Summer of the Dead: A Long Read!

O God our help in ages past

Our hope for years to come

Our shelter from the stormy blast

And out eternal Home.

Isaac Watts

Depart ye cursed down to hell

With howling fiends for ever dwell,

‘No more to see my face:

‘My gospel calls ye have withstood,

‘And trampled on my precious blood

‘And laughed at offered grace.’

From Hugh Bourne, A General Collection Of Hymns And Spiritual Songs For Camp Meetings, Revivals &C New Edition Revised & Improved, 1821.

There is a story I have always liked, a complete work of fiction, about an old soldier who was asked on his one hundredth birthday what the secret of his longevity was. He said that it was many things but the most important was that every morning he ate a bowl of cornflakes on which he sprinkled a teaspoon of gunpowder. It didn't taste great but he felt it really cleaned out the tubes. Sadly, at the age of 102 the old soldier died and it was reported in the local newspaper that he left two sons, a daughter, eight grandchildren, fifteen great grandchildren and a huge crater where the crematorium used to be.

This is a chapter in which many people die and, like me, you may not know whether to laugh or cry so I thought a little levity towards the beginning might help. I spent most of the summer of 2000 analysing obituaries and whilst there were amusing and surprising moments much of the archival material I worked through was unsettling, not least because it revived old anxieties about the impending rapture that certain evangelicals had been warning me about for years. To be honest, even bumper stickers had warned me: 'Jesus is coming – look busy!'

The obituaries appeared in the Primitive Methodist Journal between 1862 and 1930 and covered the lives and deaths of 1,750 people who are now largely forgotten. They entered the world, as each of us do, walked through life's trials and temptations (they would have danced but they were Primitive Methodists) and made their inevitable exits, remembered now only in the crumbling pages of an old, obscure newspaper and the spreadsheets of a few zealous genealogists.

Full-time obituary-reading, I discovered, is not a healthy occupation. In the late nineteenth century it was common practice, even in the Primitive Methodist Journal, to include all the gory details when a member of the faithful died in an unusual way. Consequently I endured accounts of a pastor who slipped whilst getting out of bed and managed to spear himself through the neck with his bedside lamp, a man who collapsed with chest pains at the train station but unfortunately fell in the path of the 4.15, a teenager who failed to think through his plan to impress his girlfriend by performing acrobatic stunts on those new-fangled electrical wires and most ironically of all, an evangelist who met his end at a seaside revival meeting when a rock falling from the cliff above brought a fatal end to a chorus of Hold Fast to the Shore.

Obituaries of children were quite common:

Died February 4^th 1863, Annie, daughter of George and Emily J. Wells, aged 3 years, 9 months and 24 days. She is gone, death has removed the loved one from our fond embrace; the pattern of her little feet is heard no more; her sweet little voice is hushed in the silence of death; the frail form wasted by sickness, shall never more return to us; the affliction is severe. Her loss we feel, nevertheless

We would not murmer or complain,

Beneath the chastening rod:

But in the hour of grief and pain

Would lean upon our God.

Whilst many children fatally succumbed to childhood illnesses, early adulthood proved to have its mortal dangers, not least for the coal miners of Pennsylvania. In his research on the anthracite coal-mining region, where many Primitive Methodists lived and worked, Walter Dinterman revealed that in the 100 years up to 1947 an average of 100 men died violently underground each month. Those whose lives were not claimed by accidents often ended their days severely disabled as they succumbed to silicosis, otherwise known as 'miner's lung.'  In cotton mills fatalities were less common but life was still cheap and most of the Primitive Methodists who joined that labour force were rewarded with low pay, ill-health and an early grave. This was my summer of 2000 – pain, poverty, and an early grave in a cycle that seemed to repeat endlessly; lives reduced to a few paragraphs of platitudes, and often forgotten before the pages of the Primitive Methodist Journal had a chance to yellow with age.

Fortunately some light relief was at hand. Among those working in the same office as me that summer was Geoff Little, historian of the Anglo-Saxon period and former employee of British Rail. For no particular reason, when things were not going that well for either of us we would pace around the room, make a cup of tea and join in a chorus of either Sing Something Simple or I'm a Gnu. Somehow it seemed to help.

One day Geoff told me about a business trip to the seaside on which he and a friend got talking to two women in a pub. It turned out that they were all heading in the same direction so the two men offered the ladies a lift in what they referred to at the time as the 'company car.'

'I think it was the four foot fibre glass ice cream on the top that put them off,' Geoff confided. 'Anyway they didn't come with us even though they could have had free 99s on the way.'

Such breaks as these were a relief but then it was back to the obituaries. I recorded names, place of birth, place of death, year of birth and death, which conference of the Primitive Methodist Church they belonged to and I even had a column with the heading happy death, which required a yes or no answer.

Despite the horror of gory deaths, and the sadness of lives ended before their time, it was this emphasis on a 'happy death' that disturbed me most. In the 1860s many obituaries, particularly those of women, demonstrated an obsessive interest in the dying days of subjects. Amidst the choking, vomiting, and lapses into unconsciousness, people were expected to demonstrate clear evidence of being in a joyful state of anticipation. Some managed it:

Towards noon the pains of death were strong upon her; her voice had almost failed, but her face seemed filled with joy, her face was radiant with smiles, and she called upon all in the room to unite with her in praising God, in token of which she held up her hands, they having to be supported on either side. For several minutes they were held up, and when the friends who supported them allowed them to fall she said 'again" and again her hands were raised. The spectacle was now sublime, while relatives and friends were weeping around her, to see the dying saint triumphing over her last enemy.

That it is possible to meet one's end in peace, acceptance and even joy is something that can bring comfort to those left behind. I have known people like this. I recall my own grandfather, in his last days, was positively upbeat, and in the time I spent with him he shared stories of great days lived, sang hymns and seemed almost triumphant. I found this profoundly affecting and inspirational and yet similar scenes depicted in the pages of the Primitive Methodist Journal left me really uneasy.

In the middle of the nineteenth century many Methodists were obsessed with the idea of a happy death, an end to life that could simultaneously act as an effective expression of evangelism and a ticket to the Promised Land. Frank Johnson wrote an article in Methodist History in which he drew attention to the bizarre phenomenon of the Methodist death sermon, in which evangelists of a rather theatrical persuasion reflected on their long preaching careers, pointed towards their certain hope of heaven and then hoped to die quite literally before the benediction.  A few actually achieved this but others were disappointed to find themselves still breathing and talking long after they had run out of material. For them, heaven had to be postponed but their congregations were undoubtedly left with some idea of what eternity must feel like.

Reading the Primitive Methodist obituaries I couldn't help but feel for the people who failed to turn their final moments into the Goodtime Gospel Hour, those for whom religion proved, at best, an ineffective sedative and, at worst, a fear of eternal punishment. One day I read the obituary of Maria Hilery, who moved to the town of Mineral Point, Wisconsin in 1862 and occasionally attended the Primitive Methodist Church there. The writer of the obituary expressed some concern that Mrs Hilery had not attended class meetings as often as she ought to have done and in her final days he became convinced that she was not really saved. He and other members of the congregation crowded into her house to pray for her but Mrs Hilery felt too weak to experience the joy of salvation and in tears lamented the fact that she had given up class meetings. The next day the writer visited her again to ask her if she trusted in Christ:

She answered 'yes, but I feel so weak.' I told her the Lord looked at the heart, and did not require more than we were able to perform, and telling her to look to Jesus, I prayed with her. In a few minutes, her brother came back, and she desired him to raise her up a little more in bed, and then told him not to leave her. She was laboring hard for breath, and in a few minutes she breathed her last…. We call this a solemn warning to those that neglect the means of grace, and are looking to the last hour of life for the time to seek religion. We hope Mrs Hilery was saved. The best grounds of such hope is her deep regret at having neglected the means of grace, and her earnest desire for the prayers of God's people. But there was no clear evidence. Not much manifestation of the presence of God to her. If saved, it is as a brand plucked out of the fire. And now we warn all who may read this or hear it read, not to neglect the precious means of grace—not to give up Christian duties—not to backslide from God. O, it is hard work, in extreme weakness, and in the shadow of death, to labor for a clear evidence of pardoning love.

Sinner, backslider, your all is at stake; and knowing the shortness and uncertainty of life, why will you not prepare to meet your God?

The obituary carried on in such terms for a little while longer but I could cope with no more so I skim-read it whilst waiting for the kettle to boil and singing I'm a Gnu. Unfortunately, comic songs are a pretty ineffective remedy for that sense of mortality that is triggered when your working life is spent in the company of the bereaved, even if it is only through the pages of old newspapers. Professionals who ensure that the rituals of death and bereavement are observed with grace and dignity deserve our respect. I once met a couple who were both in the funeral business. At sixteen the man's passionate ambition was to be an undertaker and he realised his dream whilst still a teenager. He met his wife on an embalming course. 'Our eyes met across the mortuary floor,' she told me as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Of course, to her it was.

To those who do the important work of helping the bereaved through difficult times, humour can be an important outlet. Almost every Methodist minister I have met has stories to tell about funny things that happened at funerals (bodies put in the wrong hole, hearses with punctures, mobile phones going off inside coffins) and these are shared not to mock anyone or to deny the solemnity of such occasions but to help cope with the awkwardness and responsibility of conducting funerals. Perhaps they serve another important purpose too. To smile at a funeral or laugh about something that happens, is to join in the celebration of a life lived but now ended and demonstrate that even in the midst of  sorrow, life goes on and hope is present.

A minister in Sheffield told me about a funeral in a Victorian galleried chapel at which many mourners were sitting upstairs as the building was quite full. The minister invited the congregation to pray and there was a slight pause during which one of the stewards realised that the minister was stifling a laugh. It transpired that when the minister said 'Let us pray,' a man on the balcony had vigorously bowed his head and, unfortunately, this caused his wig to fly off. 'It wouldn't have been so bad,' the minister later explained, 'but a man downstairs tried to throw it back up to him.'

Even gravestones can help us make light of death. My favourite  is guided by the principle that even in the midst of grieving, business is business and no opportunity for advertising should be wasted:

Sacred To The Remains of

Jonathan Thompson

A Pious Christian and

Affectionate Husband.

His disconsolate widow

Continues to carry on

His grocery business

At the old stand on

Main Street: Cheapest

and best prices in town.

Even the serious-minded, eternity-focused Primitive Methodists occasionally succumbed to using humour as a means of dealing with death. In July 1902 the following spoof advertisement appeared on the back page of the Primitive Methodist Journal:

If you have frequent headaches, dizziness, fainting spells, accompanied by chills, cramps, corns, bunions, chilblains, epilepsy, and jaundice, it is a sign that you are not well, but are liable to die at any minute. Pay your subscription a year in advance, and thus make yourself solid for a good obituary notice.

It was a nice surprise to see the Primitive Methodists not taking themselves too seriously but reading this even now I cannot help but return to the trauma of poor Mrs Hilery, who failed to die a good death, and the odious assumption that what ultimately matters is less how a person lives their life but their state of being when facing death. Working through all these obituaries took me back to early adolescence, a time when I heard several scary evangelists, Billy Graham among them, talking a language of heaven and hell, God versus Satan, an upcoming day of judgment that had never come up as a topic in my Sunday School days in Liverpool and the decision that each person ought to make tonight, to accept Jesus Christ as their personal Saviour. For me the problem was that Jesus had been alright before these evangelists started messing with him. I remembered him as the man who fed the hungry, healed the sick and spoke wise words about how we should love each other and not judge those we find it hard to get along with. Now it seemed, especially when Billy Graham got all stoked up at a rally, that there was a Jesus version 2; a Jesus who had some kind of book that did or did not have my name in it; a Jesus who had organised a day of judgment at which sinners would be judged; a Jesus who would be coming back to end all history in a process that would see the saved get sucked into a celestial vacuum cleaner and shot up to heaven for their eternal reward. The whole scenario sounded terrifying, violent and appalling but was presented at the only legitimate belief.

What made the situation even more terrifying is that this style of evangelism was rendered more powerful in its Cold War context. Preachers would testify that the book of Revelation clearly predicted the approaching nuclear war and that it would occur in or around the year 2000. I can remember one New Year's Eve when my brother, cousin Richard, and I wound ourselves up into a state of real anxiety and depression because we decided that Armageddon was surely just a few years away and if Billy Graham was right then our Armageddon would not just be the horror of nuclear war but potentially a death that was a state of eternal suffering. We talked about this for a while then wished each other a happy new year and joined with our parents in a chorus of Auld Lang Syne. Strange days.

Looking back, I recall that the evangelical threat of eternal judgment made me uneasy but something always stopped me from accepting it. I attended quite a few revival meetings as a teenager but never walked to the front to claim the evangelical badge of the saved because I always detected something sinister at work. To me this was not a gospel of love and acceptance but vengeance and exclusivity. I couldn't understand why people were jumping around and praising God if they sincerely believed that those who didn't agree with them were condemned to hell. By what perverted way of thinking was this good news? Would the Jesus of my Sunday School years, the man who spent time with society's misfits, and spoke so much about fairness, equality and the sanctity of all human life, have recognised himself in these terrifying images of judgment day? Something inside me, some still small voice that the evangelists of what would undoubtedly have been regarded as 'wrong' belief, told me that this simply could not be the case. But what if I was wrong? What if a cheap bumper sticker that read 'Jesus is coming: look busy' was not a joke but a sermon, a message from God to be ignored at my eternal peril?

Perhaps I was paying too much attention to the wrong joke. Maybe this is the one I needed:

A man arrives at the gates of heaven. St. Peter asks, "Religion?"

The man says, "Methodist."

St. Peter looks down his list, and says, "Go to room 24, but be very quiet as you pass room 8."

Another man arrives at the gates of heaven. "Religion?"

"Baptist."

"Go to room 18, but be very quiet as you pass room 8."

A third man arrives at the gates. "Religion?"

"Jewish."

"Go to room 11, but be very quiet as you pass room 8."

The man says, "I can understand there being different rooms for different religions, but why must I be quiet when I pass room 8?"

St. Peter tells him, "Well the Jehovah's Witnesses are in room 8, and they think they're the only ones here."

My summer of obituaries left me rather sad and uneasy because whether the tone of them was triumphant or cautionary, they testified to what I found, and still find, most offensive about evangelical Christianity. I can honestly say that in my own life journey, evangelical perspectives on the afterlife have done a lot more harm than good. As a young adult I once had a terrifying dream about hell in which the devil was showing me around and preparing me for an afterlife I would rather do without. The devil was exactly as he appeared in a Children's Bible I'd been given years before – bright red with yellow eyes, horns and a tail. We arrived at a sea of boiling mud at which point the devil suddenly produced my alarm clock. 'You think this is a dream,' he thundered, striking a scary and slightly postmodern tone, 'but I have your alarm clock and when I throw it into the sea of boiling mud you will never awake but stay here and boil for all eternity!' At this point the devil let rip with a really over-the-top evil laugh that would have been funny if I hadn't been in hell and he threw my alarm clock across the sea of boiling mud. I jumped after it yelling, 'Noooo!' because this was not a nightmare that went in for subtlety and I almost caught it but it bounced off my finger and disappeared in the mud. I realised that this was it, that the heat of a summer's day in Blackpool was no real preparation for eternity in a sea of boiling mud.  When I woke up I was really hot but it was good to know it had all been just a dream.  Breathing a sigh of relief I turned around to see what time it was but in a 'hairs sticking up on the back of your neck' moment discovered that my alarm clock was missing! It turned out that in my sleep I had thrown it across the room and it was in the corner in pieces. I blame Billy Graham and others like him for nightmares like that although I will concede that eating biscuits and drinking coffee before bed doesn't help.

Heaven is a more tasteful concept than hell although not one that has ever inspired me. Taken literally, I think eternity in a beautiful garden or golden city singing hymns could get a little boring after a while. Even considered non-literally, I think the idea of some part of an individual going on eternally makes no sense and offers little real comfort. Some kind of collective existence, in the sense that we are all made of the stuff of the universe that has been around since the beginning of time, I can see value in but heaven and hell, the Day of Judgment, the four horsemen of the apocalypse – these are ideas that can leave people psychologically damaged or inspire people to fly planes into the sides of buildings.

One of the sanest voices I have ever heard expressing an opinion on heaven and hell is the American singer, Iris DeMent. In one of her songs she sings:

Some say once gone, you're gone for ever

and some say you're gonna come back,

Some say you'll rest in the arms of the Saviour

if in sinful ways you lack,

Some say that they're coming back in a garden,

bunch of carrots and little sweet peas,

I think I'll just let the mystery be.

This song has inspired me many times. It speaks of the absurdity of people's fixed ideas about what happens to us when we die and the pressure on our living that can come as a consequence of that. In the worldview of this song, a hopeful agnosticism is the only healthy way forward. Forget judgment day and all the violent imagery and nastiness that goes with that and believe only in love.

My father is long since retired but for many years was a Methodist minister, a role he was better suited to than he probably thinks. Funerals made him really anxious because there was all the pressure of meeting with the bereaved and handling that sensitively and if something went wrong it could not be lightly brushed off. All of this was a lot to handle and under that strain there were inevitably moments at funerals when he tripped over his words or appeared slightly nervous but in a strange way such things only added to his considerable success. What made an Edward Watson funeral really work was that in his demeanour he shared with the mourners in the awkwardness of the situation and instead of trying to find words that made sense of what happens beyond death, he told simple stories designed to make people smile, remember and treasure the person they had lost. The funeral liturgy was there but the real meaning was to be found in the way the person had lived and had nothing to do with when or how they had died.

I once heard a comedian say, 'Someone told me I should live every day like it's my last. So I stayed in bed all day slipping in and out of consciousness.' It's a good line but my summer of obituaries was a bit like that with constant exposure to sad stories of people's dying days making me feel like I was on the way out. I needed the inspiration that I know people found at funerals conducted by my father – finding meaning in living this life rather than eternity.

Fortunately, some relief was at hand. Geoff came in one day almost deliriously happy because he'd managed to buy 1000 sandwich bags at a real bargain price.  He was less happy the next day when he discovered they weren't big enough to hold sandwiches. Such are the trials of life. More significantly, I had a new job looking after Japanese students who were spending the summer in Sheffield learning English. We went walking in the Peak District, breathing in good, clean air, and marvelling at trees, flowers, and the ritual that is English afternoon tea.  We spent two days at the Edinburgh Festival, exploring the city and its crazy summer culture. Outside Edinburgh Castle we saw a new world record set for the highest number of bagpipes being played in the same place at the same time. It is a curious thing that the volume of several hundred sets of bagpipes does not appear to be that much more than the volume of one set of bagpipes.  We went to London where my students were enthralled for the first time by the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London. I was having fun and getting paid for it. Everyone was excited and very much alive and for several days life was good and nobody died. It seemed to me, as it does now, that when we live well we worry about dying less.

As summer turned to autumn I completed making entries into the obituary database and moved onto other things. In the days ahead I sometimes thought of Mrs Hilery and others like her whose last days were blighted by a fear of not having the right belief but in my mind I also travelled back to the previous autumn and days spent wandering around Wisconsin graveyards with Loren Farrey. In these places where death is all around I sensed, despite the excesses of evangelical ideas about heaven and hell, a deep sense of peace that transcended religion.

Mainly, though, once the obituary analysis was complete I was living my life, an interesting life which consisted of routine moments and inspiring moments; lonely days and days of belonging; laughter, sadness, and everything in between. This was my extraordinary, ordinary life and in a hundred years time it probably would be forgotten but I'd like to think that someone might casually discover my grave and smile at these words:

'Here lies Kevin Watson. He lived his life in colour.'