Consumptive with the Angel of Death, Richard Tennant Cooper (1912)

“Inside every fat man, there’s a thin man trying to get out.” ― Anthony Horowitz “Inside Every Living Person is a Dead Person Waiting to Get Out…” ― Terry Pratchett

All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

I am dying. I am fat. Therefore, I am dying because I am fat.

Philosophers are expected to have a basic grasp of propositional logic. Now, I’m no wiz (as my meager B+ in grad-level symbolic logic will testify), but even I know that second one is a shitty argument. And yet, its assumptions and conclusions coat the psyches of our culture like a sticky substance on a surface vulnerable to sticky substances.

We fear dying.

We fear becoming fat.

But do we fear becoming fat because we fear dying?

Maybe that is the case. But in this world in which fatness is so reviled that people actually express preference for death over being fat, things aren’t quite so simple. The fact of the matter is this: becoming fat is akin to a death worse than death. A living death. A social death.[i]

You may have heard of a study that came out of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity that found that many children would rather lose a limb than be fat. And, a significant number of respondents said they would prefer a wide range of illnesses and disabilities to being fat: alcoholism, depression, losing a limb, blindness. But we also know, that more than half of Americans would prefer to be dead than disabled.

I’ll give you a minute to take all that in.

The part of me that likes to make sticker-accented bulleted lists in my journals is tempted to say something like this — on a scale of ‘no thank you’ to ‘uh-uh, nooooooooope’ we have:

1. Death

2. Disability

3. Fatness

Or is fatness 2? It’s hard to say what goes where, and for good reason.

The Good Place, NBC

Americans would rather be dead than disabled. They’d rather be disabled than fat. They’d rather be dead than fat. In reality, this list is not very responsible. We should have something more like a Good-Place-Jeremy-Bearimy-structure of squiggly-mutual-imbrication. [ii] But more importantly, such a list is misleading for this reason: just because Americans think they’d rather be dead than fat or disabled, does not mean it is true. (I mean, Apart from the obvious fact that there are plenty of fat and/or disabled people not offing themselves.) I am not saying that Americans don’t know what they really want — okay, well maybe a little — but most Americans can’t know which they’d prefer because at least one of the alternatives is completely closed to them. Meaning?

Americans just don’t do death.

Fatness and disability aren’t less desirable than death. Those are just the only “deaths” that they have some manner of access to, filtered though it may be. They don’t know that other death — the real death— how could they? Grandma died, we’re told, and it took less than five minutes for her body to be whisked away, two days for her to be sanitized and magicked into a formaldehyde-soaked doll, all traces of death tossed away in a bag with her internal organs. Fixed, but not quite revived. Where there is no decay there is no death. At least, that is the hope. When you remember Grandma they’ll make damn sure that what you see in your Starbucks-line-daydreams is not death. It’s not life either, but at least it’s not death.

Photo by Moira Dillon on Unsplash

This non-sense of death as the mere absence of life is what Val Plumwood calls the “modernistic reductionist” paradigm, marked by its discontinuity with life and lack of meaning. Fun fact about Val Plumwood: she’s an Australian ecofeminist philosopher who advocated a notion of death as prey and then got eaten by a crocodile. Well, almost. Now that is dedication. Coming back from that totally awesome and necessary digression… in describing cemeteries that arise from and reinforce this non-sense of death, she notes that they are strikingly “silent about death.” Their primary purpose is to separate the dead from the living and, more fundamentally, to separate death from life. She writes that these cemeteries’

“anti-life function is intensified by modern herbicide technology…. This lifeless zone is the modernist, concrete expression of the transcendent ideals which continue to hyper-separate human and nature and conceive death as apart from and opposed to life.”

This opposition to life combined with an absence of a positive presence of death doesn’t just pollute the land in cemeteries with a panoply of chemicals and drive up funeral costs.

It negatively impacts our ability to relate to our dead.

One of the ubiquitous manifestations of this view of death is the embalming process, briefly alluded to above (‘member grandma?). The purpose of embalming is not to make the body look alive, rather, it is to make the body “look not dead.” Sally Tisdale describes a violent sense of uncanniness upon encountering the embalmed corpse of her mother. What she saw was not her mother dead, nor was it were mother alive. She writes that while, on a certain “rational” level she knew that her mother was dead, she felt that “a lot of my hard-won acceptance was lost. More than thirty years later, I still resent what was done to her, and to me.” Tisdale had been confronted with the concretization of the image of the non-sense of death. She writes:

“Embalming and the so-called restorative arts are about denial and, as a result, they unwittingly cause us greater pain. …To mourn, we need to accept what has happened, and in order to truly know what that is, we must look at what has happened. What good is served by turning away from the fact of loss? Only delay. Only confusion, day after day, as reality collides with a dream.”

She contrasts this experience with a positive (in the sense of a presence) encounter with death many years later. Tisdale remained close to her friend Carol as she died of breast cancer. Upon her death Carol was not embalmed: she looked and felt dead as Sally kissed her goodbye, allowing her to process the shift from this is Carol alive, to this is Carol’s body, to this is her body that would be reclaimed by nature upon her burial in a muslin shroud. This is one of the ways that the manner in which we either sense or do not sense death can have a direct impact upon our ability to relate to our dead. What is grief if not a relationship with the dead?

Caitlin Doughty, mortician and founder of the non-profit funeral home Undertaking L.A., details her beginning forays into mortuary work: an experience largely colored by a sort of culture-shock. In her TedxTalk “The corpses that changed my life,” she describes “meeting” her first corpse:

“I walked into the sterile preparation room, and there he was: laying under a white sheet. I was a little terrified of him, to be honest, I slowly pulled down the sheets to reveal his face, and he looked so dead. But in spite of his glazed over eyes, his gaping open mouth, his sunken skin, in spite of him looking deader than I had ever seen anything look dead, the room still seemed to pulsate with electric energy. There was something so visceral, so powerful about being in the same room as a dead body, something that my society, your society, as well, has systematically kept away from us our entire lives. I said this was the first time I had met a corpse… but it was not the first time I had ever seen a corpse.”

Doughty’s experience of the corpse is not simply a confrontation with an absence of life, but a positive presence that “pulsates.” While she had seen (embalmed, made-over) corpses before at funerals, she describes this instance as meeting a corpse for the first time. The difference was that she was allowed behind the curtain put up by contemporary American death practices as made most manifest in the funeral industry, but also more importantly, she was open to the experience. Later, Doughty will describe the impact that the experience of meeting a corpse, unshielded by glass or makeup, had upon her ability to be open and compassionate with the grieving families she serves — to not mask the death or the ensuing grief.

In The Good Death: An Exploration of Dying in America, Ann Neumann describes watching her undergraduate students watch How to Die in Oregon, an award-winning film that chronicles the fight for Right to Die legislation in the state by tracing the lives and deaths of several people who chose to make use of Death with Dignity (aka medical aid in dying or MAID). One of these people is a woman in her fifties named Cody — the film closes with her final moments and her last words to her loved ones. While watching the film, Neumann notes that her students appeared shockingly unaffected:

“I wondered if, even after months of reading about death and dying, after a mere eighteen years of life, they were still grappling to understand what it’s like to die. Sure some of them had lost grandparents, but for the most part, they didn’t have the store of emotion, from either facing their own mortality or the absence of a loved one, for the movie to tap into.”

But this “store of emotion” that enables one to make oneself open to death to the point of triggering an empathetic grief response is not something that is simply lacked by the youth and can be remedied through (presumably tragic) life experiences. It is symptomatic of a larger culture of death refusal that bears epistemic, ethical, and political consequences.

I’m not dying, you are

It is easy to lay all blame on a corporatized funeral industry that works so hard to keep grieving people from their dead. I’m pretty comfortable extending a hefty serving of blame and gravy on them. But don’t let that eclipse the fact that we outside the funeral industry are actively invested in keeping ourselves away from death, burying away our own dead in the process. It is in othering death, the dying, the dead, and those whom we associate with death that we establish ourselves as a Me and a We — that is, as not them.

As alive.

For the French feminist philosopher Julia Kristeva, the corpse is that which troubles the symbolic order of the living; it is abject. The abject is either (a) that which is within me that I expel, or (b) that which is outside me that I refuse. But, it is made most manifest in the interaction of the two (e.g. the corpse. Also vomit…ugh). This refusal of the abject, of which the corpse is the paradigm, is how I constitute myself as an individual subject. Think of abjection as a “ugh gross I can’t even” response. The corpse is abject because I sense that it assaults the boundary of my subjectivity, i.e. “I can’t even.” When I see a corpse, part of me recognizes that it is also within me — that I am a meat-wrapped skeleton — a potential corpse. The corpse signifies my own corpse-ness that I must refuse to remain a coherent subject (to “be able to even,” if you will). Not thinking about my own mortality is like existential Teflon. But at the same time, this compulsion to avoid and reject that which troubles this clean boundary between life and death, health and illness, results in the abjection and stigmatization of those groups we associate with death: the dying, aged, disabled, fat, and chronically-ill.

When someone is a dick to someone for being fat — with such zingers as the classic “hey ur fat” — they are assuring themselves that they are not fat. They are not a those people. They are part of the us. At the same time, while othering fat people they are assuring themselves that they are not fat, and therefore, are not dying. A similar process occurs with ableism. Fatphobia and ableism are like interwoven security blankets that keep the chill of mortality away at night. It is illogical and futile, of course, but that doesn’t matter. Just beneath the surface of conscious thought, it feels like it’s working. And that’s enough reason to keep doing it. Because who cares about fat or disabled people?

They’re basically dead anyway.

Death Positivity can’t be just about Death

To most of the thin and able-bodied, fatness and disability amount to much the same thing — immobility, lack of freedom, discomfort, shame, being a burden upon decent tax-paying folk.

Two handicapped spots off to the sides. Much generous. Very impress.

It means being a round peg in a world of square holes. However, where the problem lies is not in the roundness of the pegs (some blessed with more roundness than others, insert coy wink) but with the uniformity of the holes in the… hole…world… okay I am abandoning the metaphor. The problem is with the way the world is constructed to accommodate only one kind/shape/size of body. If you’ve never had to stop to think before going to a concert or restaurant, “will they have space for me? Were they designed with me in mind?” Congratulations, square peg (whoops, Miss Metaphor just snuck back in there!). It is far easier to ostracize and other the disabled and fat than to make space for them — to take them into consideration before we construct our communal spaces, rather than awkwardly scrambling around after the fact (if bothering at all). So, so much easier.

Now who’s the lazy one?

As to be expected when discussing integrated oppressions — fatness and disability in this case — the issue doesn’t stop or even begin there. In her latest book, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, Sabrina Strings reveals the entanglement of anti-blackness and white supremacy with anti-fat bias.

“In the United States, fatness became stigmatized as both black and sinful. And by the early twentieth century, slenderness was increasingly promoted as the correct embodiment for white Anglo-Saxon Protestant women. Not until after these associations were already in place did the medical establishment begin its concerted effort to combat ‘excess’ fat tissue as a major public health initiative. In this way, the phobia about fatness and the preference for thinness have not, principally or historically, been about health. Instead, they have been one way the body has been used to craft and legitimate race, sex, and class hierarchies.” (6)

This co-morbid stigmatization of blackness and fatness — and I would add disability — feeds into the white-supremacist narrative of the poor black women as a burden on society. The hugely harmful image of the “welfare queen” is increasingly becoming one of a “Medicaid queen,” a drain on our (broken) healthcare system and the (thin, white, able-bodied, wealthy) taxes that fund it. Like the fat and disabled, blackness is framed as dragging down “the rest of Us™.” We™aren’t broken . Our health care — or more accurately, healthy-care system isn’t broken. Those people are the ones who are broken: even sinful.

Okay, but what does this have to do with the Death Positive Movement?

I have a lot of respect for Death Positivity as a burgeoning movement. I’m a card-carrying member with… no card… are there cards? I missed the cards. In addition to her writing and advocacy, founder of Order of the Good Death Caitlin Doughty does a lot of great work in helping people who would not otherwise be able to afford funeral services access as Death Positive praxis. But like any new movement, there are considerable growing pains as we collectively negotiate what the hell it means to be Death Positive anyway. I would argue for the necessity of a firm fat- and disabled-liberation stance as a core tenet of Death Positivity both as a movement, practice, and a philosophy. The stigmatization of death and the dying cannot be separated from stigmatization of the fat and disabled. If we pretend otherwise, we will only ever scratch uselessly at the surface of our culture of death denial.

In a recent article the Death Positive podcast and blog Talk Death made an argument for Death with Dignity/Medical Aid in Dying (MAID). One of their primary points was this:

T he truth is that as we age and become sick, the cost of keeping us alive increases greatly. Some with debilitating illnesses who wish to die may live for years at the expense of taxpayers and families.

Pardon?

When I read that I did so many double-takes I may have done permanent damage to my double-taking-muscles. Full transparency: I support Right to Die legislation, but this is an absolutely unacceptable justification. By this logic, anyone who “costs too much” is expendable for the sake of, what, Reaganomics? The fact that one can make a perfectly cogent and convincing argument for the Right to Die without appealing to saving tax-payer money by letting the sick and disabled die makes me seriously question their intentions when they go out of their way to do so.

Now back to our friend Cody from How to Die in Oregon. Cody chose to make use of Death with Dignity. This choice is made for a number of complex, personal reasons. I am not making the claim that she made a wrong choice or even a poor choice. However, the way she speaks about her reasoning is in itself incredibly telling. She makes appeals to not wanting to be a “burden” because she is sick and requires help. She chooses to die because, in her own words:

I’ m not going to die with the fluid oozing out of my pores and my legs. I’m not going to weigh 200 pounds again. I’m not going to lose my hair again. I am not going to be humiliated with losing control of my bodily functions again. This will be tidy.

Throughout the documentary she makes repeated appeals to not wishing to be a burden because she is sick. The unspoken assumption there is that the sick are a burden. If the sick, disabled, and dying are straining our healthcare system and our personal care networks, it is not because the sick, disabled, and dying are a burden — it is because our healthcare system is so fundamentally broken that it cannot even accommodate the most basic fact of all our existences: our mortality.

This idea that the disabled are a burden upon society is one activists have been battling long before I plopped onto the scene (I was a c-section baby, so I assume there was a plopping). Given the historical fact of euthanasia of the disabled, Right to Die/MAID has understandably become a point of contention. Not Dead Yet is just one disability rights group fighting Right to Die/MAID, viewing the “legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia as deadly forms of discrimination against old, ill and disabled people.” Given what we know about how society views the disabled, ill, elderly, and fat it is really hard to argue against that.

As a whole, Death Positivity is very pro-autonomy when it comes to death. So am I (hence my invisible membership card). Naturally, Right to Die/MAID is a good thing from a Death Positive perspective.

In “What Death Positivity is NOT,” Caitlin Doughty writes:

…there are so many incredible people in our movement writing, advocating, and speaking out about trans rights in death, the devastating mortality rates of black mothers, the strain funerals create for low income families, the impossible hurdles created by dying as an immigrant…We don’t believe that we should accept bad deaths, especially in our current political climate, as a fixed condition. We should be allowing communities to define what a “good death” means to them, the very real barriers that exist to realizing a good death, and examining and dismantling those barriers. This discovery is a key part of the death positive movement.

In this case, what constitutes a “good death” will be different for different communities. A “good death” for a fat person might involve having had the best possible medical care and equipment, and desired funerary arrangements (Hint: It does not look like this). I was so happy that Caitlin herself addressed the issue of fat access (or lack thereof) to funeral services.

But, what about when your idea of a “good death” means never, ever having to be anything like me while you are dying? Never having to be fat or disabled like me? What does that say about how you feel about me, Really?

We cannot separate an intersectional awareness and analysis of power when discussing what it means to have a good death. What privileged communities consider a good death needs to exhumed and examined. This will help us reveal not only our own prejudices, but to identify where action is needed to better accommodate and protect vulnerable communities in our worlds. Most importantly, fat activists and disabled activists — women of color especially — need to be a central part of the conversation about what it means to have a good death.

Most of us will experience disability at some point in our lives. A hefty majority of us sit somewhere on the “fat scale.”

If we revise and redesign our spaces and practices with a basic recognition of those facts, disability and fatness no longer need be seen as living-death-sentences.