One of the main takeaways I got from this course is that death lives everywhere in society; if we take Terror Management Theory and Ernest Becker at face-value, everything we do, whether directly or indirectly, is to manage our own death anxiety. When I first heard that, it seemed a little convenient. Of course something that all humans experience was at the root of all our social, political, and environmental problems.
However, upon reflecting more upon the ways that death has influenced my own life—from trying to be remembered, to “doing good,” and more—I recognize that, in someways, it makes a lot of sense. Death has invaded pretty much every aspect of human life. And then, it invaded my attic.
I always thought I’d be able to tell if something had died in my house; if not by sight, then by smell. I never thought I’d spend more than three months living under death—and before you freak out and think there’s a dead body in the attic, there’s not—but, it seems like, similar to the way death operates in our society, it’s actually pretty easy to live under death if you have no idea it’s there. Until, of course, things start going wrong.
My roommate got severely ill almost a month ago, and it became clear that something in the house was causing it. She hired a mold inspector and, upon our exploring our attic, he found something that was admittedly much worse than mold. The wet spot on her ceiling wasn’t a water leak, and he didn’t think it was mold, either. No, he thought it was rodent urine. There were rat and squirrel nests in the attic. And carcasses. So. Many. Carcasses.
Immediately, he told us to be on the lookout for any kind of symptoms for illnesses we struggled to say and/or spell—oh, and ammonia poisoning. Leave the house if you get a headache. With one trip to the attic, it felt like our house had crumbled around us. We realized that this space that we had started to make a home could be killing us.
In the same ways that talking about death anxiety altered the way I view the world and those around me, the rat carcasses altered the way my roommates and I saw our home. We were no longer safe, and everywhere we looked we saw death.
