oak. Golden slashes of sunlight came down through the leaves, painting the day with a virile beauty. He talked to me a little there, opened up to me as much as he ever would about his relationship with his own father, about what he had wanted for his girls.

I think I saw the real him, just that once. I think I was outsider enough to him and his family that he felt safe. For just a moment, he set aside his mask of eternal shame and I saw the druid, the man he might have been. I loved him as well as I could, mostly in that secret face that he could show me only when I brought him into the circle, told him there was no part of him that was not of the gods.

While he spoke on that enchanted afternoon, I wove a garland of wild ivy and volcanic gilia into the shape of a crown and left it as an offering in that tree. I remember how he smiled at it, how he suddenly looked like a little boy, hoping to be loved.

When the druid died, I knew I wouldn’t find him in any church. I’m divorced now; I wasn’t invited to a funeral service. I didn’t really know him, because he never wanted me to. But when I let go of the druid I knew, it was with a wreath of wild grasses and daffodils I picked and wove and tossed into Niagara Falls.

Before that, I got married when I was younger and even more stupid. Tale I never tell.

I was 22 years old and got involved with a much older man. I had been abandoned as a child, and on my own since I was 14. I was astonished to find anyone who wanted me, and I didn’t know how to evaluate the conditions of that desire. I thought it was novel that anyone would be possessive about me, because I hadn’t ever been possessed. When he asked me to marry him and make that condition permanent, I said yes.

Twenty years later, I got a job with a federal contractor. Though nothing I do in this job is secret or of grave consequence, this requires a full background check. I had to cough up the birth dates and whereabouts of members of my family I haven’t spoken to in twenty years or more. Also, the last known address of my first husband.

I hadn’t exchanged a single bit of information with him since our divorce was finalized in 2006. I had no idea.

At first, I couldn’t even remember when the day of our wedding had occurred. I, who plan my outfit with extreme care when I go to the grocery store, couldn’t recall what I had worn on that day. It took place in front of a justice of the peace in Portland, Oregon. I remembered picking up a friend who had agreed to stand as a witness. I remembered sitting at the freeway onramp, noticing I had a chance to turn left and leave town instead. I sat transfixed by that possibility so long that someone had to honk at me to get me to move.

I remember getting a pamphlet that said I didn’t have to do this, that nobody owned me and marriage didn’t change that. I can’t remember the words that I said. I signed my name. I was married.

Googling someone in 2024 is often a startling experience. I was shocked to find I could easily locate my own address from when I lived in Portland two decades ago, along with others in three states I can barely recall having lived in. Using the one we had shared, I resumed trying to find my ex-husband. I could use the address of the apartment we lived in during our three months of wedded misery, but I was a little curious to see if I could find out where he had gone.

Six seconds later, I had it. I had his middle name, long since memory-holed, and his last name which I did not take. I also had a big red word beneath his name to read: DECEASED.

I can’t recall how I felt about him when we were married. I can’t remember a single moment of pleasure, or even of young love. I can call to mind exactly how dizzy I was at nineteen over my German internet boyfriend, how I flew to Europe to be close to him. The first man I married is like a blank line with an exclamation point at the end.

I remember best the way it ended: in a betrayal that stunned me in its exactitude. No one had ever read my diary, so I didn’t hide it and I didn’t lock it. He read it. He wrote in it, scribbled all over it, took out his preliminary anger on it before I got home. Once I came through the door, he was up in arms, demanding my email password from me, demanding I show him my phone. I didn’t know much, but I knew better than to give in.

It was the first and the last time an intimate partner ever hit me.

Friends came and helped pack me out. When they asked me to explain it, I rationed out words like they cost me money. I didn’t want anyone to know how stupid I had been. One in four women will experience domestic violence at some point in her life. It doesn’t mean she’s stupid and it doesn’t mean she should have known better. With odds like that, it doesn’t mean much of anything. It’s just a thing one can expect, having been assigned female at birth.

Trying to find him online, trying to point him out to the federal government, not to press charges or attempt to get any kind of justice but instead to justify my own identity and detail my past, brought up a ghost of the shame I had felt when I had to leave him. It brought me back to a place I hadn’t been in two decades: the chair in the corner with the dunce cap on. I don’t tell this story because I hate having to admit what I was willing to do for love.

Finding that he had died felt like nothing at all. It didn’t kill the shame; that’s my feeling about me and has nothing to do with him. It didn’t bring me sadness, because I haven’t lost a thing. I read the red word over and over: DECEASED DECEASED DECEASED.

A small relief bloomed within me, followed by a sprig of good cheer. I clicked the radio button the form to mark my first husband as deceased, and the question of his last known address disappeared.

Then I put on a red dress and went out for a drink. Widows wear black. Survivors wear whatever we damn well please.

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It was a kid I knew, but not a friend. He hadn’t gotten into any colleges he’d applied to, and his back up plan had been to join the army. He didn’t pass the physical and he walked home from the recruiter’s office in the strip mall between the snow cone place and the salon called Scarlet O’Haira’s. He and his best friend jogged up the same hill every day, but he wasn’t at the bottom at dawn.

He was at the top with his dad’s gun, already cold.

The funeral was a nightmare; half the house was teenagers. I could barely endure it, and after my girlfriend sheepishly showed me where I’d driven my nails into her palm. I started with licking the blood, but before long I was licking her everywhere. We clung to each other. It seemed the only sensible thing to do.

Freud’s theory was that there are competing drives within the psyche, pushing us toward the basal functions of the living creature. The father of psychology thought we had a life drive that he called Eros (the Greek word and for personification of erotic love and desire) and a death drive he dubbed Thanatos (ditto but death). These drives seem self-evident when we examine the way that we live, doggedly pursuing sex while also letting slip the dogs of war. But humans hardly ever hold fast to a binary, no matter how brilliant the man trying to lay down a “there are two kinds of people in the world” sort of lecture. There’s more to us than that.

My mother died broke in a hospital not far from where I lived. She didn’t ask for me and I didn’t go. There wasn’t a funeral because no one she knew had any money. There was a wake of sorts in my kitchen: me listening to S.O.B by Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats and getting too drunk to think in her wretched memory. A friend told me I should get into the shower, and I remembered someone I had seen for a while in San Francisco had a hell of a nice one. I texted him from the cab that I was en route and in what state I would be delivered to his door. I asked him to take pity on me, to take me at my word, to take the consents I had previously given, to take me. Obliterate me. When I reached his bedroom, I saw he had put up the seven-foot iron apparatus I could trust with my whole weight over his bed. My mother to her coffin; myself to his bed, we were both laid to rest.

As long as we’re dealing with the Greeks, it’s important to point out that eros is not the only kind of love they slapped a name on. They also gave us philia for the love shared between friends, storge for familial love, pragma for companionate love, even philautia for the love of oneself. Why would Freud pick just the one to dance opposite Thanatos in this gothic tango? Could it be that he, too, had a case of the hot black funeral pants?

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I went with a person I had loved to the funeral of a child in their family. The worst kind of tragedy: a father, newly home from deployment, had fallen asleep while the toddler was napping. The toddler woke first and discovered that the screen in a third story window could not bear his weight. We white-knuckled through the service. Coffin like a mini-fridge, audible screaming from the bereaved mother up front.

Driving away, they’d put a hand high on my thigh, pushing my black skirt back and I asked them.

“What is it about a funeral that makes us feel this way?”

“After all that, I need to prove that I am alive,” they answered. They pulled us into an olive grove off the main road, and they proved it every way they knew how. I wondered if those young grieving parents would do the same; prove that they could make life again. How often we make both life and death without meaning to do either.

Each of us is like an open grave; a void needing to be filled. Each of us is like a coffin; a physical container for something wonderful and terrible, needing to be placed in a void of just the right shape and size for our contours. Each of us can feel a thousand types of love and a thousand drives, many of them having nothing to do with either sex or death. Each of us is our own myriad as the Greeks would say; 10,000 selves inside the self.

When we ask why funerals make us horny, we are asking 10,000 people why they live and what they live for. There’s no single answer. There aren’t two kinds of people in the world. There are more than two kinds of people inside you right now. They’re burying versions of you that you’ll never be again, and their busy making people you haven’t yet become. They’re falling asleep and they’re waking up; they’re falling out the window and jogging up the hill. They’re in the olive grove and the hospital, they’re putting up the iron frame and thinking of all the different meanings of the word hung.

Each of us knows that death is coming. Some of us want death to know that we are coming, too.

How many parents, through how many millennia of human history, and under much worse circumstances, have bargained in similar ways with whatever powers they imagined might listen and tilt the universe in their child’s favor? Burning incense, offering sacrifices, saying prayers, chanting spells, clasping amulets. How many parents are doing the same today, in all the countries of the world, in the rubble of villages and towns, at bedsides, in waiting rooms and hospital wards? Surely, if there were such a thing as demons in the world, looking for people to sign a contract with the devil, to trade their human souls for a boon or favor, those demons would be hanging out in pediatric hospitals, in war zones, or any other place where children are injured, sick, dying, because there they would find a ready supply of parents willing, eager, to trade their souls for the lives of their kids.

It’s unnatural for children to die. That’s what we tell ourselves and each other. And yet, for most of human history, it was common. Some studies show that about half of all children died before reaching adulthood until recent times. Even in 1950, one in four children globally died in childhood. I can glimpse the way it was even in my own family: my paternal grandmother gave birth to eight children. Six lived. Two died at or soon after birth. That was less than a hundred years ago in Sweden.

Vaccines, better healthcare, improved hygiene, safer drinking water, antibiotics, and so on, have changed the equation. The global death rate of children has declined from around 50% in the early 19^th century to 4%. Even so, war, disease, accidents, famine, bombs and rockets, guns and neglect still claim the lives of kids everywhere. In 2020 an estimated 5 million children under the age of 5 died, mostly from preventable and treatable causes. 5 million. The leading causes of death for kids under 5 are complications from premature births, infectious diseases, diarrhea and malaria, asphyxiation or trauma at birth, and congenital anomalies.

In many countries, the death rate for children up to age 15 has declined to 0.3%. Still, that declining mortality rate is not evenly distributed. A child born in sub-Saharan Africa is 11 times more likely to die in the first month of life compared to a child born in Australia and New Zealand. Even within countries, there are differences. In Canada, for example, the infant mortality rate is higher in First Nations and Inuit communities. Meaning, even if the system gets better overall, it doesn’t protect all children equally. Poverty, racism, war, inequality, still claim the lives of newborns every day.

When I was pregnant, no one ever spoke to me about the possibility of my child dying for any reason. I went to prenatal classes for months where I learned all sorts of things about what could happen when I was giving birth, but no one talked about the neonatal intensive care unit until my kid was brought there and placed in an incubator. It’s unnatural for children to die, and so very rare. Why talk about something that almost never happens? Besides, even if you’re not superstitious, talking about child mortality, or what might go wrong at birth, with someone who is pregnant seems like it would be bad luck, right?

What I remember most about the 10 days my firstborn spent in the NICU is the feeling of utter helplessness. There was nothing I could do for my child except occasionally hold him, touch him, watch him, talk to him. The nurses told me what I was doing was important, but it felt terribly inadequate. Doctors and nurses would draw blood, do x-rays, poke and prod his little body, and I would stand there telling myself what the nurses told me: that he would get better, that he would come home with us eventually, that he would be OK, because anything else was impossible, unthinkable, and yet the impossible and unthinkable weighed me down every single day.

I recently sat in a local pediatric emergency room for a few hours (nothing to worry about in my case, everyone is fine), and the place was filled with babies and toddlers suffering from respiratory illnesses, fever, diarrhea, vomiting. So many babies. So many parents looking harrowed and sleep deprived. It’s unnatural for children to die, and yet, in the last few months here in British Columbia where I live, three children have died due to complications linked to influenza.

A few weeks ago, I watched the TV-images of babies being removed from the pediatric intensive care unit of a hospital in Gaza. Some of those children were evacuated and lived. Others died. Others keep dying. I can’t tell you what I thought when I watched the footage. What can you think? What can you say when all you want to do is scream? It’s unnatural for children to die, and yet it continues to happen, every day. Even when we know what to do, even when we live in a world overflowing with resources that can help, so many children are not safe in this world.

It should be unnatural for children to die, and yet they do. Too often. Too many.

It’s been almost exactly 21 years since my oldest child was in the NICU. He’s an adult now. He lived. I’ve forgotten the details of most of the prayers and bargains that went through my head in that NICU. Whatever words I spoke or recited in my mind were a way, however futile, to make me feel like I was doing something when there was nothing I could do. Those words were a way to try to tilt the universe just a little bit in my child’s favor, and a way to wring some hope from my own despair. I don’t think anything I thought or said back then made a bit of difference. I was just lucky. Lucky to be in a place and a time where there the resources existed to help my child. No gods or demons needed. Just doctors and nurses and a functioning health care system.

I don’t think there are any gods or demons in this world, none except us, the people in it who are capable of so much empathy and kindness, and so much cruelty and neglect. I think this world is terrible and beautiful, full of goodness and miracles, injustice and pain. It’s a world where children can live and thrive, or suffer and die, and where helpless parents pray and bargain every day, silently, or screaming until their lungs give out, whether anyone is listening or not, trying to tilt the universe in their children’s favor, trying to wring a drop of hope, maybe even salvation, from the black shroud of their own despair.

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He had a special breathing treatment machine in the school nurse’s office. It wasn’t like the inhalers some kids carried in their pockets; it sounded like an industrial fan and it gave off vapor when he used it. When JC was in trouble, it wasn’t like a gasping asthma attack. It sounded like he was drowning.

I was at JC’s tenth birthday party. He had a piñata and a hundred drunk relatives. Most of our fifth grade class was invited and we danced to Selena in the driveway of his grandmother’s house while the adults played dominoes in the garage. When he started to gurgle like a blocked drain, his mother pounded on his back and got out their home version of the breathing machine. When she pulled up his shirt, I saw the rickrack of his ribs, the pale grey color of his skin, blotching red when he coughed.

I joked later to our mutual friends that he looked like that scene in E.T. when the alien is lying in a ditch beside a stream, mottled like a salami, obviously near death.

We all laughed, because the image was funny and pitiful, and we didn’t know what it meant.

JC had a massive crush on my best friend, Rachel. She had been his first kiss, I knew. She had touched him over his pants at his request, the way that kids do. It was furtive and naughty and she asked me if that meant she wasn’t a virgin anymore.

I knew, but I told her I didn’t know what it meant.

Maria, JC’s overworked mother, seemed to fall apart over every little thing. I remember her cussing out our landlord because some thief broke her mailbox lock. I saw her burst into tears over a flat tire. She had zero patience with her other kids and would yell anything they made her say twice. I didn’t know then that adults who can’t process emotions like frustration and rage and grief they often have trouble containing their temper or having proportionate reactions to normal life stressors.

We were ten. I was ten, Rachel was ten, Juan Carlos was ten years old. Maria was maybe thirty, and she was understandably frustrated that her son could be born with a disease for which there was then and still is still now no cure. She was enraged because no doctor or hospital could save him when he started to drown inside his own body. She was grieving every day for a child she knew would die.

Cystic fibrosis is an inherited genetic disorder, and both parents have to carry the gene for the offspring to be affected. It’s caused by a mutation, and JC knew that word when the doctor said it because we all read X-Men in the library and in the one good bodega that carried comic books. He didn’t know how to translate it for his mother, who didn’t know the word from comics or from anywhere else. He told her it meant it wasn’t her fault. She nodded and said she knew what it meant.

Juan Carlos was on the swings. I was on his right, Rachel on my right. We knew swinging would make him wheeze, but he didn’t care. On his left was Jessica, and at her feet, Jesus. Jesus was counting. Our school was badly overcrowded; administration resorted to a trimester system with two months on and one month off to ease the bursting classrooms and teeming halls. But even with a quarter of us out at all times, there just weren’t enough spots. When someone stood at your foot and counted down from a hundred, you had to give up your swing.

Jesus got bored counting down on Jessica and started ducking and darting beneath her swing as she flew through the air. Ever the showoff, he cut it closer and closer. None of us thought this was a problem until he snagged her shoe with his shoulder and pulled her down off the black rubber seat down to the gravel from a terrible height. I knew the sound because I’d watched my mother spatchcock a chicken. I jumped from my seat, Rachel jumped from hers. JC dragged his feet and staggered off after us.

Jessica was unconscious, and that was for the best. Jesus was wailing. When I got closer, I saw that Jessica’s tibia was fractured and the jagged edge of it poked out through the hairless skin of her lower leg. Someone hauled Jesus away. A yard narc dragged JC to the nurse’s office to bring back his breath. Rachel and I stood there, just staring, until someone told us we had to go, then screamed at us to tell them the girl’s name. The girl who lay there, bone exposed to the air.

I told them her name. Rachel and I didn’t talk about what we had seen. JC came back to class when he could breathe again, and he didn’t bring it up either.

Jessica didn’t ever come back to school. We didn’t know what that meant.

JC missed a lot of days after Christmas. When he did come in, he could barely hold up his head. His labored breath sounded as hard as a full-time job. Teachers didn’t call on him, and he didn’t swing. When Rachel asked if he wanted to kiss again, if he wanted her to maybe touch it, he shrugged. He didn’t want anything.

I knew what that meant.

Juan Carlos wasn’t first person I had known who died, but he was the first person my own age. Not a baby who wasn’t going to make it, not a grandparent whose time was up. He turned eleven. We were eleven.

Sixth grade began without him. The relatives who had thrown him that birthday party didn’t invite the kids who had been there to his funeral. Nobody notified us. Maria left without giving our landlord notice; I saw them go into the empty apartment with the sheriff that summer.

Out by the swings, our playground featured a huge maple tree. It dropped its spiraling seeds by the thousands that fall. When there were people on the swings and people counting them down (newly forbidden to run beneath) Rachel and I caught them. We called them helicopter seeds.

“If I catch this one, it means Juan Carlos is in heaven right now.”

Rachel usually held out her hands like a basket and let the seeds fall gently in. It made her look like a Disney princess; delicate and belonging more to nature than the rest of us. But this time, because our dead friend’s eternal disposition was riding on it, she reached up and snatched the helicopter seed out of the air in her small brown fist.

I was a superstitious child. I grew into a superstitious adult. I want to believe that there’s a heaven for kids who die for no reason, and that he’s there.

I still want to believe that’s what it meant.

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Her passing wasn’t particularly sad and certainly wasn’t unexpected. I watched the adults in my life plan her funeral coldly, clearly annoyed at the expense of it all. We didn’t expect a crowd at the wake and there was almost no one to notify; she had outlived or alienated everyone she knew. The mortuary shipped us her ashes in a nondescript brown plastic box. It looked like an artifact of a 1970s office set, as outdated as a Rolodex, pebbled like the hard-shell cover for a typewriter. It suited her. The box sat around the house for months as my mom and her sister tried to decide what they should do with the cremains.

“She hated nature,” my aunt said. “Seems almost cruel to put her anywhere outside.”

“Good,” my mom said, exhaling the smoke that would kill her, too. “Fuck her. I hear the city dump is nice.”

My aunt rolled her eyes. “We should try to honor her wishes.”

“What wishes?” My mom’s voice was like a wasp in the ear; irritating until it could find a way to hurt you. “She had no money, no will, and left us no instructions. Her wish was to be a bitch, and she got that wish every day for seventy years. I’m thinking of pouring her into the litter box.”

My aunt stood up and stretched her back, I think just to avoid looking at my mother, who looked just like the bitch in the box. “What did she love? Where was she happy?”

“Not us,” my mom said, lighting her next Kool. “Not here.”

“Vegas.” I shouldn’t have spoken and I knew it. They both looked at me like they’d forgotten I existed.

“What?” My aunt turned around to face me.

“She loved Vegas. She said so all the time. She was happy there.”

“Because she could drink and gamble and pass out every day. Because that’s normal there.” My mom puffed a ring of smoke that rose to the yellowing fixture. “All right. Fine. Let’s take her to the desert.”

“And do what?” My aunt looked confused, fanning the air in front of her face as if that could ward off cancer. “We can’t just dump her on the strip.”

“We probably can,” my mom countered. “We just have to not tell anyone what we’re doing.”

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I love Las Vegas, but not like my grandmother did. I don’t gamble, and I can’t drink like she did. I love tawdry magic of it; the hotels lit up like electric diamonds, the overblown stage shows and endless food that has no business being in Nevada. Vegas is the only place where I suspend my rules about sushi (not to be eaten anywhere more than a 2-hour drive from the sea).

I loved it as a child, too. There was a brief and ill-starred campaign to revamp Vegas into a family destination that coincided with my grandmother’s death. I was eleven years old; I wanted nothing more than a big bathtub and to be left unsupervised at a vat of buffet gravy (NB: not much has changed) and Vegas offered those things. Living in southern California meant it was a short drive to the city of bright lights and broken dreams. We set out at midnight with Grandma in the trunk.

My mom turned twenty dollars into quarters and dumped the quarters into the tacky brown box of ashes. She then fished them out and put them into a plastic bucket, pointing me toward the arcade at Circus Circus. For an hour, I pumped those dusty quarters into steel machines that made a lot of noise and gave me nothing back. I can’t think of a better way to honor my progenitrix; I was literally following in her empty, joyless footsteps.

At different casinos, up and down the strip, my mother and her sister fed coins gummy with human remains into different slot machines. They lost pieces of her to a chance to win a car, to the promise of big jackpots. They dipped their money into her ashes and fed hungry slot after hungry hole, pieces of their mother clinging to the grooves in a dead president’s face. Not a single machine paid out more than a dollar or two, and about half of the ashes were gone.

“We have to leave in the morning,” my aunt reminded us. “I’ve got work tomorrow night.”

My mom shook the box. Little chips of bone rattled inside. “Come on,” she said.

Night is Las Vegas’ mask. Without it, you can see her awful scars, how tired she is. The scabs around her mouth melt into the darkness if you can forget what you saw by day. We walked down the strip to a construction site where there would one day be a new casino hotel. The crew wasn’t working; the site was silent. My mother, ever the petty criminal, found a break in the fence. We took the box to a concrete mixing form and tipped them out right there, mixing in with the rest of the dust.

The cost of a real columbarium is anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. For the low low price of a tank of gas and $120 in quarters, my grandmother was laid to rest all across the Las Vegas strip and in the foundation of what would one day become the Bellagio.

In the morning, I talked them into one last decadent breakfast buffet. I asked the pastry chef to torch me a couple of crèmes brulee, and I climbed into the car certain I’d be unconscious before the state line.

Somewhere out on that desert highway, my mom stuck the ugly brown box out the window and tapped it on the bottom as one does a ketchup bottle. Ashes streamed out, and some flew in the open rear passenger window, landing on my lips, waking me from sleep.

This is a review for that second use case. These are not the cheap waxy stagepaints of a casual coal kisser. These are the kind that go on like a starless night, last all day, and do not transfer to cup or collar.

My research spans decades of experience and favors a matte finish. Pucker up and let’s begin.

It is with exquisite pain that I inform you that MAC Cosmetics does not make the best black lipstick on the market. These people had us in a chokehold with Ruby Woo all through the aughts and tens, but roulette rules are in effect here and either red or black must win.

MAC’s retro matte liquid lip color in shade name Caviar is charming and properly dark, going on smooth with that signature MAC scent of a vanilla frosted cake being served at a birthday party in a strip club. It is relatively transfer-proof, but it flakes as the hours pass. Think of her as a friend who makes a brilliant cameo at every party, but the minute you stop paying attention to her she will sneak out the door.

Kat Von D’s liquid black matte lipstick used to be called Witches, but the shade name was changed to Black Briar for inexplicable reasons. It is a witchy shade, slightly into blue-black territory, with a light finish and a decent staying power. Like all Kat Von D formulas, this one is vegan and is not scented. Imagine a little black dress that you can wear with diamonds or your jean jacket and you won’t stun them in the streets, but they won’t criticize, either.

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Urban Decay offers us their Vice Lip Bond glossy longwear liquid lipstick and this ONE time I’ll wear something that’s got the same finish as the vinyl booth in an all-night diner. The shade name is Indie Sleaze: Pure Black and that’s just what she is: a black so pure that wearers of all skin colors seem paler around its outlines. If you want to look like a corpse who’s recently had a wet drink, this is the one. Another vegan formula, this lip color is richly pigmented and wears well for about four hours. She’s a good first date who makes you laugh, but somewhere underneath you know she’s going to break your heart.

Lime Crime’s liquid lipsticks will always have a special place in my cold black heart, especially their Velvetines liquid lipsticks line. If you were a 1990s goth like I was, you might remember this being sold at Hot Topic in shades of antique gold and deep purple, but their Black Velvet is as dark as an unmarked grave. This vegan formula goes on smooth and dries immediately, but it takes all of your lip moisture with it. Think of this as a glorious night of drunkenness: everything will swim and shine with exuberant delirium, but the next day your only thought will be moisture within and moisture without.

Now we come to the heavy hitters.

Maybelline, that juggernaut of drugstore brands, cannot be beat in the category of matte lipsticks. Their Super Stay Matte Ink line is unmatched for range of shades, staying power, and transfer-proof hold. Their black shade is Thrill Seeker, and I can assure you that every thrill sought will be found. This stuff goes on like a hole in reality, so black and so smooth that it swallows the light on your face. It holds and holds, never needed to be reapplied if you let it dry properly. She’s your best friend, your ride or die, the one who picks up the check and gives you a wink before you’ve even got your wallet out.

The uncontested winner of this lineup may shock you. I had never heard of Pretty Zombie cosmetics when it was recommended to me. Their website is bare-bones and their Instagram is neglected. I feared I might never receive my order after I entered my credit card details. But she did come, shade name Black Cat, and she was perfect. She is indeed a black cat; graceful, languid, laying on your lap and never moving again. This formula is basically bulletproof. Slightly blacker than Thrill Seeker, smoother than Black Velvet, and best of all: when people ask what you’re wearing, you get to tell them about a lipstick they’ve never heard of before.

First: keep in mind that people come to the cemetery to grieve their dead. The newer parts of the cemetery aren’t picturesque anyhow, but you really don’t to be discovered draped over the tombstone the beloved when the lover comes to call. Choose among the oldest graves you can to avoid disrupting someone’s coming to mourn.

Second: with those older graves and monuments, you may be very tempted to climb them, lie on them, crouch on them like a gargoyle. Don’t do any of that. Old tombstones are brittle, fragile, and unsafe. You could hurt yourself or the stone, and both are precious and expensive.

Next: choose your props wisely. You can get gorgeous pictures of yourself with a lantern, flowers are a perfect choice and belong in that setting, and capes and cloaks are suited to the season. Walking around with an obvious sword or dagger, even if your behavior is circumspect, can turn into discomfort or even trouble. Get creative! Eat cake among the stones, or bring a prop hand to set up as though it’s popping from a grave.

Speaking of your behavior: many cemeteries have security, groundskeepers, gravediggers, and other staff keeping watch over the premises. Some have posted hours specifically for mourners, and many have rules about food and drink, playing music, pets, and weapons. Familiarize yourself with all these rules before you go and follow them. Observe any posted notices, and be polite to staff you meet on the grounds. Many cemeteries are private property, belonging to churches, mortuary services, or other groups. They largely tolerate people who come for the quiet and the view, but take a dim view of shenanigans. Be on your best behavior and get your best shots.

Your shots are the goal here, and they can be stunning. Use the surroundings to your best advantage. Graves can make a spooky or pensive background. Praying figures and angels can loom over you at a low angle, or seem to be worshipping you if shot from the higher ground. If you’re lucky enough to have a mausoleum, you can lurk beneath its eaves or pose as though you’re about to enter through the door.

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If your cemetery is open to the public at night, you can shoot shadowy, moonlit wonders. You can position yourself in the dark corners, your profile peeking into the light for eerie effect. If you’d rather be there in the light of day, look for surfaces that shine like polished marble, reflecting pools, and glass windows to accentuate your outlines in light rather than darkness.

Most cemeteries have trees, and winter trees are a moody backdrop for photos. Just as lying against, leaning on, climbing, or touching extensively is an absolute no-go for headstones, trees are available for all that. Be careful if you’re going to climb, don’t get your head or yourself busted. But gently interacting with trees is perfectly acceptable and the results are often compelling. The bare branches of the season look like haunted hands. The bark is dark and textured. If the tree is holding snow, it can look like a shroud or a layer of bone.

Think about color against all that. Does your cemetery still have greenery, or is it bare? Are all the stones grey, or do you have some unusual pink or white marble? Are there flowers growing, or a colorful wall or building? Choose your outfit accordingly, to match or to contrast. The easier way to solve this is also a classic: process your photos after the fact into black and white. There are different filters for this, including some that can make you look like a movie star from another century, rendered on silver nitrate film. Use the gifts of the cemetery, but use the tools of digital editing, too! Even if you can’t shoot at night, you might be able to make it look as though you did.

A cemetery in winter doesn’t have to be a bleak or empty place, any more than a funeral needs to be a dreary affair. Remember to bring your sense of mystery and whimsy, to approach it as respectful play. Even your spookiest, most moody images are best brought to life when you’re engaged with it and bring your sense of fun along with your black crown that holds the moon.

You could come back with some shots that are simply to die for.

It is just so inconvenient to try and keep your dead loved ones near to you in this day and age. Most of us don’t want to move an urn full of ashes from one temporarily affordable condo to the next, let alone buy a plot of land for someone who can’t even enjoy the mushrooms that grow on it.  While the Victorians used to make beautiful jewelry from the hair of the deceased, modern problems require modern solutions. There are ways to keep your departed dear reliably near without paying rent or a mover for the privilege.

(None of this is sponcon, by the way. I’m just the sort of person who makes a hot cup of tea and searches keep dead body legal how and human corpse practical use until someone shows up with a warrant.)

First up is one for all you environmentalist goths out there: human composting. I wrote about this upon the death of my lover, David, because he opted for this one. Recompose specializes in human composting, as does The Natural Funeral, Earth Funeral, and a handful of other providers. Human composting legally and respectfully processes human bodies into forest-nurturing compost. This is a great option for those family members who insist they want “nothing fancy” or “just a Hefty bag” or “don’t waste money on a coffin, just let me rot.” This is rot for the good of the trees, and it’s now legal in six states. For mementos, these outfits offer a range from a tiny urn filled with the soil made of the loved ones’ body to a sackful of it to spread on your own garden or throw in a dumpster while crying. It’s portable, it’s powerful, it’s safe to carry on an airplane (though I don’t suggest you tell the TSA the story of your bag of dirt.)

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But maybe you’re too fancy for all that. Maybe you’d rather return to stardust than plain old earthdust when you die. When you’ve lived a fabulous life, it’s only natural that you’d choose a fabulous keepsake of your death. Human remains can be compressed into diamonds. Using only one pound of crematory ashes, the power of science, and the desire for sparkle, the dead queens among us can keep gagging them by becoming a literal gem. We are all just elaborations of carbon, after all. So why not be the most elaborate one possible? Even pets can die like a diva and become an opal for remembrance. Remember: a box in the dirt may be nice and traditional, but diamonds are a landless peasant’s best friend.

We’re not eternal creatures. Perhaps the idea of becoming an indestructible stone runs counter to your sensibility as a living meatbag with hormones and feelings. Or perhaps you’d like to eat of your own dead! Either way, you’re in luck. The mushroom burial suit is a legal option accepted at most green cemeteries, and the human body can be processed immediately through mycoremediation and made to grow delicious mushrooms. These fungal bodies can also be dried and preserved as a souvenir of the person that was: a fruiting body from the fruiting body is a fitting and poetic way to remember the fleeting life of meat.

Many of us are more romantic about our eventual end than mushrooms, but less than diamonds, as so there are options in the middle. Ashes from cremation can be pressed into a vinyl record or sifted into a clear locket so that the living can see the tiny chips of bones left behind. Cremains can be secreted in a picture frame or sealed forever into a gold elephant-shaped pendant. The options for a portable piece of a human corpse that you can take with you wherever you go and store no matter how tiny your studio are too numerous to mention. If you dream of keeping a loved one in a wearable football helmet bearing the logo of the Oregon State beavers, your dream can come true.

We live very differently from our forebears, thousands of generations of whom lived and died within a five-mile radius of where their parents were buried. With new ways of living must come new ways of dying and grieving. When it comes time to see to your people’s final disposition, don’t be afraid to get unconventional. There are more options than ever when it comes to laying someone to rest and deciding what (if anything) to hold on to. Planning ahead, you can also make any of these choices for yourself.

After all, it’s your funeral.