A Morbid Fascination with Death: A Photographic Study

Recently I have developed a morbid fascination with death. Although I'm not sure there is a fascination with death that one wouldn't describe as morbid.

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So many questions swirl around in my subconscious and, without warning, they fracture my relative oblivion and pour out into my stream of consciousness. Sometimes I take pause and ponder the query, other times it's fleeting and I simply shake it off as I hurry through another day's activities. Tasks that seem imperative at the time, but meaningless in the grand scheme of the universe. But that is my life. I define my life by the activities I choose. I have often described myself less as a human BE-ing and more of a human DO-ing. It is my chosen purpose in life to create, to nurture, and to assist my fellow man and the many creatures of this Earth. I have essentially generated a constant momentum that unless acted upon by an outside force keeps me going. Most recently the outside force that stopped me in my tracks was death. Not literally, of course--obviously I'm not writing this from beyond the grave. No I mean the concept of death.

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What is the definition of death? Quite succinctly, it is the absence of all life signs. But as I struggle to understand my own personal characterization of death, I realize that my definition seems to be in a state of flux. Is death a concrete state or is it a process with a beginning and an end? What is the moment where a beautiful healthy entity loses its grip on life and begins the spiral into entropy and eventually death.

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In the prime of our lives, death is perceived as something that afflicts the elderly and infirm. Sure there is the errant accident that takes a life long before its time, but you don't look at a person in their 20's, 30's 40's, and even 50's and define them in terms of death.

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I began to see death not as a destination, but as a journey. Implying that death is where we are all going, but there are many ways to get there (and many things to see along the way) and the journey itself, albeit taking us all to the same place, has the potential to contain so much life. We should not be defined by the way we die, but by the way we lived.

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My current experience with death was akin to buying a new car. Bear with me, this is actually going somewhere. Imagine, you find and purchase the perfect new vehicle. It seems so unique. Then in the next few days and weeks, you begin to see them everywhere. Did that many people just buy the exact same car? Not likely. More likely, you simple became aware and began to notice. That's been my experience with death. I was blissfully unaware. In the prime of my life and in relative substantial health. And so I thought my husband was too. Even after his stage 4 cancer diagnosis, I still steal long gazes at him while he was unaware. Unable to wrap my head around the idea that this man that appeared so healthy was in fact in the beginning stages of entropy. Inside, his body had begun the spiral of deterioration and decline that would eventually lead to his demise. It feels unreal. Now, I see death everywhere. The weird part is that I see a beauty in the chaos that I never noticed before.

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As I sat quietly watching the last rays of the sun disappear over the ridge behind the house, I sipped at a glass of wine and simply surveyed my surroundings. In the hustle and the bustle of oncology visits, hospital trips and diagnostic tests, I had left a vase of beautiful tulips to die on the dining room table where I sat. Normally I would have disposed of them as soon as their life essence was spent. Delivering them to the compost pile to return their remains to the earth so that their energy could be transmuted and become the nourishment for a new life to begin. I looked at them and simply did not care that these dead flowers still inhabited this space. Their lifelessness transcended death. But in that moment, I began to see them differently. I began to see a splendor and magnificence in the veritable corpses that lazily draped over the sides of the crystal they inhabited so beautifully a mere week before. I felt overwhelmingly compelled to pick up my camera. I wasn't sure if I could capture the beauty I was seeing, but I had to try.

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