Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Death: An Oral History
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Portland
STATE: OR
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://zestbooks.net/death/ * http://www.portlandmercury.com/books/2016/11/02/18671605/casey-jarman-stares-down-death
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Willamette Week, music editor; Believer, managing editor; Party Damage Records, cofounder, 2013.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Nylon, Portland Monthly, Next American City, and Reed.
SIDELIGHTS
In his debut book, Death: An Oral History, Casey Jarman provides a series of essays and interviews that center on death and all that surrounds it. Jarman’s subjects include several professionals who deal with death on a daily basis, including a funeral consumer advocate, a hospice worker, a reporter for the Mortuary Management magazine. Jarman also interviews personal friends; one mourns a twin brother who committed suicide and another the unexpected death of a mother. Even Maus cartoonist Art Spiegelman weighs in on the topic. In the end, Jarman presents an overview of death that effectively grapples with fear. In normalizing mortality, Jarman offers readers emotional support in the face of death.
Indeed, as the author explained in an online Eleven PDX interview with Scott McHale, Death “changed my perspective in a lot of ways, but I think the biggest thing was having all these conversations with other people. Having it be an open, not-taboo thing allowed me to talk about it more in conversations with friends and family members and that’s been very rewarding to know that other people have the same anxieties and worries about it that I do.” Jarman added: “Having all of those external conversations has changed all of the internal conversations I was having with myself about it, where if it came up, I would just freak out and panic and not want to think about it. Now, I feel that I can have a playful kind of relationship with it internally. That’s the big thing for me, to be able to have the bandwidth to think about it and not have it make me want to go sleep in a hole somewhere.”
Reviews of Death were largely positive, and critics noted that Jarman provides an evenhanded retrospective. According to Portland Mercury Online columnist Morgan Troper, “Death is insidiously accessible. It’s a harrowing and heavy read, and it seldom meanders into mawkish, faux-spiritual territory . . . Death provides a sort of ‘realistic optimism’ about the end of the line: To varying degrees, we’re all afraid, and none of us are alone.” Commending Jarman on the Reading the End Web site, a correspondent advised: “Each of his interviewees has considered death extensively from a certain angle, and each of them is able to say what they’ve learned about it, what they believe it means, how they believe people can approach it in a healthy way.” Echoing this sentiment in Publishers Weekly, a reviewer announced: “These people, many of whom walk with death gracefully every day, make the concept a little less frightening and deeply human.”
Offering further applause in Booklist, Glendy X. Mattalia observed: “Jarman’s unflinching curiosity on the machinations of death and dying make for an interesting romp and read.” Arianna Rebolini, writing in the Guardian Online, was also impressed, and she remarked: “About halfway into his introduction to Death: An Oral History, Casey Jarman lets the reader in on the impetus of the project: ‘I wrote this [book] in the hopes of beating death altogether.’ It’s an impossible objective–the reader knows it, the writer knows it–but not a disingenuous one, and Jarman’s literary debut is a testament to the value of doggedly pursuing a goal that has never and can never be realized. We can’t beat death, but maybe we can beat fear of it. The 18 interviews contained within Death are Jarman’s investigation into the possibility.” As an online Out Front critic put it, “there’s a touch of the disturbing in Death: An Oral History, but it’s not sensational so much as it is incidental. It’s also beautifully touching. You’ll read about grief-stricken people and those who toil helpfully in the quiet spaces between death and understanding.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, October 1, 2016, Glendy X. Mattalia, review of Death: An Oral History.
Publishers Weekly, August 29, 2016, review of Death.
ONLINE
Eleven PDX, http://elevenpdx.com/ (May 31, 2017), Scott McHale, author interview.
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (October 20, 2016), Arianna Rebolini, author interview and review of Death.
Out Front, https://www.outfrontmagazine.com/ (February 6, 2017), review of Death.
Portland Mercury Online, http://www.portlandmercury.com/ (November 2, 2016), Morgan Troper, review of Death.
Reading the End, http://readingtheend.com/ (January 16, 2017), review of Death.*
Casey Jarman has served as the music editor at the Pulitzer Prize-winning weekly Willamette Week in Portland, Oregon, and managing editor of the Believer in San Francisco. He co-founded Party Damage Records in 2013. He has written for the Believer, Nylon, Portland Monthly, Willamette Week, Next American City, and Reed Magazine, as well as various online publications. He is currently a contributing editor at the Believer. He lives in Portland with his wife and two cats.
photo by Caitlin Webb
photo by Caitlin Webb
Death. It’s the metaphysical elephant in the room. This topic would be far too daunting for most writers to deal with as a debut, but Casey Jarman found the topic to be so curiously over-avoided that he dedicated a year of his life to investigating it.
Death: An Oral History was published in October and doesn’t at all read like a new-age self improvement book; rather it addresses the situation candidly and with enough ease and light-heartedness to be truly comforting. In it, Jarman picks some brilliant minds, like Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Maus, and modern philosopher Simon Critchley. Jarman also opens up mind-altering conversations with people who look quite differently at death, like psychedelic scientist Katherine MacLean. The most relatable interviews he conducts are those with his family and friends.
I met Jarman for a beer on a Saturday afternoon, and was soon entrenched in a discussion more anxiety-easing than any pill on the market.
ELEVEN: What inspired you to write about this subject, and then how has your perspective on the concept of death changed after interviewing all of these people?
Casey Jarman: I was just looking for something that I thought I could spend a year on without getting bored. There are so many endless directions you can take when talking about death, and I had a publisher that was willing to let me go out in any direction I wanted to go out in. They gave me some great ideas and leads on people, but for the most part, they allowed me to talk to people who inspired me. So it was a great exercise. If I got bored talking about the funeral industry then I could talk about something completely different, like art or music.
It changed my perspective in a lot of ways, but I think the biggest thing was having all these conversations with other people. Having it be an open, not-taboo thing allowed me to talk about it more in conversations with friends and family members and that’s been very rewarding to know that other people have the same anxieties and worries about it that I do. Having all of those external conversations has changed all of the internal conversations I was having with myself about it, where if it came up, I would just freak out and panic and not want to think about it. Now, I feel that I can have a playful kind of relationship with it internally. That’s the big thing for me, to be able to have the bandwidth to think about it and not have it make me want to go sleep in a hole somewhere.
ELEVEN: I had a similar reaction after reading your book. I especially connected with your conversations with your friend Anna Urquhart, whose mother had very recently died. Can you speak about that a bit?
CJ: I was in two minds about even asking her to talk about it. We’re pretty close. She’s a very honest and warm, wonderful person. She’s also, as I mentioned in the book, a very sarcastic, hilariously raw person. I thought that it could help somebody to hear a conversation with someone who is in the thick of trying to figure out what the fuck they were going to do now. Anna was about as realistic as you could possibly be. She realized her lack of any sort of faith or ritual around death … threw her into a tizzy. Not having that security of “it’s cool, she’s in heaven, so everything is good…” It was a huge existential crisis for her. I was real conflicted about even asking her, but she was totally open to the idea and I’m so grateful to her. I’ve read a lot of things from people a year out, two years out, five years out … I’ve never heard anybody say, this is what I’m going through right this minute.
ELEVEN: Simon Critchley was a fascinating subject because, first off, you don’t hear about many modern day philosophers. So is that actually his job title?
CJ: I think he is a little conflicted about it, but he did say, “I don’t really know what to call what I do, but I basically think and talk about death.” I think he’s OK with the philosopher title and I think he’s certainly done a lot in that capacity.
ELEVEN: My favorite line from him in that interview talks about the avoidance of the topic. “People are dying. We just don’t see it, we’ve chosen to devalue it in the name of longevity and youth. It means that we don’t cherish the connections that we have. We run after ones that we don’t have, and that makes us even more miserable.” It’s a life-affirming statement.
CJ: That was inspiring for me to talk to people — and who knows, he might have some spirituality that’s personal to him — like Holly Pruitt, locally, [who] talked a lot about ritual and tradition. Really, that’s what I was looking for. Because I think I’m too skeptical to adopt any kind of faith in my life at this point. It’s just not gonna happen. So I was looking for people who found some sort of comfort in a stark, realistic way of looking at life and death. People who can look at things and say, “I’m gonna die and I don’t know what’s next, or nothingness is next but I’m cool with it.” For me, that’s the best case scenario I can get with it: getting to the point where I can look at the uncertainty of death because I don’t think I’ll ever be … I don’t think anyone can ever look at it with any surety and say, “This is what happens.” I would feel like a fraud if I ever did that, because I’m just too small. We’re just fucking tiny insignificant beings.
screen-shot-2016-11-02-at-5-26-59-pm
ELEVEN: Why are psychedelics such a common thread in these studies? You discuss it with scientist Katherine MacLean and I didn’t realize it was so influential on Art Spiegelman. How did the conversation go there?
CJ: They both talked about it being a very helpful tool. For Art, how he got comfortable with the idea of death and his loss of the anxiety over it was taking acid and realizing that he was a part of the natural cycle. I don’t think that drugs are the only way of getting to that place. I know people that are completely sober and straight and who find other ways. I know biologists and scientists who just have that outlook on life. I think a big part of our disconnect from our mortality and from death is that we’re disconnected from nature. That’s why there’s so much stuff about green burial and about different methods of disposing of bodies. That in itself, I’m really not that interested in, but what I am interested in is the connection that we do or do not have to dying and to the people around us who are dying. I think that our disconnect with nature is a huge part of that puzzle.
ELEVEN: We kind of lie to ourselves about it, don’t we?
CJ: We live in a world of symbols. There’s an old band that I love called Kickball from Olympia. They have an album called Everything is a Miracle Nothing is a Miracle Everything Is. To me, living in the USA in 2016 is this constant experience in “I can have whatever I want whenever I want, so why would I spend any time on thinking about death? Why would I spend any time thinking about hard shit … when I can just play video games at my house for five hours, or I can go get drunk on any corner?” There’s no consumer influence that’s telling you to think deeply about your life or to think about mortality. Nothing about capitalism is saying to you, “Hey you should just chill out for a while and meditate on death.” Because that can’t make any money for anyone. You literally have to be in a different segment of society or disconnect yourself from society to get an appreciation for stuff like this, really.
ELEVEN: Until someone who is close to you dies and then it hits you like a ton of bricks.
CJ: Then it shatters everything. That’s what comes up over and over again. There’s this very real phenomenon that we’re all gonna deal with that, for whatever reason, none of us want to plan for or think about, or develop a way of living with. It’s just avoidance. For me, that was starting to drive me completely crazy. That’s why the book is the book, because avoidance was making me nuts and it was not working. Even for someone who was not experiencing loss personally, something was weighing very heavily on my mind. I had so many mundane conversations that I felt like screaming in the middle of the conversation. Like, this is stupid. We’re all gonna die, why aren’t we talking about this?»
– Scott McHale
Death: An Oral History
Glendy X. Mattalia
Booklist.
113.3 (Oct. 1, 2016): p4.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Death: An Oral History.
By Casey Jarman.
Oct. 2016.352p. illus. Zest/Pulp, $22.99 (9781942186120). 155.9.
Jarman's first book (he's a music writer and a contributing editor for the Believer) is one of the most fun, surprising,
and inventive essay books readers might find on any subject, let alone what's sure to be among many readers' least
favorite subjects: death. Part memoir, with the flow and appeal similar to that of an episode of NPR's This American
Life, this revelation of a book is chockfull of vignettes that dig deep into the psyche of the Grim Reaper and how we
deal with him. With essay topics ranging from the death of a twin child in Jarman's hometown, to an interview with a
friend after her mother dies, to a "sometimes" coworker who also has a job caring for hospice patients, Jarman toils
under a blanket of irony as he bravely confronts death, a concept he's most afraid of, headon. Despite the obvious
morbidity of the topic, Jarman's unflinching curiosity on the machinations of death and dying make for an interesting
romp and read.Glendy X. Mattalia
YA: Teen readers will likely find Jarmans inquisitive approach a palatable way to explore the topic. GXM.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Mattalia, Glendy X. "Death: An Oral History." Booklist, 1 Oct. 2016, p. 4. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA467147884&it=r&asid=8dd6cac3938cfdda3d9b46e29b993dfa.
Accessed 13 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A467147884
5/13/2017 General OneFile Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1494718602851 2/2
Death: An Oral History
Publishers Weekly.
263.35 (Aug. 29, 2016): p84.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Death: An Oral History
Casey Jarman. Pulp, $22.99 (355p) ISBN 9781942186120
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Jarman, a contributing editor at the Believer, confronts his own mortal dread with this profound collection of essays,
based on oral historystyle interviews with experts on death such as Maus cartoonist Art Spiegelman, a funeralfocused
consumer advocate, and a hospice worker. A childhood friend of Jarman's recounts his grief after his twin
brother shot himself when the boys were in seventh grade, and his feelings of being left behind. A philosophy professor
at Oregon State University outlines the curriculum for his "Death and Dying" course. A certified professional in life
celebrations discusses the human need for ritual. Proving that even death has a mundane side, a reporter for the trade
magazine Mortuary Management breaks down her process of writing copy for funeral home websites. In the most
devastating chapter, Jarman interviews a close friend dealing with the recent and sudden death of her mother. Her
shock and pain are visceral on the page, and she provides practical advice on how to support a grieving friend. Through
Jarman's discerning curation, interesting thought patterns emerge. Even those dealing with death professionally discuss
it with remarkable candor and intimacy. These people, many of whom walk with death gracefully every day, make the
concept a little less frighteningand deeply human. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Death: An Oral History." Publishers Weekly, 29 Aug. 2016, p. 84. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA462236498&it=r&asid=898d7908fe1bcdd065a94564b8c668a4.
Accessed 13 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A462236498
Casey Jarman Stares Down Death
Death: An Oral History Prepares You for the Inevitable
by Morgan Troper
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NOTHING PROVES human consciousness is an evolutionary blunder more effectively than our innate fear of death. It’s inescapable and feels totally fucking useless biologically.
Most of us develop ways to compartmentalize these anxieties, because if we didn’t, we wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning. But for some, obsession only festers and grows until it becomes debilitating, and that’s why Zoloft exists.
Casey Jarman falls squarely into the latter camp. He thinks about death so much that he wrote a book about it. In the foreword to Death: An Oral History, Jarman admits that he set out to write about his favorite least-favorite subject at least partially so he could quell his own dread. “Talking to people about death for a year seemed like a pretty solid way to combat my own fear of it,” he writes. “Call it exposure therapy. If you have a fear of heights, spend some time in the mountains. If you’re scared of physical pain, get yourself into a fistfight. If you’re scared of death, what can you do, short of dying?”
But Jarman’s incisive ruminations are limited to the book’s first six pages. The bulk of Death is comprised of eighteen interviews with a range of subjects united only by the significance death has played in their lives, including Jarman’s own mother; singer-songwriter and reformed Christian David Bazan; and Frank Thompson, a former death-row warden who conducted Oregon’s last two executions.
While some of these interviews are merely interesting—like the one with Katrina Spade, founder of Urban Death Project, a Seattle organization that aims to turn human corpses into compost—many are deeply affecting, particularly when Jarman has clear emotional stock in his subject. One such highlight is an interview with Gabriel DePiero, a childhood acquaintance of Jarman’s whose identical twin brother committed suicide with his father’s gun at age 13. The book’s centerpiece is an interview with Jarman’s mother Wende, who recounts her motherless childhood and unexpected brush with death a few years back. These segments are less journalistic, and make the reader feel like a fly on the wall for a delicate conversation between intimates.
Death is insidiously accessible. It’s a harrowing and heavy read, and it seldom meanders into mawkish, faux-spiritual territory. (This is not Proof of Heaven.) Jarman is primarily concerned with death’s role in the physical world—what it means for people whose lives have been shattered by it, and for those whose vocations rely on it. Still, Death provides a sort of “realistic optimism” about the end of the line: To varying degrees, we’re all afraid, and none of us are alone.
Death: An Oral History
by Casey Jarman
(Pulp/Zest Books)
This is the end: undertaking a journey to beat the fear of death
Music journalist Casey Jarman’s book Death: an Oral History features interviews with denizens of ‘death cafes’, a ‘psychedelic hospice’ and death row wardens
Casey Jarman says that in constructing his ‘oral history of death,’ there was ‘a lot of fumbling’.
Casey Jarman says that in constructing his ‘oral history of death,’ there was ‘a lot of fumbling’. Photograph: The Ronald Grant Archive
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Arianna Rebolini
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Thursday 20 October 2016 05.00 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 2 May 2017 13.36 EDT
About halfway into his introduction to Death: an Oral History, Casey Jarman lets the reader in on the impetus of the project: “I wrote this [book] in the hopes of beating death altogether.”
It’s an impossible objective – the reader knows it, the writer knows it – but not a disingenuous one, and Jarman’s literary debut is a testament to the value of doggedly pursuing a goal that has never and can never be realized. We can’t beat death, but maybe we can beat fear of it. The 18 interviews contained within Death are Jarman’s investigation into the possibility.
For a writer responsible for a work so ambitious in scope and often devastating in content, Jarman is disarmingly humble and upbeat. When we speak on the phone, he immediately acknowledges his discomfort with being the interviewee and offers a precautionary apology should he come across as trying to steer the conversation. (He doesn’t.) He pokes fun at himself for his desire – which he describes as being born of inherent laziness – to “get out of” dealing with death, and he speaks on the subject more with wonder than authority.
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Perhaps this is because Jarman’s background is not in philosophy, or science, or any death-specific discipline. He received his journalism degree from the University of Oregon, and has since focused primarily on music, holding positions as music editor for the Portland, Oregon-based alt-weekly Willamette Week and as managing editor at the Believer. When his friend Adam Grano, art director at Zest Books, suggested he pitch an idea to Zest’s editors, Jarman decided to pivot.
“I didn’t want to spend a year thinking about albums or doing music criticism, which is kind of the most natural thing for me, and the one thing that’s constantly on my mind is death,” Jarman says. “When I do interviews, I always wind up talking to artists who tackle that subject. One day I’m not going to exist and none of the things I’m doing now are going to matter – how do you come back from that? How does anybody make art or build houses or wash dishes? That’s the thought I linger on every single day, and sometimes it’s positive, and sometime it’s negative, but it’s just always been there.”
Mourners, wearing black clothing after the death of Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej, exit from the subway in Bangkok, Thailand.
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Mourners, wearing black clothing after the death of Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej, exit from the subway in Bangkok, Thailand. Photograph: Sakchai Lalit/AP
His was a simple pitch on a broad theme (“What if I talked about death with a bunch of people – people who work in death-related industries and people who’ve had close emotional experiences with death?”) but his limiting factors came in the form of convictions about what he didn’t want the book to be. It wouldn’t be “X celebrity’s thoughts on this or Y celebrity’s thoughts on that”, nor would it stray too far from the humanity of the stories. Jarman didn’t speak with funeral directors or undertakers about the physicality of death. He wasn’t necessarily interested in the gritty details; he wanted an inroad to the emotions surrounding it – emotions often silenced or self-censored by notions of propriety.
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Perhaps most significantly, it wouldn’t be about Jarman himself, because Jarman hasn’t yet been affected by a profound loss.
“I tried to be upfront about this being a curiosity to me, and I did have a certain sense of feeling like an imposter,” he says. “I was so grateful to everyone that I spoke with for giving me such emotional access, but there were a lot of times when I’d be sitting in a room with someone and we both knew there was that bridge that neither of us could fully cross. Nobody could really explain loss to me in a way that I would fully understand, and I couldn’t quite ask the right questions. It was a lot of fumbling.”
The fumbling is one way in which the format mirrors the content – meandering stories about groping for a clear path through grief. Jarman largely steps out of the way of the narratives, removing his voice save for his introductions to the book and each interview. The result is an unhindered intimacy with each subject: the scientist whose sister’s death spurred her research in a “psychedelic hospice”, the former death row warden now working to repeal the death penalty, the Black Lives Matter activist trying to find solace in proactive grief, the social worker grappling with her mother’s recent death, to name just a few.
Still, Jarman’s presence is felt through the reader’s experience of yearning for a solution that simply doesn’t exist. His curation keeps the book agnostic, not only in the literal sense of presenting the possibilities of multiple belief systems, but also in its refusal to settle on any one ritual, coping mechanism, or method of grieving as the correct or optimal action in the face of death – whether one’s own, or of a loved one. The frustrating fact is there is no right way of handling it, but perhaps the most consistent theme throughout each interview is a collective impulse toward preparation, a desire to do work now that would ensure future resilience.
Ivy and other plants grow over the gravestones at Arnos Vale Cemetery in Bristol, England.
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Ivy and other plants grow over the gravestones at Arnos Vale Cemetery in Bristol, England. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images
Usually this prep work is in deliberate exposure. In one interview, Holly Pruett, a memorial officiant and organizer of Death Cafes in Portland, Oregon, says she became interested in social gatherings built around discussions of death because, “I thought at the time, maybe I could befriend the concept of death and just develop a greater capacity to handle it, be more prepared.” Undoubtedly this book is Jarman’s own exercise in preparation for the inevitability of death, though he now acknowledges its futility.
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“The reality of the situation is that there are muscles you have that you don’t know exist until you’re grieving for someone,” he says. “From what I learned from everyone I talked to, if you try to prepare for the steps you’re going to have to take when something awful happens, 99% of the time you’re going to find yourself taking wholly unexpected steps when you actually confront the terrible thing. Grief isn’t something that you do, it’s something that happens to you. The best you can do is prepare to be moved how everything moves you.”
But all hope is not lost. The collection never falls into the gratuitously maudlin or morbid. Yes, it will make you cry in public, but those hoping for tragedy porn should look elsewhere. Jarman recalls being surprised often throughout the interviews, but most keenly when subjects – especially those who “had more than a professional relationship with death” – found their way to a discussion of the beautiful moments, or as Jarman calls it, the “art to death”.
“So many people talked about a kind of beauty that’s inherent in the process of being there as someone’s dying, or going through the grieving process. There’s a lot of garbage, of course, but there are also these beautiful moments, and especially in the outpouring of support and sympathy and love.”
And though Jarman isn’t cured of his fear of death, he at least has mitigated it – thanks, in large part, to his conscious attempt at breaking through the silence that usually surrounds it.
“Six months ago, I don’t know that I would’ve had this answer, but now I do feel a little more at peace with it,” he says. “If we have real conversations about what death means to us, and what our friends and family members have gone through around death, then suddenly it’s not such a crazy albatross to drag around any more. I left this process with a bigger toolkit, not even so much to deal with death but just to be a human being.
“You’re not going to solve this riddle,” he adds, laughing. “That used to frustrate the hell out of me. Now I’m kind of intrigued by it.”
Death: An Oral History is available in the US from Zest Books.
Review: Death, an Oral History, by Casey Jarman
Note: I received Death: An Oral History from the publisher for review consideration. All opinions are my own.
Death an Oral History
So my favorite thing about Death: An Oral History is the story of its genesis. Casey Jarman noticed that he hadn’t yet lost anyone he couldn’t afford to lose, and it started to cause him anxiety about death. He therefore decided to spend the next few years of his life talking, reading, and thinking extensively about death, with the ultimate goal of producing a collection of interviews with people familiar with death.
This is very very relatable to me. I have learned that when you are afraid of something, it’s either fine to live your life without that thing (like acid trips or the many species of spider that live in Australia) and then you are fine to go on avoiding it, or else it is diminishing/impossible to live your life without that thing (like taking long walks alone at night while a lady or people I love dying or getting a job in publishing and moving to New York without knowing anybody there) and then you have to make a decision about your priorities. I am terrible at not being afraid of things, but I am excellent at triaging. (I am too jittery and on edge to enjoy long walks alone at night, which defeats the purpose they would otherwise be serving. People I love are definitely going to die. I really wanted to work in publishing.)
Jarman interviews a wide range of people who spend their time thinking about death: a retired warden on death row who now opposes the death penalty, a grief counselor, a songwriter whose lyrics deal with the inevitability of death, a hospice volunteer. Each of his interviewees has considered death extensively from a certain angle, and each of them is able to say what they’ve learned about it, what they believe it means, how they believe people can approach it in a healthy way.
As oral histories go, I liked this one a lot. Inevitably, a few of the interviewees rubbed me the wrong way — I have no patience for woo-woo granola bullshit, and I had to quit reading the interview with the psychedelic scientist who’s convinced we could all have peaceful and pleasant deaths if only we dropped a lot of acid at the crucial time.1 Most of them, though, spoke with respect about the dead and the process of dying, and the book made me feel — and I hope made Casey Jarman feel, bless him — that there are people in this world who have the process of death under control and who can see the rest of us through it.
Ugh okay that’s not a fair representation of her position but “psychedelic hospice” is a thing she wants to do and I just cannot with people sometimes.
DEATH: AN ORAL HISTORY & WRITTEN REVIEW
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You haven’t printed out your tickets yet.
No worries, though; the trip you’re taking doesn’t require them. You’re going somewhere where there are no storm delays, no souvenirs, no fancy restaurants, and where accommodations will be a surprise. An unknown that could be scary, but read the new book Death: An Oral History by Casey Jarman, and you may get a preview of the itinerary.
Like many people, Casey Jarman never knew his grandparents; they’d died long before he could make memories of them, although his parents were both still alive. At age 35, though, Jarman knew “the game is rigged” and that sooner or later, he was going to lose someone he loved, which scared him. Writing a book about death “seemed like a pretty solid way to combat [his] own fear of it.”
He set out to interview people who dealt with dying. Perhaps they had some insight on the trip nobody looks forward to taking.
No two people grieve the same, as Jarman learned from a grief counselor, and it’s wrong to tell someone how to do it. Also, once was the time when death wasn’t discussed with
kids but today, truth-telling has its strong advocates. Though it may be controversial, Jarman interviewed the “frontwoman” for the Urban Death Project, the cause of which is that human bodies make great gardening. Burial takes up real estate, she pointed out. Compost a body, and it becomes “part of the ecosystem.”
From an identical twin who lost his brother, Jarman learned that it might be shaky, but healing happens. From the former editor of a magazine, he learned that when it comes to death and what we want to hear about it, everybody has a line drawn in the sand. He talked with his mother, who lost her mother years ago, and with a motherless friend whose grief is fresher. He spoke with a consumer-rights advocate, a philosopher, and a hospice worker. And through it all — rituals, conversations, and even laughs over coffee — there was this:
“Death always wins.”
Oh my, that sounds a little dark, doesn’t it? It can be — but it’s also quite eye-opening, considering the range of interviews that author Casey Jarman collected and the insights each person offers. Yes, there’s a touch of the disturbing in Death: An Oral History, but it’s not sensational so much as it is incidental.
It’s also beautifully touching. You’ll read about grief-stricken people and those who toil helpfully in the quiet spaces between death and understanding, and Jarman gives them room to explain what they do. That’s what struck me as I finished this book: In his introduction, Jarman indicates that you’ll find community within the inevitable if you need it — all you have to do is ask.
This is not really a book for the newly bereft or the ailing, but open-minded readers may benefit from what’s inside. You’ll be taking that one last trip someday and to satisfy your curiosity, Death: An Oral History may be just the ticket.