In Which We Try To Find A Way To Unwind

White Houses

by BREANNA LOCKE

I was once told that no one ever wants to hear the ‘death of a grandparent’ story. We all have to experience a first death some time, and as children, it's usually an older relative who departs from your life first. While sobering to experience as a child, it is a perverse but ordinary rite of passage. A few days after my great-grandmother's death, I ended up finding something that disturbed me in a way very separate from this new discovery of mortality.

I remember my mother’s face when she addressed me and my sister. “Girls,” she began with concerned eyes, her hands resting on our shoulders, “Great Grammy died.”

Died? I thought back to her 100th birthday party we attended a few years earlier at her big mysterious white house. Its large early nineteenth century structure always spurred overactive imaginations in my sister, cousins, and me. There were just so many nooks and crannies and staircases and rooms. While the adults mingled, we would always be wandering off, investigating. My great-grandpa — who I’d never met — used to be a doctor, and his old office remained in one large room on the first floor. It was still set up like it was in the 1950s with old glass bottles of tinctures and medical supplies nestled neatly next to each other on shelves. A leather doctor’s bag and even a stethoscope rested on the old davenport desk. It was all pretty Norman Rockwell-esque, but after dark, the scene took on a more eerie aesthetic.

The attic had two closet-sized nooks where we were told slaves lived long ago. We’d knock on the walls and listen to see if any spots sounded hollow. Then we’d crawl down under staircases, certain that we would find some kind of hidden room or secret passageway somewhere in the huge house. It had been Jamie’s idea; my big sister loved her Nancy Drew books.

Later that the night, we all sang to my great grandmother, the beautiful pink frosted cake sitting before her on the long dining room table. There weren’t a hundred candles on the cake though; I was told they just simply wouldn’t all fit. My great grandma had been so present, so warm and loving and lively despite her wrinkles and tiny, slouching frame. Her smiles were always genuine and lovely. She didn’t speak much anymore, but she could still communicate, especially with those smiles. She was one hundred! I guess I just assumed she’d live forever.

At eight years old, I had a rudimentary understanding of death. I knew it happened to other people — characters in movies and TV. And in real life too, I supposed. How else would ghosts exist? But I had never considered the fact that death was capable of intruding into my own life.

Would there be a funeral with everyone dressed in black? The only dresses I owned were sprinkled with bright, floral patterns.

I did end up going to the funeral, and my mom bought me a black dress just for the occasion. After I put it on, I found myself squirming in it, and my stomach hurt like I had eaten too much candy. I quickly made sure that Jamie would stick by my side throughout the whole ordeal. Though only a few years my senior, at 12 she was a grown-up in my eyes.

My mother explained to us that the night before the funeral, there would be a wake. And she warned us that it might be open casket. I knew she wouldn’t have black Xs over her eyes like in cartoons, but what would she look like?, I wondered. Grey and skeletal, or beautiful like Snow White in her glass coffin?

From the outside, it just looked like an attractive white house. But upon entering, it became all too apparent that it was a funeral home. We hugged my grammy and grandpa, my aunts, my uncles, my cousins, and some relatives I didn’t even know. And then I peered into the large room behind them.

Chairs were arranged in a way that reminded me of church pews. There was even a priest. But it wasn’t Father McKenzie; it was an unknown stranger holding a bible, and he was standing beside a casket. And the top lid was open, exposing my great grandmother.

For a moment, my eyes refused to look away. From this distance it seemed that she was only sleeping. Why wasn’t anyone waking her up? Because she’s dead. Suddenly, I was able to turn away.

Jamie and I didn’t have to sit in that room with the dead body while the relatives mingled, expressing their feelings of loss to each other. We were told it was okay for us to stay around the common rooms in the front of the funeral home, where collages of photos were set up. Still, the atmosphere from the back parlor seemed to keep creeping in, and it made me dizzy.

It wasn’t long before our confinement to stuffy rooms and their velvet couches wore on us. So we began to wander. And it was down a hallway past the bathroom where we came upon a door with a sign on it.

“Game Room,” my sister read aloud. It seemed like that would be the perfect place for us. Kids should be with games, not death.

“We're not allowed in there,” I said.

“I think it’s okay,” she said, her voice sounding eager, though slightly uncertain.

No one was in sight as we stood staring at the door, so finally, after some contemplation, Jamie cracked it open. It revealed a staircase leading down into the basement. Was there really a game room down there? Despite any doubts we had, she flicked on the light switch next to the door, illuminating the descending trail. And down we went.

At first it seemed to make sense. It was a game room — there was a pool table. But then we noticed a silver pole on the other side of the room. It reached from a platform on the ground all the way up to the ceiling. A disco ball hung in the center of the room, casting glints of light onto a dancing cage. There was an orange shag rug beneath our feet, and it looked dirty. And the room carried a lingering odor that made my nose tingle, like beer and smoke that would drift in from the bar section to the dining area at a local restaurant we frequented. My eyes continued to scan the room that was making me feel increasingly uneasy. I noticed the posters on the wall, each featuring an almost-naked woman and some brand of alcohol. One was a close up of a tan blonde woman with sly-looking eyes holding a pitcher of beer. Her tongue was licking white froth from her lips.

Something was not right. This was not a place for kids.

Suddenly it didn’t feel like we were in a funeral home anymore. But somehow, this place was scarier. The room was silent as my sister and I said nothing. I felt wholly unnerved, and I could tell by the look on her face that Jamie did too. But our curiosity continued to grow.

When we noticed a door on the far wall, we had to investigate. We opened it to reveal a darkness that made it impossible to see anything inside. Jamie felt around for a light switch inside by the door, but found none. So she entered the room.

She searched the air for a string to pull from the ceiling. That’s how our closets at home were—exposed light bulbs activated by the yank of a string.

My attention must have been elsewhere when that room first lit up. I imagine I was looking around behind me, feeling anxious, like someone could come down the stairs at any moment and find us in this weird basement where we did not belong.

From the corner of my eyes, I saw the light coming from the closet, but before I could even look inside, Jamie rushed out and slammed the door behind her.

Her face looked white and clammy, and her eyes began to water.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “What’s in there?”

She didn’t answer my question. “We should go upstairs,” she said. I followed behind her towards the stairs, and from the sounds of our feet hitting the steps, I realized that we were running.

Jamie threw open the door at the top of the stairs, I switched the light off, and as soon as I was out, we made sure that that door marked “Game Room” was shut tightly.

When we made it back to the main front room, we took a seat on an isolated couch in a corner.

“What was in there?” I asked again.

This time, with enough distance now between us and that basement, she told me. The room was a large storage closet. She’d walked in deeply enough so that she could find the dangling light string with her hands in the dark. But when she pulled it, she found herself standing alone in an oversized closet, surrounded by coffins.

For a moment I wondered if they were filled. Is that how funeral homes stored bodies for upcoming funerals? My stomach burned.

While being shielded from getting too close to the first dead person we’d ever known, my big sister and I had discovered an “adult” playroom. No flowers, no prayers to be heard, just a pool table and a gleaming stripper pole sitting atop a musty shag rug. And amidst any debauchery that could happen down there, there would always be that closet of caskets tucked away in the corner.

I realized that even undertakers have to find some way to unwind. Maybe it’s necessary to preserve their own sanity. But I did not think games and coffins could exist so closely to one another, so closely that they occupy the very same basement. I had never considered that coffins were stacked up somewhere, waiting for people to die so they could be filled. As the night wore on, I imagined myself being surrounded by caskets almost every time I blinked. And somehow that made me feel incredibly small.

Breanna Locke is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Medford. You can find her tumblr here.

In Which Gwyneth Paltrow Appears Under A Sapphire Sky

Honey You Are A Rock

by DICK CHENEY

At first it was difficult to decide what song exactly I should choose to commemorate the all-too-sudden passing of Gwyneth Paltrow's marriage from this earth. I was pretty much evenly decided between Marc Cohn's "Walking in Memphis" and "Gangsta's Paradise," until I remembered how my wife Lynne quietly whispered, "There's far too much Gwyneth to take in here/More to goop than can ever be found" when Chris Martin initially went outside of his marriage for a consolation prize. Her mane reminded me of a young Simba: Gwyneth can never be surpassed, only glided alongside, like an F-15.

I have been crying all night, and when I stopped crying and trying to make the lyrics of "Magic" apply to Chris Martin's weird affectation of considering pre-come "first orgasm", my tears evaporated. That's when my pride kicked in.

Is there anything she can't do, except you know, be happy?

To console myself, I wallowed in what is perhaps one of GPalt's most underrated performances - her two hour long butchery of an English accent in Neil LaBute's weirdly flaccid Possession. In a rarity for a major actress, Paltrow plays ten years over her age, in a role that would make a lot more sense for her now that she is (1) crazypants and (2) showing the faintest glimpses of a middle age that most prayed would never arrive.

Possession concerns the romance between Maud Bailey (Paltrow) and a young American scholar portrayed by Aaron Eckhart. Together, they pursue the mystery of a literary affair centuries old. Despite ample use of awkward silences and the penetration of the American's anus with a quill pen, the two never quite generate the requisite chemistry to make their romance the slightest bit believable. Gwyneth's accent varies from slightly bad to utter and complete shit, but it's all worth it to watch her play a buttoned-up English professor whose idea of a compelling sexual experience means getting felt up on a weekday.

literary research b4 5mbps internet was so hard guys, you don't even know. So many turtlenecks.

Possession switches back and forth between Gwyneth's genuinely sad accent and a literary romance discovered by the two scholars that took place during the late-1800s. The chemistry between the historical couple (Jeremy Northam and Pride and Prejudice's Jennifer Ehle) is equally lacking, especially since the woman seems to have a greater interest in an extremely attractive lesbian (Lena Headley). In contrast, Gwyneth's sudden movement and prevalence of onesies gets the heart rate moving a bit faster.

It is hard to think of who exactly Gwyneth ever had any chemistry with. She felt a lot more like Iron Man's mom, her version of Sylvia Plath turned her modest, and as Margot Tenenbaum she was so asexual that the only relationship she could ever consummate was with the mirror image of herself (Luke Wilson). She never even had to "consciously uncouple," her natural state was isolated, like an extremely shy owl.

Doing everything he can to resist complimenting the part in her her hair.

Possession is a lot better on mute, since watching Gwyneth swish and strumpet around like she's hunting for the Declaration of Independence in National Treasure begins to take on a momentum of her own when you're not focused on how silly she sounds. You always knew that Chris Martin was in no way the right man for Gwyneth, because she would require a timeless beacon of sexuality that could unnerve her steely veneer, and allow her to come apart without being torn asunder. (I have been reading a lot of Courtney Milan novels, so my apologies.)

At the time it was released, Possession's main story took place in the present. Watching it now, both tales are period pieces. No one has a cell phone, and all interneting is done on Macbooks. A good twenty percent of the film, in fact, is just waiting for the Prodigy service to load whatever Usenet group had good information about the sex life of the unfortunately named Randolph Henry Ash. Things were pretty bad before the internet was instantaneous, but waiting for web pages to load added to sexual tension and brought baby lion cubs closer together.

No woman has ever looked better in a down jacket than this girl.

I alluded to this earlier, but perhaps the main failing of Gwyneth's real life husband was that he thinks everything that comes out of his body is some holy object. The second he starts getting the least bit moist, he loudly exclaims "I'm coming! I'm coming!" and puts on a shit eating grin like he's just found all the differences between the two pictures in those Highlights puzzles.

The New York Daily News reported the two had been separated for some time, a relatively obvious state of affairs given that one can only pretend to take a man who writes a song concerning his adoration of clocks seriously for so long. Gwyneth's initial new squeeze, according to the paper, was a doofy looking entertainment lawyer who actually had the decency to keep up with her website. He would romance her with certain bon mots like, "Saw your website today," or "Good post GPalt" and she would melt into a small, Simba-shaped puddle. It is truly astonishing how little it takes to make some people happy. 

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location and the former vice president of the United States.

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In Which We Take The Long Sleep

What's After Life?

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Before we die, it's a continual panic about things coming to an end, kind of like how all goodbyes are depressing. After we die, what a rush! We can deduce that several things occur after death just from the living world itself.

1. The cancellation of Firefly was an egregious mistake rectified in the afterlife, where Joss Whedon's storyboards are viewed behind angel-proof glass.
2. We can't communicate with our loved ones or use the bathroom for its proper function beyond the grave.
3. We may return.

Are you familiar with Dr. Ian Stevenson? The McGill-educated biochemist/psychologist spent the vast majority of his life exploring the phenomenon of reincarnation. He found about 2500 children who claimed to partially retain the memories of people who had died, usually under tragic circumstances. Often he found birthmarks or defects that indicated some similarity between the child and the deceased. Although he pursued his passion project with the scientific method in tow, Stevenson's drug experiences informed his work. In a lecture to a group of similar-minded people, he expounded on parts of his process:

While I was still involved with psychoanalysis, I began experimenting with hallucinogenic (perhaps better called psychedelic) drugs. I have taken or had administered to me a number of drugs and anesthetics as part of a search for drugs that would assist psychiatrists in interviewing or in psychotherapy. However, here I shall speak only of the effects on me of mescaline and LSD.

Mescaline could not improve my vision, but it vastly bettered my appreciation of what I saw. The beauty of the colors that I inwardly saw under the influence of mescaline made me ever afterward far more sensitive to color both in nature and in art than I had been before. From my experience with mescaline I also became more aware than I had been of the subjective element in our sense of the passage of time.

With LSD I had less experience of beautiful colors and much more of memories of my early life. With one of my experiences with LSD I also had a mystical experience by which I mean a sense of unity with all beings, all things. After the second of my LSD experiences I passed three days in perfect serenity. I believe that many persons could benefit as much as I did through taking psychedelic drugs under proper medical supervision, which is the only sensible way to take them.

Unlike most evidence for life after death, Stevenson used a scientific approach to collecting the stories of the "reincarnated." He published a book that met with a lot of attention, but refused to delude himself that people were giving real credence to his ideas. He knew they bought the book because they wanted to believe. In reviewing Stevenson's findings, Carl Sagan found them to be the most convincing evidence of life after death. As Dr. Stevenson explained in an interview:

In many of our cases in northwest North America and Burma, people in the same family or village are involved. So there's a likelihood that some adult or older child has talked about a deceased person and the child has absorbed the information, as our questioning makes clear. This is not, however, an issue in most cases I cite in India, many of which involve long distances, twenty-five to fifty kilometers or more, with no contact between the villages. Often the child has quite precise details.

Stevenson's subsequent scholarship in the field was even more exacting, and some of the coincidences he finds in his fieldwork are indeed astonishing.  In one such interview, a Lebanese boy speaks of being a mechanic in his early twenties killed in a car crash near a beach. Stevenson has multiple witnesses who heard the boy give the driver's name, where the crash occurred, and names of the victim's family. This is only one of many such impossibilites Stevenson documented. Connections between the recently deceased and the recently born abound in his research.

Something less than a total skeptic, at some point Stevenson purchased a filing cabinet and inserted it in his UVa Division of Perceptual Studies office. He locked it with a combination that only he knew, and planned to trasmit the combination after he passed. It is unknown whether that combination was a word or a sentence, and since his death from pneumonia in 2007, the filing cabinet has not been opened.

The psychiatrist Harold Lief argued that Stevenson was a "methodical, careful, even cautious, investigator, whose personality is on the obsessive side." He also wrote: "Either he is making a colossal mistake, or he will be known . . . as 'the Galileo of the 20th century.'" Mystic or doctor? I'm not sure what motivated Stevenson. He wanted to convince others than reincarnation might be possible, but to what end? Did he want to influence a generation of the deceased to possess the souls of living children? He thought of himself as a scientist who had to reach his conclusion no matter its purpose. Many religions hold this life is only preparation for the life beyond, which is a lot more useful fiction than those that Stevenson could provide.

The best film about death ever made is Defending Your Life. Albert Brooks plays Daniel, an advertising executive who runs into a truck as he's adjusting some papers in his new BMW convertible. Rather than being an evil man, or a virtuous man, Daniel is just another guy. When he wakes up, he finds himself on a tram entering Judgment City, a place that resembles Los Angeles so the dead from the Western half of the United States feel at home. In Defending Your Life, reincarnation is a punishment meted out to those who haven't conquered their fear of life and thus aren't worthy of entering the afterlife.

In Judgment City you can eat anything you want and you never gain a pound. Daniel meets Meryl Streep of twenty years ago. She's a very nice person who adopted two children and saved a cat from dying when her house was on fire. (The character appears to have been modeled after Angelina Jolie.) She immediately falls in love with Daniel. It's really easy and fun. All they do is make out and binge eat. Who couldn't close with those givens? The cinematic idea of the afterlife usually involves some fantasy of the actual life.

Tormenting the ones we love while they still exist doesn't exactly seem like a great use of our time, although it does make widows a lot more susceptible to practical jokes. Most of us would find the involvement of the dead in our personal affairs and hobbies more disconcerting than reassuring. That is why reincarnation is such an appealing idea. We do come back — but we come back not as ourselves. Given our lives to do over again, we are able to correct some serious imbalance. For example, I would be able to pick up on the 467 times a girl was interested in me and I did nothing about it.

When I was young I harbored a sneaking suspicion that while I was doing this for the first time, everyone else was faking that this was new to them. I was also convinced my 2nd grade friend Tim was a robot, a possibility only enhanced by the fact that he moved to Japan with his mom. I watched him wave at me from a bus and I never saw him again.

In Defending Your Life, such important moments are played before Albert Brooks, and he finds himself explaining his behavior; why he lied to save a boy from being expelled, and why he recanted when his father threatened to take away television. He realizes that while his ideas about the past haven't changed, their relative importance to him has.

Part of why Defending Your Life is so perfect is because unlike the traditional Hollywood representation of the afterlife, acceptance of the world beyond is immediate and natural. "They make it easier for us," Meryl Streep says as a way of explaining that once you're dead, your old life might as well be a book you've once read. We can intuit a hint of truth in this no matter what we think lies beyond Earth.

I actually think Defending Your Life ruined Albert Brooks' career. It did not do very well at the box office, even though it was beloved by both critics and audiences and became a television staple. But really, who wants to see a movie about death in the theaters? It was difficult to get over that this is going to be hysterical, and as funny as Defending Your Life is, ultimately the movie is  a depressing fiction. Whenever a studio executive endured Brooks' pitch meetings in the ensuing years, they must have only thought of their own mortality. There is really no other reason that his masterpiece with Debbie Reynolds, Mother, is not shown to schoolchildren along with To Kill A Mockingbird.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the same sort of thing happened to Howard Storm, whose near death experience, as chronicled in his account My Descent Into Death, changed him from an atheist to a proselytizer. Storm's NDE attracted the attention of such serious outlets as The Oprah Winfrey Show and 48 Hours. Storm endured a terrifying ordeal in a Paris hospital, after which he became a  much better person, a transformation partly due to what a dick he was before his incident.

Storm's description of the afterlife, on the other hand, is ludicrous. It is crazy not because it can't be verified, or because it doesn't have a ring of truth. Storm's story is silly because it has all the logic of a dream, and is familiar to anyone who does dream. Since he was basically delirious from pain, his lengthy description of the afterlife was nothing more than a nightmare. Storm saw scenes from his life, and he turned away from them. Presumably Jesus showed him how much of a dick he was. (Some people are so stubborn they only listen to Jesus or his counterpart Paul Krugman.)

After his surgery, Storm refused doctor's advice to recuperate and he became beset by complications suffered when he travelled back to the United States. He spent most of his time weeping and praying and his wife threatened to leave him. He gained some distance from his experience, and the fact that he was able to talk to hospital staff before his surgery indicates that despite his severe condition, he was never dead, only dying.

People need a reason to change their lives, and if they don't have one, they'll make it up. Before his NDE, Storm was an atheist, and by all accounts a horror to friends, family, and students. Afterward, he turned into a nicer man who believed in God. Perhaps he couldn't handle the idea that he had made the change himself, so he had to attribute it to a man who lived and died so long ago.

Many saints lived an ignominious existence before coming to Jesus. The sight of Christopher Hitchens in a prayer group is avant-garde indeed. The guy smoked 450,000 cigarettes, what did he think was going to happen? This is not to say that there isn't something very noble about putting your faith in something larger than yourself. But that's not what Storm, or Hitchens, or Anne Rice is doing.

The scientist puts the evidence before himself — he knows he is small in comparison to everything, even God. The proselytizer puts himself before the evidence, and it is because he is afraid of one of those things: the evidence, or himself. A rabbi once told me that if you need God, he is there. And if you don't, he is there. I remember thinking that struck me as sexist.

There is a vexing curiosity to find out what will happen, something along the lines of what dooms Inception's Mal. It is potentially the source of all madness. Stevenson's cabinet remains locked.

Recently I mastered the art of lucid dreaming, which is something like what Howard Storm went through in that hospital in Paris. In the dream world, I control all of my behavior, but others still act of their own volition. Despite the illusion of dream control, I am less and less excited to descend into the dream world. The imagined projections in my mind move nearer to reality, instead of the real world inching closer to my fantasy. It may be this is only a consequence of getting older. We find, like Howard Storm, that we do want to make a transformation, even if we like the person we were. Even though I am already someone worthwhile, I long to be someone else.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here and twitters here. He last wrote in these pages about Todd Haynes' HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce.

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