Death is the beginning of Mythology
by Tony, Western Australia
Consultant, Aged 50
My dad died when I was twelve.
"Who Owns This Death?"
our western Christian consumerism demands
underneath hushed corridor conversations
as the death industry negotiates
honour into distraction.
He was killed.
"I do!"
is the clamorous chorus
as the living rush to marry themselves to
the altar of distraction,
huffing and puffing their
capital B Bereavement through all
the accoutrements of
a commercially mediated passage
to mask the lie of life.
My heart thumped; my stomach churned; my head exploded.
And the soon-to-be-dying,(and the later-to-be-dying),
speaking with their eyes,go unseen and not heard.
Death-and-dying has become a
manicured process of dainty
bite-sized crustless sandwiches,
eaten with napkins,
in sanitized antechambers of
pristine architectured crematoriums
of parenthetic closure
for the half-alive.
He died early in the morning on Christmas Eve, five days after the small plane in which he was a passenger crashed
into the sea.
A momentary sun-cycle
flashing through the apathy of living to trifles,
where the half-alive who remain are
caught like kangaroos in a spotlight,
confronted by their unexamined lives,
paddling their toes in the shallows of life.
I was too young for him to have stepped from hero to ordinary bloke.
And the now-dead,(and the later-to-be-dead),
speaking with their eyes, go unseen and not heard,
as the industry of death creates a story
drained and pasteurised of texture, mythologized and sterilized into an image
that haunts tomorrow, distorts yesterday,
and renders today fraught.
I wasn't ready to let him go.
The public faced packaging condemns
grief to the privacy
of individualised worlds, unprocessed
and un-honoured.
For weeks our home was invaded by the clamouring of the faithful competing for notice and ownership,needing their comfort to be heard. Dad became an image that needed to be; disconnected, corked in a bottle like a museum to a mildewed god.
Deadness is
the final stopping point,
where we all have to accept that
we can no longer influence the
image of us in the world;
the process where I
no longer count in the world; where I am
finally overtaken by what others choose
to do with what I lived
in their lives.
It took me until I was fifty years of age, two years older than my Dad when he was killed, to uncork him, and me, from the bottle, to become just a couple of blokes who were special to each other.
Death is the beginning of mythology.
Copyright © Australian Museum, 2010