Butcher Bird

TWENTY-THREE Death is not the End

Among the greatest lies ever told, probably the greatest is that death only comes in one flavor.

Depending on the time, the place, the species of the deceased and its general standing in the universe, the nouveau-dead can find themselves experiencing any number of different types of death.

Most often, the classes of death experienced by humans fall into three categories:

Total Death. This is the typical human death. Sleeping the big sleep. Taking a dirt nap. The spirit has moved on and the body is empty meat in the cold ground. Nothing, short of some expensive special effects or an act of God, is going make a Total Death anything but a common separation of spirit and a feast for worms.

Hungry Death. This is a loathsome kind of half-death. Typically, the hungry dead end up as zombies—slow-witted, gluttons for human flesh and smelling like an abandoned pig farm. This is the category where you never want to find yourself. Too deranged for Heaven and too unstable to accept damnation in Hell, there’s no love lost in any Sphere for the hungry dead.

Petit Mort. The little death. This is the most elusive, but perhaps the most sublime human death. It’s reserved for those enlightened souls to whom death and life aren’t separate states, but the continuation of a single thought. Once they’ve made that initial transition between life and death, your typical Petit Mort spirit slips continually been the Land of the Dead and the Living Earth, wherever the action happens to be at the time.

Each state of death has a very different cast. Not all bad ones are punished. Not all good souls are rewarded. Luck or the lack of it, timing and intelligence are as important in death as they are in life.

A few of the humans who’ve experienced Total Death are musicians Buddy Holly and Bob Wills (plus most of his Texas Playboys); comedian Andy Kaufman; aviatrix Amelia Earhart; Picasso; cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova; Marilyn Monroe; and Hitler.

The hungry dead also include a number of musicians, most notably Jim Morrison; also actress Jayne Mansfield; serial killer (and the real Jack the Ripper) Frederick Bailey Deeming; author Ayn Rand; big-eyed child painters Margaret and Walter Keane.

The small Petit Mort roster includes most of the major prophets, plus a few artists, such as the painter Marcel Duchamp; singer Robert Johnson; inventor Nikola Tesla, and Lilith, the first wild wife of Eden. Also in this category is a peculiar class of being, not quite human and not quite divine. These are the Tricksters. They slip between life and death for the simple reason that they refuse to take either state seriously. The Tricksters—Loki, Legba, the Painted Man, Coyote, Kubera and others—are pure chaos. Some cultures are certain that the Tricksters created the universe as a colossal practical joke, while others believe that as a joke is how they will end it.