“Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time. Live well and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead.”
-from World of Tomorrow by Don Hertzfeldt
The wrong people keep dying. In October 2020, Donald Trump and basically every Republican senator got COVID at a Rose Garden event. Donald Trump apparently almost died. He didn't die, though, because he was the president, so he got to go to his multi-room suite at Walter Reed and receive cutting-edge treatment from the best doctors in the country, which we all paid for. None of the senators, who insisted along with Trump that this pandemic wasn't that big a deal and we should stop whining about it, who let the bottom fall out on pandemic relief and unemployment insurance and the entire health care system, died either. Conservative columnists who thought those wacky libs were addicted to mask wearing and staying inside1 all got by just fine. The actual people who had died at that point in the pandemic were retail workers and restaurant servers and nurses and day care workers and bus drivers and schoolteachers, who died because they had to keep physically going to work to hold society together. They died in the hallways of overflowing hospitals and their bodies were kept in refrigerated trucks outside of the overflowing morgues.
During the Black Death, you could find "Danse Macabre" imagery in European cathedral murals and on city walls; this iconography usually featured skeletons, representing the dead, holding hands and dancing with representations of the living, usually a wide variety of living people including laborers and royalty and clergy. It was a time when everyone was thinking about death, and the skeletons in the images seemed to say "guess what. It's going to happen to absolutely everyone. Even if you survive the plague, it's going to happen. We promise."
During our more recent plague, I did spend a fair amount of time thinking about how it - meaning death - was going to happen to absolutely everyone. One thought that gave me a great deal of comfort early in the pandemic was "now is the envy of all the dead", which was a line from the 2015 Oscar-nominated short film World Of Tomorrow2. I still say that to myself nearly every day; I kind of flirt with the idea of getting a tattoo of that line except I don't know how to explain to my wife that I want a tattoo of a line from a Don Hertzfeldt movie.
The point is, I'm not going to say I'm an expert on processing my own mortality, but for the past three-ish years, guided in part by that line, I've at least gotten a little bit better at making sure I'm fully present with the people I love, as much as possible, so that when it (death) does happen to me, I have at least been with the people I love as much as I could. I will at least be alive and present now, because now is the envy of all the dead, and there will one day be a time when I will wish I still had "now".
That is how I think about death, and I need some framework to think about it, because it's not like there are a lot of Danse Macabre images in my local Catholic church or on the outside wall of the Portillos. We were told, for a good two and a half years and counting, to keep ordering from restaurants and that we could go get haircuts again if we wore masks and eventually to get back to the office, just whatever you do don't think about death don't think about death don't think about death. Maybe that's because if we thought about it too much, we'd start getting angry about how the wrong people were dying. Here's Lyta Gold writing on Danse Macabre iconography for Current Affairs in May 2021:
"In the pan-European danse macabre, the living human characters usually come from all classes: peasants, noblemen, monks, popes, and emperors. The joyful skeletons flex and grin, while the living stand stiff and terrified. The Dance of Death is a story about how everyone will die, and not “eventually,” but very, very soon…[but] during the Black Death, every kind of person really did die, whether peasants, noblemen, monks, popes, or emperors…Contemporary COVID-19, however, can be staved off by cold hard cash. Money and fame can buy the special experimental treatments given to patients like Trump and Chris Christie, the private islands that are perfect for waiting out this plague in style, or the vaccines that the wealthy have been able to score through “hefty donations” and “cozy relationships with CEOs” as per a report from Business Insider. Over two million people have died of the coronavirus so far, but the rich (and white) have had a tendency to survive, while the poor (and Black and brown) have died. In Poe’s classic story “The Masque of the Red Death,” the rich and well-connected flee into the countryside ahead of a terrible plague that has devastated the poor, only to be caught, in the end, by the specter of the Red Death himself. But the Red Death would struggle to make it into the private party of a contemporary prince. He’d probably be turned away at the door by armed and vaccinated guards."
I'm not going to say I'm an expert on processing my own mortality, but for the past three-ish years I've at least gotten a little bit better. But, in an era when mortality has been top-of-mind for a lot of us, I'm still not doing a good job processing the lack of mortality of certain people in this world.
2009 medalist The Graveyard Book is Neil Gaiman's kind-of homage to Kipling's The Jungle Book, filtered through Gaiman's dark fantasy sensibilities. As with The Jungle Book, a young boy is orphaned early in his life and raised apart from human society, in a series of episodic stories. But it's Neil Gaiman, so instead of Mowgli being raised by a friendly bear and panther, we have a boy who toddles into a cemetery after his family is murdered by a supernatural assassin, and the ghosts and other paranormal inhabitants of the graveyard take him in and raise him as their own. They are encouraged to do so by the figure of Death, represented in this book as a woman riding a massive grey stallion, who admonishes them that "the dead should have charity."
The boy takes on the name Nobody - Bod for short - and learns the techniques of the graveyard folk - Haunting, Dreamwalking, Fading, and the like - as he slowly grows up and as his family's assassin is still pursuing him. The book is a fun read; if you like any of Gaiman's other stuff, you'll like this. Gaiman has a similar skill set as Stephen King: he's got a great and very detailed imagination, the characters he creates are fun to spend time with, and he's very good at getting his stories off to a fast start with minimal exposition. The best part of The Graveyard Book is about midway through the novel, when the real, literal Danse Macabre happens.
The Danse Macabre described in chapter five of Gaiman’s novel almost happens outside of the actual timeline of the book. Nobody - neither the dead nor the living - really remembers the dreamlike event after it happens; Bod is the only one that seems to think that it really happened. But everyone knows that it’s coming, as the graveyard flowers start to blossom in the winter. As one ghost tells Bod, excited for the dance to come, “things blossom in their time. They bud and bloom, blossom and fade. Everything in its time.” As Bod’s guardian hints, “everything in its season”.
The living know that it’s coming, too, although they don’t really understand it. They know they have to collect the blossoming flowers from the graveyard, they know that every man, woman, and child in the town has to receive one, as if its some knowledge that has been deeply ingrained in the town for generations. “It was a tradition in the Old Town, before the city grew up around it. When the winter flowers bloom in the graveyard on the hill they are cut and given out to everybody, man or woman, young or old, rich or poor.” The living gather in the town square and at midnight, the ghosts process in, fully visible to everyone. The music starts - nobody knows what the source is - and the dance begins, filling everyone with a “fierce joy” as the tempo speeds up. Every living person finds a partner among the dead, everyone changes partners throughout the night, and everyone across the town and across the generations is blissfully united, truly united, by the one thing that can ever really unite them. Death herself arrives at the end to lead the crowd in the final dance numbers.
The Danse Macabre chapter doesn’t really advance the plot - Bod will eventually find the man who killed his family and confront him in the book’s climax - but it’s the scene that sticks with me the most. It shows me something different about the promise of death than a threat or gloomy inevitability. It can also be a promise that a different season may be coming someday. And if I'm thinking about death and I'm thinking about the proper season of death, then I'm also thinking about another book.
Ecclesiastes is a very strange book in the bible; it really doesn’t feel like it belongs with the rest of them. The main message of the book, at first glance, feels like it's "everything that you think is important is something that doesn't actually matter". You know the most famous passage from that book already, in chapter 3, because the Byrds made it into a song. To everything turn turn turn there is a season turn turn turn, you know the one. There’s a time to weep, and a time to laugh, a time to mourn, and a time to dance. There’s a time to be born, and there’s a time to die. This is a very popular scripture reading for funerals. There’s a time for death, for everyone. It’s going to happen. We promise.
But there’s also a time to be alive, as chapter 9 of Ecclesiastes explains. This passage wasn’t a Byrds song, so it’s not quite as famous, but it was a Dave Matthews Band song, so it is still a little famous:
“Go, eat your bread with joy and drink your wine with a merry heart, because it is now that God favors your works…Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of the fleeting life that is granted you under the sun. This is your lot in life, for the toil of your labors under the sun. Anything you can turn your hand to, do with what power you have; for there will be no work, nor reason, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the nether world where you are going.”
In other words, now is the envy of all the dead. There will be a time later when you will wish you had “now”, so know how wonderful it really is to have “now”. As I said earlier in this piece, I’m better at this than I used to be, but I still have trouble processing the lack of mortality of others, the fact that the bad guys keep winning, the idea that what happens in the "now" doesn't seem just or good or right a lot of the time. But right after that Dave Matthews Band passage in Ecclesiastes 9, there's another less famous passage:
"Again I saw under the sun that the race is not won by the swift, nor the battle by the valiant, nor a livelihood by the wise, nor riches by the shrewd, nor favor by the experts; for a time of calamity comes to all alike."
Yes the bad guys do win a lot. What do you care? They will all dance with the skeletons someday, too. Maybe not as soon as you'd like, but it will happen. You have your now and you won't have it forever. Don't worry about the bad guys, the end will come for them just like it will for you. We promise.
And in that context, the "promise" of death feels less like a threat hanging over my head and more a reassurance from a great levelling force operating on a scale too vast for me to understand, a reassurance that my now is just that precious and cannot be taken away from me by anyone else.
For the final number on the evening of the Danse Macabre, Bod finds himself paired with Death herself, the Lady on the Grey. Not fully understanding who she is, he tells her:
"'I love your horse. He's so big! I never knew horses could be that big.'
'He is gentle enough to bear the mightiest of you away on his broad back, and strong enough for the smallest of you as well.'
'Can I ride him?' asked Bod.
'One day,' she told him, and her cobweb skirts shimmered. 'One day. Everybody does.'
'Promise?'
'I promise.'"
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1949 medalist, King Of The Wind: The Story Of The Godolphin Arabian by Marguerite Henry.
I also wrote about this separately in 2020 - the entire short film is now available on YouTube and you should pause your life for 15 minutes and watch it.