On having written
On having written
Haydn Spurrell
In March 2021, the long-running Tasmanian publication Island Magazine published its 161st issue. In the promotional materials for the issue, Island’s nonfiction editor Anna Spargo-Ryan wrote:
There was no set theme for this issue, but one manifested regardless in the nonfiction submissions. After a year of learning to cope with uncertainty, unrest and grief, many of the pieces we received held a common focus: finding meaning.
I was lucky enough to get to work closely with Anna for the months leading up to the issue, after the magazine accepted a work of mine for their first 2021 issue. This came on the back of a twelve week process where, in our semester 2 ‘Art of Writing and Editing’ class, we were tasked with developing a concept and carrying it through an exhaustive editorial process before submitting the work as our final assessment of the year.
I’m a total rookie in the nonfiction field, and 2020 was kind of one long epiphany. First, I wrote an essay for The Old World about history and literature, which morphed into something I’m still proud of thanks to Sam Perazzo’s editorial talents (his first time doing this stuff, same as most of us, though I’m convinced he’s lying). The piece I wrote in the second half of the year, the one that eventually found a home in Island 161, started simply enough…
I wanted to talk about death.
It sprang from my own crippling childhood fear of death, something that I’d always been interested in. Gradually, it evolved into something bigger. It turned into a conversation about the environment, mourning and loss, and death’s shadow looming over us. Though, I still feel like I’ve only scratched the surface.
With Claudia Trotter, who I was paired with for the duration of the project, and AWE tutor Rose Michael’s help, I was able to better find my own voice in this big, messy, complicated topic. My relationship with death was woven in more overtly, and I think it helped to bring the whole thing back down to Earth.
Once Anna and I began to talk about it in the lead-up to Island 161, the process began all over again. It found new life, because the work is never done. We evolve, and our work evolves with us.
Writing is scary. Being edited is scary. But having written, and having been read, is so gratifying. Beneath is a small excerpt from the essay. I learned a lot writing it. If only one person learns anything from it, then the work was worth it.
From “After Death in the Anthropocene”
I’m struggling to sleep again but this time it’s still early enough. I can see beneath my bedroom door the faintest yellow light from down the hall.
I walk barefooted along the pine boarding, down the three-step staircase, and, sure enough, see Dad seated at his desk in the adjoining room. He usually does this once everybody else is in bed and it’s peacefully silent through the house. He asks me why I’m up, and I tell him I’m scared of dying. I’m so scared that I can’t think of anything else.
I can see that he’s searching for the right words. His desire to help is betrayed by the unenviable task of solving an unsolvable problem. He tells me that I’m still very young. He tells me I don’t have to think about that for a long time yet. I go back to bed, still thinking about it.
When I eventually sleep, I have this recurring dream: through the darkness, I see a creature hanging from a noose attached to a lamp overhead. Its body, limp, turns slowly around to face me. I see its horrifying eyes, its bared teeth. I wake up before its sharp claws can wrap themselves around my throat.
In a material world where our day-to-day survival is assured, our fear of death has never been more pronounced. While the complexity and capacity of our brains has afforded us significant advantage as a species, the ability to comprehend our own mortality is both a gift and a curse. There is an existential dichotomy between the will to survive and the ability to contemplate our deaths. Because such fear of the inevitable without methods for control would be catastrophic to our wellbeing, our brains create the world around us through an endless process of thoughts and behaviours to, basically, distract us. This ability to stave off death anxiety is undeniably a good thing, to a point.
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