Life Before Death

(The Wellcome Collection, Euston, London, 2008. Images here.)

The faces of the terminally ill are large on white walls in paired black-and-white portrait photographs. Most are creased with age, feathered with hairs coarse and fine, dotted with moles or freckles, blemished, imperfect. Some are infants, smooth-skinned and round-headed. All are human, awake and dying.

This is the Life Before Death exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in Euston, London. German photographer Walter Schels created twin portraits of terminally ill people before and after death, while his partner, Beate Lakotta, recorded in interviews the subjects’ thoughts and feelings about their lives and the deaths their doctors had told them would soon come.

The result is an honest, direct portrayal of death, which the introduction calls one of the last genuine taboo topics in Western society today. A universally certain future uniting all of humanity, and something hardly anyone will talk about. Death occurs most often at a significant remove from our everyday lives, in hospices and old-age homes. The dying are a subclass, ostracised by the fearful living.

In the exhibition, dark eyes stare intensely from the left-hand portraits, always expressing an awareness, a recognition of our own recognition, a human mutuality. In some faces there is anger, in some there is sadness, in some there is a smile. A woman with tubes in her nostrils glares and rages away from the camera. Contempt hitches a grandmother’s upper lip. Worry digs a trench in an old man’s brow.

The texts accompanying the portraits are revealing. A woman clings to the possibility of a miracle, that her cancer might not be fatal. Another ruminates on becoming one of a billion grains of sand in the desert. A woman sees tiny men come climbing out of flowerpots to kill her. Some heal old, scarred relationships. Others vow that, if they survive, they will volunteer at the hospice. Only after becoming terminally ill does a cancer sufferer truly find the desire to live.

In the right-hand portraits, eyes are shut. Lips have caved in, heads have lolled. The terminally ill are ill no more. The grandmother’s lips have met; her eyebrows look as though they stopped halfway into an expression of surprise. The old man’s face sleeps. Will and effort have left their habitations. The faces of the dead are vacant, no longer to be used, stretched, compressed, no longer to be damaged or caressed, no longer to be creased. The people are gone.

I walk through the exhibition with my girlfriend. Before entering we argue over tea about religion, about what one should or shouldn’t tell one’s children, but as we walk through the gallery the argument is left in the past. Faced with these reminders of our own mortality, we no longer skitter away our moments gratuitously. We hold hands and each other’s waists as we walk.

The reminder is welcome. After the exhibition, having seen twenty-four living faces alongside twenty-four dead ones, I see the futures of passersby in their bodies, like walking corpses. I can see the talking jaw grow still, the bunched cheeks slacken, the eyes shut, activity cease. Like me, they are ignorant of their mortality – blissfully ignorant, as the ordinary conduct of our culture would attest.

Walking corpses is right. This exhibition draws back the curtain on our shock. We are surprised by our own surprise at this basic fact about ourselves. Our solitary life could be over tomorrow, or at the end of our next breath. The boredom, the irony and the ennui of modernity arise from denial of death. The more vivid our awareness of mortality, the richer and more poignant each moment becomes.