Interview Transcript by Simonn Stratton

Interview Transcript

Subject:                 Brad

Occupation:          Grim Reaper (one of)

He starts by drowning a cup of coffee as we stand in the hallway of the Palliative Care unit.

Funnily enough I never had a career goal to become a Grim Reaper. I always thought I’d make a good computer engineer. Not having to work with people, being all chitty chatty in the kitchen and all that. Just plugging away at code in a cubicle, under a flickering light, and smooth sounds in my headphones. Know what I mean? But I took a dive into a river when I was seventeen and bang, immediate career change.  Immediate life change [he roars laughing]

How did that come about, the career change?

Well it’s not like there was a career counselor. I don’t think it’s something the career adviser’s at school have high on their radar. “Be a chap and get young Brad in here, I want to talk to him about persuing a career as a Grim Reaper” [he laughs again] Fractions of light appeared, and a lady’s voice said Brad, we have a job for you. I took it. I mean what else could I do.  Damn I miss the taste of coffee. I drink it, but you know, no taste anymore.

He throws the cup on the floor. A nurse walks by tsks and places it in the bin next to us. I’m not sure even if she can see us. 

Can you tell me about how you deliver people through death?

As quick as possible is my motto. People linger too much. They worry about the people left behind; the dogs, meat in the sink defrosting, whether they get into hell or heaven. If you don’t throw them to the silence quickly, they over think it. And the over thinking drives them crazy, they punish themselves till they get stuck in the nothingness. I hate that, its hard work pulling them out.

Some Reapers are good in the nothingness. They like the despair and the hand holding. Empaths. Man, they shit me. Always mollycoddling and nurturing the dead to understanding. Fuck that, life’s over, deal with it. There’s no coming back, no point in thinking and worrying about those left behind. They’ll get over it. I mean, I’ve had people say, “Oh no, I left the house unlocked” and I’m like “Lady you’re dead, who cares now!”   

All people have to say is yes or give a nod. Lots of the guys do that. They clam up when they see their bodies. I reckon its ‘cause they don’t know what to do. Like my dad, always having to fix things and getting that dumb look on his face when he can’t. Well, once you’re dead, there’s no fixing that.  I say to them “mate, you’re done. You’ve got to go to the next thing.”

And the next thing is silence? What does that look like?   

Hey, you aren’t one of those Jesus people believing angels carry you up happily into the open arms of your loved ones long departed, are you? Or one of the Buddhists looking for the next pregnant chick to slip into to start all over again. I’ve seen them all. They all come with shock and disbelief. The Catholics take it the worst. Spent their whole lives following rules and then, no St Peter in long robes telling them they were good Christians.  They struggle, they simply can’t believe heaven isn’t waiting for them. You know what they always ask me? “Was it the Jews? Were they right?” Fucking cracks me up.”

Hippies get it. Silence, eternal emergence with the oneness of all. That’s what the silence is. Nothing left but a strange vibrating and then POW, you’re gone into the oneness. I tell you something, there isn’t a single word I can find to describe it other than silence. You just become part of something else, something bigger. It’s the universal connection of all energy. And you know what, they don’t even mind that they cease to have consciousness, cause you know, you’re never yourself again.

You cease to be human?

You never were one to begin with. Check this bloke out. Sam Williams. Worked as a plumber his whole life. Cancer got him. Smokes will do that. Good life really. Still with his wife, Margaret, bloody miracle that is nowadays.  She’s gone to get water. He’s thinking, how will she cope? He’s thinking of his grandkid he’ll never get to see. She’ll be born in a couple of weeks. His son said old Sam will look after her from “up there”. That’s bullshit though, it never happens.

See, its only energy, not humanity, not soul, not essence; just energy that vibrates. The human body is a machine, nothing more. We spend way too much time mucking around with reasons for existence, spirituality, wishing to god (‘scuse the pun) there was something more than what there is, because humans are so arrogant. They have to have something that proves they’re greater than just machines. It’s a load of bullocks, you know. And all the crap we do in our lives all leads up to what? The fucking silence, that’s it.

Everything you think makes you uniquely you, is just stored up mitochondria’s in the DNA. You’re a machine with a memory, that’s all. And your environment draws it out. Margaret thinks their son Brett is like old Sam. And he is. But not because he’s got his father’s soul or anything. He’s like his dad because he’s got the same DNA and he’s a plumber too. So, the environmental factors were the same for Brett, as old Sam here.  

He pauses.

Poor old sod. He’s worried about his dog, an Alsatian. It’s too big for Margaret to manage. He needn’t worry though. Dog gets hit by a car, in about a week. Then they’ll say, “Oh old Jasper is up in heaven with Sam, riding in the back of his Ute like always.”  Yeah, that’s bullshit too.

Old Margaret ends up in a nursing home. I’ll come back for her in about a year. That always happens too. Grief. Be easier if we just took them together but that’s rare. 

I want to take Sam before she comes back. You know we come for animals as well. I’ll come back for Jasper. I prefer taking animals.

Why is that?

Much simpler than humans. No questions, no rubbish, just grateful eyes and poof! We’re done.

Sam was breathing hard and forced, the air whistling from his lips like a forgotten breeze at the end of winter. An old man whispering at the end of his days. Maybe not Sam himself as Brad pointed out, but perhaps it was this energy he speaks of, slowly leaving the strained and taught skin over the bones of the human machine. The old man’s fingers flexed; his chest rose and remained there. Brad placed his hand on the old man’s stomach and waited. The chest slowly lowered and with three or four jerks, the body died. Sam stood there looking at Brad. It was hard to see him. I knew I couldn’t see things well in Brad’s world, but I definitely saw the old man standing there. And then he was just gone.

Nice old bloke. He was ready to go. Didn’t fight it at all. The energy knows it’s being torn from the body. It fights hard. Not old Samuel. He was done.

Did you say anything to him, about dying?

“Nah.” He just said, “well that’s it then.” I said, “Yeah mate, you have to give in to the silence.” He asked if it was painful. I said, “nah mate easy peasy.”

Brad runs to the window, opening it wide.

Hey, check it out, cockatoos flying low. Man, haven’t seen them in a long while. When I was a kid they were everywhere. Always screaming and waking me up at 5am, bastards. God, I hated them. But then I’d look out mum’s window and see them fly low over the green hills at the back of our place and I’d think, man that’s the life. It really is you know. I see that now. We never take time for the simple things. And the end of days, they were the things that matter, know what I mean?

I nod rather uselessly. I’m not sure how I feel about this. It’s quite confronting being shown a death that is clinical and lacking in compassion or spiritualism. It feels like someone has jabbed me in the ribs and I’m jarred, frozen to the spot without the ability to move. But with a nagging, dull pain that I can’t quite pin the source of.

He motions me to follow. We pass Margaret on the way. She looks hollow as if her life has already started leaving. I fight the urge to reach out to her, this poor old woman who is walking into a room where a deathless, human machine waits.

 I’m not sure what bothers me the most about Brad, his cold dispassionate manner, or his irrefutable logic challenging everything I believe in.

I mean, how does one argue for religion or faith with a Grim Reaper?

Are there any mistakes Brad? People who aren’t meant to die. We hear talk of people coming back from the dead, they have stories to tell.

No mistakes. If they come back, then they were never meant to leave. Reapers aren’t there for them. The see a bright light for sure, it’s the connection of energy to the body, nothing more. Remember the body’s a machine, it breaks down, the parts wear out or when they’ve been neglected and put under pressure, they seize up. So, the energy slips out but only a Reaper can break the connection.

Look at this guy. Huge Maori fella. Can’t do anything with his family standing there.   

Brad holds his hand up towards the man and I see a blurring of air flowing from it. The man on the bed starts shaking, growing in intensity until the body lifts off the bed and thrashes around. Several of the family run out of the room. A Nurse rushes in and motions for all of them to leave. She closes the door. Brad lowers his hand and the body falls still.

She leans in and whispers, “you can go now.”

There’s a pause in the room, an unnatural silence.

“Do they know, the nurses?”

Yeah. Most of them can tell a Reaper is in the room. They see the dying reach for us, well the ones desperate to go. Sometimes I’ll send the dying messages to help them move past the pain. I don’t use words. I send them a picture of going home or getting in a plane and travelling somewhere, going shopping with their kids, or to a concert, whatever makes them relax and not fight me when I come. That’s what they tell the Nurses. “I’m going to a concert tomorrow,” the old lady said yesterday. The Nurse took her hand and said, “best you get some sleep then, so you’re nice and refreshed.”

That was a good take that one, the old lady. When she saw me, she asked “is this the way to the concert?” I said, “yeah lady, it is.” She gave up easily but not before saying she’d miss the Nurse sitting there holding her hand.

Can see why, she’s a good one that Nurse. She gets it. She won’t call the Dr on our Maori guy because she knows. Man, they should pay them more, you know.

Brad walks over and places his hand on the Maori man’s stomach. Like before there was an unnatural silence as if time had been paused. Then the blurred imagine of dead man stood near the window looking outside. Brad spoke with him, but I heard nothing. The man nodded and like Samuel just vanished.

My attention was broken by a glass falling off the table near the bed. The Nurse rose and felt for the man’s pulse. She cleaned the shattered glass from the floor, pulled the sheet up and moved the body, so it was in a relaxed position. She took a deep breath and went outside to the family.

I like to let them know I’m done. Sometimes it’s a knocked glass, or a curtain breeze. They’ve got a shit load of work to do those nurses. I try and make it all quick for them. You know do my job so they can do theirs.

So, I reckon my time with you is almost up. I have to get you home, back to your family. First interview I’ve ever given. Was a strange I tell you. I hope you got an understanding of how things work.    

Within an instant we are outside my house. In the yard I can hear my young daughter Sarah playing. Tomorrow is her fifth birthday and we have a party planned. The air is punctuated by the sound of our angry lawn mower.

I wonder if Brad is right, treating death as a clinical event in life rather than a sorrowful, despairing trauma. It seems very clean cut and dried with him. The two men I saw pass away today, just accepted it with a kind of calm grace.   

I might not agree with Brad’s detached handling of death, but he made it look like a transaction one has to do in one’s life, nothing more. It was the window dressing around the death that was the traumatising part of it, the fear, the guilt, despair, the loss and anger. Brad removed all of that for the dying in his unruffled, commonsensical way. And I thought if it were my loved one, he was coming to take, perhaps his way was the best way. 

I mean, I’m not really a soft and fluffy kind of guy. It’s just a job, right? I get not many people can do it, but I hope you weren’t looking for something heroic or nice. I’m certainly not that kind of Reaper.

No, in fact I have no idea why I was asked to do this interview or why you said yes to it.

“Well, you’ll understand soon enough.”   

Brad was sitting on the front porch, stroking the cat. Old Marley was swooning under his gentle pats. He was twenty, his eyesight failing, kidney disease slowly crushing him, and all he ever seemed to do nowadays was lie in the sun on the porch. Sarah would be devastated with his loss, she loved him so much. Her little best friend that she carried every night into her room and made sure he slept underneath her blankets.

Brad rose, left old Marley and moved to the front door. 

Sarah, that was her name, right? 

Catch our Creator Interview with Simonn on Patreon tomorrow.

Executive Producers

Elliot Cameron

Sue White

Daniel Henson

Karolina Ristevski