April 2006
Jbuzbee
Terry Pratchett was of course a genius. I almost bought ‘Strata’ as soon as it came out (but didn’t, costing me hundreds of quid) and read every Discworld novel up to ‘Wyrd Sisters’ in 1988. I then suffered a crisis of confidence in his work. It was of very high quality and was being written very fast, and I got worried that he wouldn’t be able to maintain the quality. Because I didn’t want to witness the death of the author in a different sense than usual, I made a conscious decision to stop reading. I’ve read maybe five novels he wrote after that point, there was no decline as far as I could perceive and, well, I was wrong. He is of course now literally dead, and I can’t help but wonder if he kind of burnt his brain out writing so much brilliant stuff for so long, so fast. But my medical side tells me this is very likely impossible and is just welding two unconnected facts together. It’s kind of a supersititious part of my own brain which tells me the contrary.
Pratchett was no stranger to entertaining superstition, and one of his major characters is in fact Death. This is Death the anthropomorphic personification, who always speaks in small capitals and is mistaken intentionally for an undertaker by mere mortals whom he’d prefer not to realise his true identity. Incidentally, I can’t remember if he is gendered as male in the stories – he may be neuter. Death and the Grim Reaper are in a wider context not exactly the same figure. For instance, Death is the presumably symbolic figure in the Book of Revelation – one of the Four Horsemen. The Grim Reaper comes on foot. I’m going to call the personification the Grim Reaper rather than Death because I’m not really talking about the being on horseback.
As you may know, a fortnight or so ago a guy turned up at our front door apparently carrying a scythe about 250 centimetres high. He turned out to be delivering a hoist, was wearing jeans and a polo shirt, and had flesh on his bones, so clearly he wasn’t the Grim Reaper. Nonetheless, the presence of an elderly and infirm person in our home, which necessitated the delivery of said hoist, does focus us very much on the possibility of imminent death and although we only playfully made the association, it was nevertheless made. Other people, under greater duress, make the association much more strongly and have, anecdotally, witnessed apparitions of the personification concerned. Now as far as I know there has never been a thoroughgoing scientific study of these experiences, but there are plenty of reports of them, and they aren’t always associated with the expectation that someone is going to die, which would presumably prime their mind for seeing such an entity. That said, there is the question of post hoc confabulation. I’m now going to recount a few stories of the incidents involved. I can’t really do more than that because of the lack of research, but I will go into that issue later.
First of all, the Grim Reaper in these tales is often, but not always, a male figure in a shadowy shapeless cloak with a hood, carrying a long scythe vertically with the blade at the top. Sometimes the skull or a bony hand is visible and usually the figure is identified as male even though there are no anatomical or other cues to that effect. There is some variation.
There are, first of all, some straightforward perceptions which seem to be versions of Near-Death Experiences. For instance, a man called Ralph was hospitalised after a heart attack and saw a “dark, grey, cloaked stranger. He had no face”, standing by his bed. Ralph felt “very cold, below freezing” but knew it wasn’t his time to go yet, and the stranger vanished. This is easy to explain as a NDE, but there are others which are harder. For instance, an apparently healthy woman in her twenties experienced the apparent Grim Reaper on her landing and was shortly after diagnosed with cancer. She then continued to see him intermittently until she died a couple of years later. A similar first-hand account involves an older person who intermittently saw the entity throughout the last year of her life.
This can be put down to a physical process whereby someone becomes subliminally aware that they’re unwell. Not wishing to trespass too far into one of my other blogs, this reminds me of the intimations people sometimes get of their conditions, which I also suspect explains gender incongruence to some extent. There are cases of people with degenerative motor neurone conditions having recurring dreams of turning into a statue before they’ve noticed any symptoms or were aware of being susceptible, and of a schizophrenic who believed he was dissolving and urinating out the substance of his body who turned out to have a parathyroid tumour which was causing his bone calcium to be released into his bloodstream and excreted via his urine. If someone sees the Grim Reaper herself and is soon after diagnosed with cancer, the fact that it’s happening inside her own body where, in a sense, her consciousness is situated, it makes sense that she would have this kind of experience.
There are, however, also vicarious experiences of the apparition. A man sitting on the couch in his living room became aware of the presence and went upstairs to find his wife had tried to kill herself, and was able to save her life. With this again, I suspect there is a link between his existing concern for her and the happening. Another one is harder to explain. A nurse walking past a room in a hospital glimpsed a shadowy figure out of the corner of her eye through the doorway, went back to check and found that the patient in it was accompanied by a man standing by her bed in monk-like robes, a skull for a face, a skeletal hand and red fires inside the eye sockets. Once again, this could be due to fatigue and the intuition or expectation that the patient’s life was approaching its end.
Another experience was the first of many, starting in childhood. A boy at school asked a teacher on a bench outside for permission to go to the toilet and saw a man sitting next to her. He was pale, bald and had heavy bags under his eyes. He then went to the toilet and on coming out, the teacher had had a fatal heart attack and died about half an hour later. It then emerged that nobody else had seen the man. A year later, he was out playing with his friends in a remote area near a waterfall and met a blond mute man. Shortly after, one friend fell down the falls, fractured his skull and stopped breathing. They attempted CPR and fetched the ambulance, and fortunately his friend survived, but the man was with them the whole time, didn’t respond when he pleaded for help, and again nobody else saw him.
All of this is uncorroborated, anecdotal evidence gathered on an ad hoc basis. However, it would be difficult to say something to that effect to a firsthand witness to these phenomena. It may not be necessary to focus on the specifics of the experiences because they resemble others to some extent, such as Lewy body dementia, which involves the mixture of dreaming and waking experience, the more conventional near-death experiences and sleep paralysis. They also bring to mind psychosomatic symptoms, though on a more imaginative, figurative level, and they also tend to differ from what one would expect, as second-hand experiences often seem to presage someone else’s life-threatening event, and he seems more like a helper than a threat, as in someone who saves lives and warns.
It would be interesting, as well, to know what people in other cultures experience in these situations. For instance, Satem cultures such as the Slavs and Hindus have a female personification of death and Mexico has Santa Muerte. Banshees (bean sí) are also female. They’re said only to lament true Gaels, so I’d better watch out for one. Θανατος in Greek mythology is the son of Νυξ and twin of `Υπνος, Night and Sleep respectively, and is depicted as a winged, bearded man. It would be interesting in particular to know how today’s Dodekatheists, Greek traditional religion revivalists, experience the apparition of Death because it might indicate how well-entrenched their faith is in their minds.
To conclude, then, there doesn’t seem to be anything to suggest that the Grim Reaper exists aside from the perception of people who see him, but that doesn’t make him any less real. In a sense, everyone we meet is a mere animated physical body but we instinctively project the fact that they are people onto their forms, and in the same way some of us can’t escape the same kind of phenomenon when we are in some sense close to death. It’s notable that it doesn’t sound like he would be visible in a mirror, because in dreams mirrors are often empty when we face them, and he would have that in common with Satan and vampires. I don’t want to be led to patronisingly saying “well he’s real to you” so much as adopting a different attitude to what happens when we perceive each other. So I’m just going to say, yes, he is real, and we are not just impersonal scientific instruments.
Therefore, yes the Grim Reaper exists.
A Box Of Chocolates 