We’ve
lost two starmen in the last twelve months. One of them I cared
deeply about. One of them triggered the response that a famous name
and good music does, but I can’t say I held a special place for him
in my heart. So David Bowie has returned to whatever fabulous alien
celestial home he came from. Leonard Nimoy has beamed up. Spock is
now enjoying a drink somewhere beyond the stars with Scotty and
McCoy. (And then, in the few days that I wrote this, Alan Rickman is
also gone. Pictures proliferate with images of Severus Snape and the
word always.)
Maybe
it’s the autism in me, but whenever this kind of thing happens I
just want to scream, no! They’re
dead! They’re not resting in a better place. They haven’t gone on
to some imaginary world based on whichever media persona we knew them
by. When your dog dies it doesn’t tiptoe over a rainbow bridge,
either. It’s dead. That’s the condition of being dead; there is
no doing, there is no animated beyond. Cells cease to function,
brainwaves stop, everything that makes a being a being is gone. It
leaves behind a gaping hole in those who loved them, but that doesn’t
make it less true, and
stating that fact doesn’t make you love someone less, or miss them
less. It’s hard not to say
these things without sounding like an asshole, but you get used to
that. People layer emotions onto completely unemotional statements,
and that makes you an asshole.
That’s
not to say I have no belief in any kind of soul, that I have no
belief in the energy that makes up a being moving on to another
place. I can’t prove heaven, but I can’t prove there is no
heaven, either. What
makes me uneasy is the way that we layer a
pretence over these things
that the deceased doesn’t
deserve. We imagine David
Bowie in a silver glitter suit with incredible make-up and platform
shoes doing things beyond our ken on an alien world. We imagine
Leonard Nimoy with his Star Trek uniform and his pointed ears, out
there on the Starship Enterprise,
able now to go about his business without all of those pesky human
connections that grounded him when he was bound by Nimoy’s life. We
have taken away what made up that unique person and instead we see
only the fantasy of a character that they were not.
Part
of what makes me uneasy about this is, I think, the autistic response
to metaphors, to anything that isn’t straight speaking. I
understand metaphors. I use them regularly. I don’t always say
precisely what I mean. But it bugs the hell out of me if, for
example, I ask someone if they want something and they reply, ‘I
wouldn’t say no.’ ‘Would you say yes?’ I want to ask. Not
saying no leaves a realm of possibilities that might not include yes.
It bugs me even more when
people pretend that death is a sleep or a trip into a better world
full of glitter and unicorns.
But
what really makes me uneasy is this shared fantasy. I know these kind
of things are not new. For millennia people have taken solace in the
idea of heaven. Saying grandma’s in heaven now is no different to
imagining Bowie on an alien planet having a rock party. But Bowie
becoming the starman, Nimoy transcending his earthly form to beam up
to the Enterprise, are
more than saying grandma’s in heaven, even if the ideas come from
the same motivations, to visualise our loved ones and heroes in a
better place. Grandma isn’t defined by heaven. The idea of heaven
doesn’t erase every other amazing thing that grandma did. The
Starman and Spock – and now
Severus Snape – do that.
They erase the deep, many-layered, incredible richness of a human
life.
For
every newspaper report and internet meme to associate Nimoy with
Spock, Bowie with the Starman, Rickman
with Snape, suddenly deletes
every incredible detail of their lives. No childhood of scraped knees
and selling papers, no early years searching for a niche, no
children, grandchildren, loved ones. No quiet evenings reading books,
or meals out, or gestures of kindness or moments of temper. Second
upon second of a person’s life, piled up like leaves of a book,
piled up into stacks so high you couldn’t comprehend them, become
flattened. In our desperation to keep our heroes around, to send them
to a better place, we’ve compressed them to a cartoon cut out, and
I think that kills them more than anything.
