Death: The Trip of a Lifetime
By Greg Palmer
HarperCollins, 320 pages, $23
Several years ago a reporter for a Seattle television station was covering an outdoor performance by a Japanese dance troupe. Before a lunch-time crowd, six male dancers lowered themselves on ropes down the facade of a building. Fifty feet from the ground, one of the ropes broke.
The reporter, Greg Palmer, could not believe it: He was watching a man fall to his death. When he realized that his horror was mingled with the satisfaction of having exclusive footage, he was ashamed. But his cold-bloodedness was short-lived.
That night, taking his son to the circus, he burst into tears watching the high-wire act. The Japanese performer had been the first dead person he had ever seen. He was crying not only for the artist who had died but also, newly aware of his own mortality, for himself. Out of that experience have come a book and a PBS television series, both entitled “Death: The Trip of a Lifetime,” Palmer’s peripatetic examination of death in all its most colorful aspects.
He interviews an AIDS patient; pays tribute to the will to live of a 7-year-old girl with leukemia; jets to Ghana for a glimpse of a no-holds-barred Ashanti funeral; analyzes Dorothy’s journey to Oz as a near-death experience; and talks to the owner of a Pensacola funeral home with a drive-through viewing window. Death, which normally has a reputation for being quite restful, has never seemed so exhausting.
Or so elusive. Because what we quickly realize, viewing this necrological embarras de richesses, is that death itself is a total blank. What we’re learning about can only be how people live in light of their knowledge of death.
The fact that poets and philosophers have explored this subject both more sublimely and more systematically doesn’t make Palmer’s smart, unpretentious effort less valuable. “Death” is a cozy, informal look at each phase of the process, from ailing to dying to autopsy to funeral to entombment to various contradictory views of the afterlife.
To this end, Palmer has interviewed roughly 200 experts. Many are familiar with death professionally as coroners, undertakers, hospice nurses, casket builders, or preachers; others are simply individuals contemplating-often at close range-their own mortality.
The result is a tantalizing book, laden with fascinating details. But it lacks clearly reasoned conclusions and often fails to cite sources that would let us evaluate the worth of Palmer’s assertions. Who, for example, says that English dentists of the 19th Century made dentures using the teeth of corpses? We are told that elephants, apes and dolphins mourn their dead, but on what authority? Palmer informs us that druids celebrated the precursor of Halloween, Samhain, by dressing as spirits and playing tricks on their neighbors, but then says, without attribution: “The theory was that real spirits passing by would see their colleague working a particular neighborhood and move on.” It would be nice to know who these experts are.
But Palmer has the virtues of his defects. He may shun the trappings of scholarship, but as the winner of 13 Emmys and a George Foster Peabody award, he knows how to make direct contact with his audience and interview subjects. His occasional flippancy might be the most polite honest response to some of our species’ wackier funerary customs.
In north Florida he observes a coffin lid painted inside with “The Last Supper” and speculates that this is an attempt to ward off the fear of “boredom in the box.” Palmer adds: “It still wouldn’t have held my interest for anywhere near the time it would need to.” He is equally funny in a quick, deadpan aside on Howard Hughes: “Reportedly Howard Hughes went to extraordinary lengths to live in a germ free environment. You know, the Howard Hughes who is now dead.”
But the impulse to entertain his readers never leads Palmer to treat the dying or the bereaved with a lack of respect. He may be drawn to the funeral home with the drive-in window precisely because it is bizarre, but once he has observed the dignified elderly woman lying in her coffin he makes fun neither of the corpse nor of the funeral home’s director. Rather, he gets out of his car and attends the woman’s memorial service.
When there are feelings involved, he enters into them. An AIDS patient talks about calling his father, from whom he has been estranged ever since he announced he was gay: “I told him I was dying of AIDS. And he said, `Are you calling for my forgiveness?’ ” Palmer adds, “I’ve never met Ian’s father, which is probably just as well for both of us. He wouldn’t find our conversation pleasant.” Where human connection is possible, he clearly prefers it to journalistic detachment.
Books that are spinoffs of television programs all too often resemble freeways driven along at low speeds-the uneventfulness of the landscape becomes painfully apparent. Happily, that is not the case here. Palmer’s empathy and insatiable curiosity have produced a somewhat disheveled book, but a full one. And-oddly, considering its topic-a lively one. Death turns out to be packed with life stories.
