Monster of the Week: The Reaper (On The Human Need To Conceptualize, Rationalize, and Personify Death)
By Rene Madrigal
Graphic by @punkie.star
The Colorful Cold
Day of the Dead at a Catholic Cemetery is interesting.
A unique blending of aboriginal and Catholic influence, it turns what the West views as macabre into a colorful and exuberant celebration of death.
The ubiquitous, completive sorrow is replaced by cacophonous laughter and scintillating orange hues.
In distinct contrast to the misery that forever encompasses those holy grounds.
The Western conception of a cemetery is in and of itself interesting. A quiet, completive, ode to the dead. A place where death’s presence is openly embraced.
The Western Cultural concept of the Grim Reaper seems to coexist within the same niche.
A physical, tangible manifestation of an inevitable force of nature.
Why must humans do this? Personify a faceless concept.
Across the world cultures not only have their beliefs of death, but their own monsters and gods, manifestations of death.
I believe this need stems from an almost necessity, something that brings such sorrow, fear, anxiety necessitates a figure, a face.
The personification of death that immediately comes to mind for those raised within a Western Culture is The Grim Reaper. A shadowy skeleton wreathed in a black cloak wielding a scythe.
Death as a cold agriculturalist, coming to reap what has been sowed.
Dia De Los Muertos
Smash cut back to the cemetery, the normally grim and solemn Resurrection Cemetery in Montebello, CA had been wholly transformed. The traditional cempasúchil illuminating the sea of grey and green.
This was jarring to me, undeniably beautiful but odd. I have a European, conception of death, death is grey, The Reaper is black, it will find you no matter how fast you run or how hard you fight.
This color and life to death comes from Day of the Dead’s origins, a conglomeration of Spanish Catholicism and Native folk religion.
According to the University of Kansas’ Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Dia de los Muertos or The Day of the Dead originates from an aboriginal holiday celebrating Mictēcacihuātl, the Queen of Mictlān or the Underworld. Once a year she would ascend from Mictlān to make sure the bones of the dead were properly tended to and cared for, her arrival being celebrated with dance and food.
The Spanish took this tradition and fused it with traditional catholic beliefs to synthesize what we now understand as Dia de los Muertos.
The morbid subject matter doesn’t seem so morbid at the cemetery, a holdover from aboriginal conceptions of death.
Aboriginal folk religion isn’t alone, many non-Western European cultures have a more varied understanding of death.
Musings on Western Fetishization of Eastern Spirituality
Many Westerners have an appreciation that borders on fetishization of Eastern religions, without any true understanding of their teachings.
Buddhism in particular is fetishized and misunderstood by, usually well-meaning, Westerners.
I am not here to gloat about my vast knowledge and thus my intellectual superiority over anyone else, exactly the opposite in fact, I know nothing.
There is wisdom in that I believe, to admit that I don’t have ground to stand on when it comes to spirituality and religion.
As opposed to the common “Eastern Spirituality good, Christianity bad” narrative that is often parroted by those who know very little of either.
I feel as though I am a stumbling toddler, hardly equipped to construct my thoughts into a cohesive form.
Mortality Salience and Death Anxiety in my Aunt’s Honda Civic
The American Psychological Association defines mortality salience as the awareness of the inevitability of one’s own death.
I wonder if most children fear death, is it just so far away and nebulous that they just don’t think about it?
If they did could they ever really conceptualize it?
Five-year-old me thought of it constantly, Oblivion was what scared me.
An almost eldritch concept, yet an inevitability, the unceasing march towards darkness.
I voiced this concern to many people, the panic attacks I would have if left alone in the dark made it hard to avoid.
None of them were really able to handle a child’s death anxiety, their easy answers about the Kingdom of Heaven were met with a stark “but how do you know?”
The answer most of the time was that either they didn’t, or hadn’t ever really questioned their spirituality, and they were ill equipped to discuss God with a five-year-old who had never so much as stepped foot in a church.
The context of the following event alludes me, but its mark still stains me.
I was young, incredibly so, four or five sitting in my Aunt’s Honda Civic. It’s terribly late, we are waiting for someone in an empty parking lot, the blinding florescent lights pollute the black night.
I don’t believe there was a trigger, maybe the call of the void from the pitch black area beyond the light’s reach, but I broke into terrible panic, my little mind filled with a terror so forceful and encompassing I had no recourse but to try and fail to breathe.
My aunt tried desperately to calm me, which she was able to for the most part, or at least take me off the cliff’s edge and into a conversation about belief.
Kids are stupid and they aren’t, it was a rare moment where I felt as though someone older than me engage with me not as a child but as a human,
She told me she had seen things she couldn’t explain, I told her that just because she couldn’t explain them didn’t mean there was no reasonable explanation.
Many years have passed since that night, and I feel as though I still don’t have the answers I am seeking.
On the topic of death, five-year-old me and I could meet as intellectual equals.
The Reaper’s Long Shadow
The day of writing this I was awoken very early by my dad, he shook me awake and told me I have to find a place to stay for a couple days because the neighbor’s house had a termite infestation and our landlord wanted to fumigate the property just to be safe.
I spent a couple hours meandering in my car, before deciding to go to my aunt’s house.
As soon as I walked in I saw flowers on every countertop, a grim reminder hit me.
My uncle passed a few weeks back, he had suffered from strokes for most of my life, but this stroke was his last.
I sat alone in the empty house, guiltily working next to the small memorial they had set up for him.
Small moments were pictured, at the diner with my cousin, on the beach with his signature smug smile.
I went to visit him twice in the hospital before he passed, he was alive, but only just.
According to the doctor, even in the off chance he awoke from his coma it would be with permanent and severe brain damage.
I said bye to him then, The Reaper patiently waiting next to me, ready to harvest.
Does The Reaper ever stay around?
Does he drink coffee with the grieving family when they gather?
Does he help prepare the hastily made chicken salad from the $5 Costco rotisserie chicken?
This aurora of death I’m feeling, when I went to my paternal Aunt’s house last year following my uncle's death, I called it a haunting.
There are no spirits here, only death, only The Reaper.