A REASON TO LIVE

PART ONE: CONFLICT

Months ago, I went to Whole Foods after work. I wanted to buy some lysine tincture for my cold sore and get some chapstick, which I did not need and was planning to steal. (I’m an independent bookseller in downtown Manhattan, and have a sturdy sense of consumer ethics, which is why I can only justify shopping with Amazon or one of its affiliates if, A.) I really need something and don’t know where else to get it quickly, and B.) I can find a pleasurable way to stick it to them in the process. I didn’t get away with it in this instance, or even try—for reasons that will soon become clear—so don’t call the FBI just yet, okay?)

The line at the Whole Foods checkout is sophisticatedly organized into several rows, differentiated by color: red, blue, and yellow. You pick one of the three to wait on and then you watch the big-screen television hanging from the ceiling. The TV announces your turn by flashing your line’s color on the screen, directing you toward the checkout. A robot voice will also guide you over an intercom, saying, for example, BLUE PLEASE PROCEED TO REGISTER 14. This system creates all sorts of problems, of course, especially because on any given day, more than half the people shopping in a New York City Whole Foods are from out of town and have never experienced any such impersonal and unnecessary technology. 

But on this day it wasn’t crowded, and I stepped onto my line—red—and began to nervously pat myself down for my iPhone and wallet, two things I always need and never seem to have. (This is my Dickensian tick; if a reader needed to remember me in a long novel, I’d be the character who always came on the page in a frenzy, crying about her lost wallet/glasses/keys/iPhone/Metrocard.) I might’ve already noticed some passive aggressive muttering at this point, but that isn’t the kind of thing I tend to pay any attention to in public. Like many lifelong New Yorkers, I need a person to confront me directly if they’d like me to know they exist.

Which is what then happened.

“Could you be any closer to me?” said the person directly in front of me on the line. It was not, as you might have reasonably guessed, Chandler Bing. Instead, she was tall with elbow-length red hair and wore a black minidress. The dress had spaghetti straps and a corset bodice that propped up her obvious boob job. I’m not judging her for having breast implants—I actually think cosmetic surgery is pretty bad ass, honestly, and hers were impressive, for sure—but I mention it now, and with some snark, because we soon became enemies, and I think it might be something she wouldn’t want me to bring up in recounting the following events.

I said something along the lines of: “Huh?”

“Back up, dumbass!” she snapped. There were two gallons of skim milk in her cart, plus several boxes of wheat cereal—the shredded, high fiber, cardboard type—some raspberries, nonfat greek yogurt, I forget what else.

I looked at her askance for a second, and at the space between us, which was about two and a half feet. Indeed, I could be closer to her. Much closer. 

But I nodded, shrugging.

“I will back up,” I said. “And give you more space, but I don’t really appreciate the way you’re talking to me.”

“I’m not talking to you in any way,” she said. “Now back up, dumbass.”

I took one step back. Guys, listen. In general, I practice social distancing. But the problem with six feet in New York is that nobody has it. It just isn’t there. The vinyl seatbelt-like rope corralling each line was probably 8 feet long, total. If there had been those circular stickers on the floor instructing me where precisely to stand, I would’ve been right where the sticker instructed. There was not. And it wasn’t like I was crowding her—I don’t like when someones dominoes up on me, either! —plus this was late September of 2021; I was just following what had become the latest of our always morphing protocols. In the months since the vaccines had gone into our arms, New Yorkers continued to keep more distance than ever before, but not six feet, because like I said! It isn’t possible. 

Full disclosure, though: in this case, I could’ve backed up even more. There wasn’t anyone behind me yet, so I might have just done what she, uh, requested and let it all go. I resisted, I think, mostly to get back at her for calling me a dumbass, but also because the further back I went, the more likely it would be that the next person who showed up would be annoyed about all the space I’d left in front of me, and then it would be a fight in the other direction. 

You’ll never win. You may, however, find some consolation in acting like a loser. At least, I do. 

Those closest to me often beg me not to engage with difficult people. Let it go, my friends say. You’re embarrassing me. It’s not worth it. That person is just an aggressive asshole. That person its looking for a fight. 

My loved ones seem unwilling to consider and accept that I, too, may be looking for a fight. Because these confrontations don’t bother me—they roll off like water on a duck’s back—and it never occurs to me to take the high road. The high road… kind of bores me. 

“See, right there,” I said. “It’s pretty rude and childish to call someone a dumbass instead of saying, just, you know: ‘Would you mind giving me space?’ It’s okay if you’re still nervous about the vi--”

She cut me off there.

“Who’s nervous? I’m not nervous. I said back up. You don’t want to mess with this old broad today.”

I didn’t respond for a beat as I considered this, and so she began to repeat herself in the manner of frustrated lunatics. “Nervous!” she said mockingly. “Look who’s nervous. Not me! You don’t want to mess with an old girl like me, dumbass. You don’t want to mess with me. I’ve been around.”

“You don’t seem old,” I said, even though I had no idea if this was true. First of all, the boobs obfuscated her age, and second, she had a KN95 covering most of the areas that may have been a tell. I just wanted her to know I wasn’t some kid she could push around. I, like her, was a full grown adult who, despite a proper enough upbringing, was absolutely willing to engage in the most idiotic, petty argument imaginable at 3pm on a Wednesday afternoon. Anyway, I had the sense that whatever her age, she was probably quite beautiful, because I’m jealous of hotties and therefore tend to assume the worst in the super attractive among us. (In fairness to me, the extraordinarily good-looking people I encounter as a service worker in New York City are often ill-mannered and demanding little shits.) So I added, “Right now, you’re actually making me think you are in about the 6th grade.” 

She snorted.

“Lucky for you,” she said, and then the conversation took a strange turn. “I don’t want to go to jail today. Because you don’t wanna mess with this old girl—”

“Oh, sure” I said, laughing. I turned the little bottle of lysine over in my hands, hoping she wouldn’t notice it, or know what it was, and then make fun of me for having some kind of herpe somewhere on my body. “You’ll kick my ass and go to jail. How exactly are you going to do that? If you need me to be so far away from you?”

Pointing out that a bully is full of shit is something I love to do, even though it never goes well. Bullies are usually all talk, but the talk becomes explosive if you humiliate them. I can’t help myself. The single second of satisfaction, while I’m delivering the words, is like whippets. Fleeting and ultimately destructive, but so giddily good. 

“Back up!” she screamed, so loudly it may have implied I was assaulting her to all the other shoppers who certainly overheard. “Get away from me!”

I rolled my eyes with a spiritless affectation, like she was only a toddler having a tantrum, but you better believe I switched to the blue line at the other end of the corrals and did not say another word. The other people on line looked at me, and then at my new enemy, who was muttering, “That’s right! That’s right, dumbass,” along to a series of triumphant little shoulder shimmies. A guy with a six pack of fancy-looking cider and little dog zipped up in a fanny pack slug diagonally across his torso raised his eyebrows, like he wanted to know what happened. I tried to look as sane as possible in responding, which I accomplished by making that whirly she’s crazy hand gesture, pointing my finger to my head. The dog, a teacup yorkie, wasn’t buying it. He looked at me, licked his little black lips; his expression the dog version of the disgusted pity I was, at this point, seeing from several human onlookers as well.

Good news, though! The blue line went faster, and I got to the checkout before my confronter, and it seemed she was now engaged in a new situation with whoever was hapless enough to get on line behind her next. In the end, take whatever victories you can. (I conceded the chapstick, fishing it out of my work apron and scanning it at the self checkout along with the lysine, because that’s the consequence of getting into a fight in public: You lose the anonymity and confidence to shoplift in peace.)

Why am I telling you this story, of my own immaturity and argumentative nature, in a newsletter about death? Shouldn’t a death newsletter take a kinder view? Shouldn’t I have a everyone-you-meet-is-fighting-a-battle-you-know-nothing-about, live-and-let-live kind of ethic? Well. 

Conversations about death are essentially conversations about time, and I’ve noticed I spend a lot of mine in conflict. It isn’t something I love about myself, okay? It’s an obvious flaw in my personality. Part of my problem is pure hubris, I think, and an admittedly marmish unwillingness to demure. 

But there’s another side of it. I’ve got a genuine curiosity about others. In his excellent The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, John Koenig proposes the neologism sonder—taken from the German word for “special”—to describe the understanding that each stranger one passes in a crowd has a life, including an inner life, as rich and complex as one’s own. I’ve always lived in the city, and, as cranky as I can be when bumping up against someone else’s bad attitude, I’m delighted and bemused at the sheer number of brains bobbing down the sidewalk alongside my own brain as it bobs toward the bagel shop or the eyebrow threader’s or the pharmacy or the bar or the bookshop café where I work, or the corporate retail space (not a real store!) where I must sometimes buy necessities and like to pocket small, cheap items without paying. So much is happening all the time! Even when, practically speaking, nothing is happening. 

I still wonder about Back up Dumbass Black Minidress, these four months later. I wonder if she got Covid, and if so, if it was a bad case, if she blamed people who stood in her vicinity. I wonder if that trip to Whole Foods was somehow her first time back in public, and she just lost her mind in the moment, like I did (and do, semi-frequently), or if she’s a baseline irascible bitch. I wonder what she does for money, and if she lives nearby (will I see her in the neighborhood again?). I wonder if people like her were meant for people like me, because I couldn’t tell you another thing that happened that day, and I certainly didn’t meet anyone else who made me feel so humiliated and confused and annoyed and alive.

I remember the first time I sensed that being a person was as hard as it is. I was five or six years old, and had newly grasped the concept of my own mortality. I’m unsure how, but I’d recently come to understand the idea that adults—my mom and my father and stepmother and the teacher at school and even my grandmother—had once been children, like me. And this in turn allowed for the fact that someday I would be an adult. That’s what birthdays signified. Everyone got older, it was happening all the time, and would only stop at the very end of things. Wherever this knowledge came from—however clumsily I’d received the information—I can’t say, but I remember coming from my bed and padding through the shining wood floors of our apartment’s living room into the kitchen, where my mother was standing at the sink with an Amstel Light and a pack of Camels. She only smoked every now and then, always alone in the kitchen, as a treat. Country music played softly on her tape deck, our haggard kitchen witch with its knobby walnut face and green felt headscarf twirling in the ceiling fan’s air at the window. No city beyond the glass, yellow light reflecting our kitchen’s light in front of the dark alley and the neighboring building’s brown brick.

“Mom,” I said, and she jumped, turned. “I don’t want to die.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” she said. She was an empathetic mother, but not necessarily a soft one. We were poor, and she was single and finishing school while working full-time; I just don’t think she had the energy to hide how hard things were in the world, or pretend life was—or should—be necessarily fun. “You aren’t going to die for a long time.”

“But I am going to die.” It wasn’t a question really, but I hoped she’d contradict me, anyway.

“Yes, that’s true,” she said. “But you have so long. You don’t have to think about that—don’t worry, okay?”

I hesitated before asking the next question. Likely I knew the answer.

“Will I go to heaven?” I asked.

I wish I could remember the look on her face. My mother, at the time of this memory, was far younger than I am now. I can’t imagine being barely thirty and having to take care of a person like me, who drinks pickle juice from the jar and wants to share my every creepy thought, the moment it comes into my head, at a stentorian volume. 

“Oh, Livvy, I don’t know about that,” she said, unable to be frank, but not willing to lie, either. “What do you think? Do you believe in God?”

“I asked you first,” I said, and I started to cry.

In his essay “The Fallacy of Our Age,” philosopher Galen Strawsen argues against the modern tendency to understand our own lives as one long narrative. A human self is not a story, or even a series of stories, he says, and viewing it as such is an impulse, a moralistic one, and not a biologically inherited trait, not necessary, not natural. Believing your life is a story is like believing Instagram represents anyone’s reality: It may cause the susceptible among us to act and live in an inauthentic way that corresponds with what we think our lives should look like. Essentially, it’s shallow. I tend to agree with this. As fun as it is to picture myself as an eccentric side character in a Dickens’ novel, my life is not the story of a woman who chronically loses all her material necessities. It is not the story of the little girl waking up in the night and demanding answers about mortality and the afterlife as her young, tired mother who only wants to smoke a couple cigarettes and listen to her Dwight Yoakam cassettes unbothered. Nor is my life a longer narrative that also includes scenes of the exhausted, cantankerous adult bookseller/bartender standing an arbitrary distance from the redheaded jerk in the black minidress at Bowery Whole Foods during a lull in a possibly unending global pandemic. 

You might find this a strange argument from a professional storyteller. Especially since I have just told you a few “stories” from my life. But to me, that’s the fucking point: A story is a human invention, and a complex one, difficult to successfully construct, and so I can make a pretty solid cart-before-the-horse case for not seeing myself or my life as a narrative. My life isn’t a story for the same reason it isn’t a song or a painting or a tube of striped toothpaste. Sorry to sound like the huge stoner I certainly am, but a human cannot be a thing of his/her/their own invention. 

If your life is a story, who is the author? God? Come on. 

Strawsen would say I am a transient thinker, a person whose sense of self does not exist, in my own understanding of it, as some persisting, holistic experience (like a story), but rather, I see myself in the present moment. I don’t mean this ethereally, or self-help-y, “living in the now.” I mean I think of myself in terms of my current ordeals. Transient people have little regard for themselves in the future. The future, and their role in it, doesn’t exist and is therefore irrelevant. 

I do not think there is narrative unity to my experiences. In fact, if I had a written record of every moment of my life, if it read like a screenplay or a book, it would not fulfill the conventions of narrative at all. There’d be no thread. I guess what I am trying to establish here, to set the mood for this project, is this:
I am not attempting to make sense of life or find meaning. 

I am looking to decide why we bother at all, given how soon and unexpectedly everything might end. Today even! It is only 10 am, and so much could happen. This doesn’t bother me the way it did when I was five or six. I don’t think I am going to heaven, I don’t believe in God, and in fact I do not give a shit about that kind of thing. The way we talk about death bothers me. I want to prod back at it, at the theory of death as a menace hanging over our lives, the end of our “story,” the lurking skeleton in his black bathrobe with his corny fucking scythe that he probably bought at Spencer’s Gifts. Death isn’t the enemy who takes us down. 

I’m not seeking some capitalist consumer carpe diem, the narcissistic sense that in order to be whole in life one must finally finish a screenplay or lose weight or take a pottery class or learn Italian. Bucket Lists are embarrassing! I’m not talking about Buddhism or mindfulness (though I’m interested in those things, you may be confused to know) or the sophomoric, egocentric advice found in the pop songs we play at graduations. 

What I am seeking is a frank exploration of the practical. I want to talk about how weird we are while we are around, the chaos we make. The fights we have in the otherwise forgettable moments. Our absolutely bananas relationship with animals, including why we raise some to eat and raise others like children, for love (which, by the way, the pope is pissed about!). And also, I want to discuss the price of a good coffin. I want to know about fertilizers used on cemetery grass, and why we can’t bury people on golf courses, about modern cases of Incorruptibility, about burial laws, last rites, mercy killings, the body farm, Lazarus syndrome, power of attorney, death by defecation (a real thing!), and why it took so many tries to execute Rasputin.

Every month I’ll attempt get as close to my discomfort as I can. In general, I’ll write on a theme—work, love, drugs, sickness, nature, etc—finding my way in with some account of my own puerile daily concerns, and then searching deeper, examining something I’ve read, watched, visited, or otherwise studied. In the podcast, I’ll be having conversations with people who can speak in some interesting but not proscriptive way about the month’s theme and relate it to death/dying.

Thank you for joining me. Let me know if you have a tip, question, idea, know a contact I should speak with, or—since I can’t resist!—provocation. 

Also! One more unrelated thing! The paperback of my novel, Cheat Day, comes out next week.

Please buy it! If you want a signed copy, with or without a personal message from me, please purchase from Book Club Bar, where I work. You can come pick it up yourself and say hello, or we will ship it anywhere in the continental US for $3.25. For personalized signed copies, leave your name and any other message you have for me in the “instructions/comments” section at checkout. Here is the link to do that. 

Content notice  

This newsletter discusses death from both a philosophical and practical standpoint. I am objectively funny, but you may not like funny things, or you may feel reasonably put off by some of my topics, which include terminal illness, fatal freak accidents, violent death, and the crushing loneliness of human existence. Personal necrophobias will be laid bare in detail. I may reference the real life deaths of certain real, once-alive individuals. In addition, I will write and talk about suicide and end of life planning, including assisted suicide, which I believe is a human right. I can be morbid. I will likely bring up the Terri Schiavo case at some point, and not with much sensitivity. 

I am not sentimental about death and I do not think death is sad.

This project is, therefore, not for everyone, and may not be for you. Which is okay!
I understand.