A funny thing happened on the way to our graves

Whoever rightly understands and celebrates death, at the same time magnifies life.— Rainer Maria Rilke

It’s always funny until someone gets hurt. Then it’s just hilarious. — Bill Hicks

HP Newquist and Richard Maloof’s This Will Kill You: A Guide to the Ways In Which We Go is a grim book — it is about death after all, and anybody who believes in an afterlife is surely to be scared of that. But it is also an irreverent one. Reading it one finds out exactly what happens when not only we get an aneurysm, drown or get Alzheimer’s Disease but if we get an overdose at a rock show, a space suit malfunction or try beat a locomotive across the tracks. (The statistics might surprise you.)

The levity is welcome.

It’s peppered with anecdotes like one about a girl named Jennifer Strange dying after participating in a “wee for Wii” contest. (“After drinking nearly two gallons of water… she died that evening from hyonatremia or ‘water intoxication,’ a condition where too much water thins out the sodium levels in the blood. Making it even more dreadful was the fact that Strange wasn’t even the winner of the contest.”) Or factoids like: “Heart attacks don’t always look like they do in Hollywood scenes, where the victim very suddenly grabs his chest, knocks over a vase, and falls to the floor. Sometimes they strike with no symptoms at all — even while the victim is at rest” — or that women exhibit symptoms of a heart attack that men do not, such as “abdominal pain, heartburn, clammy skin, dizziness and fatigue.”

Wit, bizarre anecdotes, a knowledge of pop culture and real medical information, the book’s got ‘em all — sounds fun? It is.

Of course, the subject of death isn’t a polite one to bring up in most situations — the formalities that preclude us from remarking that someone has gained weight after meeting them for the first time in a long while doesn’t usually apply. Knee-jerk responses may include constant nodding and the shaking of the head, if one is not directly involved. Or a consolatory smile, even laugh, if the bereaved initiates it.

That’s why we gossip about it instead. To make light of it, to revel in the fact that apart from the consolation prize of being born the only thing we’re certain of getting is that we will die. If anything that realization has yielded great things: the comedy of Woody Allen, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, the fiction of J.G. Ballard, Poe and Will Self, the paintings of Francis Bacon and Jose Legaspi, Lou Reed’s post-Velvets career and Charles Bronson’s filmography to name but a few. And this volume, which is as readable as it is highly entertaining. It will go a long way the next time you find yourself in a reunion or team-building out-of-town session in making sure you’re ironically the life of the party — or worse, employee of the month. (And if you think death isn’t entertaining, as it is unavoidable, then do us a favor and stop watching television, reading “graphic novels,” watching movies, listening to music, you hypocrite.)

Perhaps the best-written piece in the book, however, is the afterword by a real funeral home director. “Many people think I have a special insight into all matters death. I’m not certain I do, but after 25 years in this profession, I do have some observations.” This includes that how we live our lives determines our death and that some people just have “too much fun” in their pursuit of leisure and the “good life.”

“The longer one lives the less tragic the death is likely to be,” he says. He offers one truism about death he’s realized throughout his experiences. “I’ve found that it is extremely unlikely you will die before the age of twenty-five if you don’t have a tattoo... Whenever someone young died, I would ask my staff if the person had a tattoo. Initially, the answer was always ‘Yes.’ Over time, however, the answer to the question became ‘Of course.’”

Although horrible to admit, I find that highly amusing for some reason, even slightly humorous for some reason. But if it applied to those people who insist on getting henna tattoos in Boracay (and add to that dreadlocks) then it would be indeed be freakin’ hilarious. Just hilarious.

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This Will Kill You: A Guide to the Ways In Which We Go by HP Newquist and Richard Maloof is available at Fully Booked.