“Things fall apart” is one of anglophone literature’s famous one-line wonders, probably because it goes to the heart of the problem of being here, as beings evolved with the ingenuity to forestall things from falling apart. Despite humanity’s many successes against disease, disaster, and our strides in mental and physical health, we nevertheless still fail. Bodies fall apart. Relationships fall apart. Nations fall apart. And that’s the end of the story.
Or is it?
My impetus for writing The Institute for Creative Dying was an attempt to write the other half of the story. Yes, things fall apart, but those disparate parts embark on their own journeys, don’t they? The skin cell that’s died and flaked off my body somehow lands up as a fleck of dust on a stranger’s doorstep. How astonishing, then, that so much of ourselves gets shed, and is lost, from the moment we’re born to the day we give up our place in the waking world.
The funny thing about writing a story about death is that you find yourself thinking so much about life and its secret allegiance with the grim reaper. You spend time thinking about the ways death shows up in the lives of your characters — a former nun, a model, a couple in crisis and an offender newly released from prison. How might death figure differently for these people? Not just the death that’s the final nail in the coffin but the death of one’s worldview, one’s beauty, one’s love for another and one’s addiction.
What’s surprising is that buried inside my novel’s preoccupation with mortality is an interest in transformation and how characters go about adapting to the unstable ground beneath their feet. To articulate how each character faced up to the transformations they were being asked to undertake meant understanding their world views. It meant populating my imagination with the ways of comprehending the world and the lexicons people use to sustain their attachment to the world. All the while I felt I had to write towards an understanding of death that held the grief, the fear, and the philosophy of what I wanted to show about death together. Luckily, if one takes a slow, focused walk around in the world there are metaphors and processes of life that reveal death to be subterranean — part of the fabric, the fodder, for survival.
I had a similar feeling in the supermarket the other day as I walked up the aisles and realised that everything fresh and packaged is already in various stages of death. We eat death for breakfast, lunch and supper, and that’s where storytelling and imagination comes in. Stories give us the space to playfully see, think and feel differently about finite existence and its many quirks. It might not take away the fear of the unknown (little can), but it does have the potential to spark in a reader an awe for the persistence and poetry of life, even after things have been broken.
The Institute for Creative Dying is published by Picador Africa. Click here to buy a copy.
