Hi, I’m J.G. Sandom, class of ‘79E.

E because I took a semester off and worked on a freighter that sailed to Namibia, South Africa and Mozambique, a trip that became the inspiration for my honors thesis here at Amherst, and eventually my debut novel, The Blue Men.

Some of you may know me from my novels; I’ve written a dozen of them so far, with a couple becoming international bestsellers and one optioned by Warner Brothers. Some of you may know me because I started the first digital advertising agency in the business, Einstein and Sandom Interactive, in 1984, creating the first digital ads online ever produced, which in turn helped monetize the Net we see today. (Please don’t blame me for your digital addictions).

But I’m not here to talk about writing or digital advertising, although over the next thirty minutes or so, we will be undergoing a rebranding exercise of sorts, hopefully engendering a new way of looking at something as old as humankind.  I’m here to talk about something all of us will have to deal with, one way or the other, eventually. Unless … wait.

How many of you out there are immortal? Anyone? OK. Then this presentation is relevant to everyone in this audience.

Through a dubious provenance, I happened to inherit this 2,500-year-old Etruscan vase. My Dad worked for Amex and I grew up mostly in Europe, including in Italy. The vase was a gift to my father. It’s not particularly valuable from an auction house point of view but its delicate simplicity, its dark unglazed finish and elegant lines, and the fact that it’s still in one piece after all this time makes it precious in my mind.

Who once drank wine from this black clay goblet at some distant dinner party, toasting the ancient gods? And who scraped that one thin line that runs inside the lip and down across the base?

That imperfection has fascinated me since I was a boy, when my father first told me the story: how this dark lump had been unearthed by a wayward oxen hoof at plow in southern Italy; miraculously intact; seeing light for the first time since before the Romans ruled the earth.

My small Etruscan vase came to mind some time ago when I happened upon some photographs of pottery dating back to 16th century Japan from the town of Hagi in Yamaguchi, Japan. Like my vase, ceramics made in the Hagi style have shapes that are not quite symmetrical, and colors and textures that appear to emphasize an unrefined, intentionally simple style.

Wabi-Sabi

This style both informed and was influenced by an aesthetic philosophy known as Wabi-Sabi. In traditional Japanese aesthetics, wabi-sabi is a philosophy centered on the acceptance of the transience and imperfection of all things.

Ceramics made in the Hagi styles are not only somewhat asymmetrical and unrefined, like my Etruscan vase, but they are often intentionally chipped or nicked, made “imperfect” as a celebration and expression of the wabi-sabi philosophy.

Actively engaging with something considered to be wabi-sabi achieves three things:

• an awareness of the natural forces involved in the creation of the piece;
• an acceptance of the power of nature;
• and 3, an abandonment of dualism — the belief that we are separate from our surroundings, that we are here and everything else is out there.

Combined, these experiences allow the viewer to see themselves as part of the natural world. Rather than seeing dents or uneven shapes as mistakes, then, they are viewed as creations of nature, much as moss growing on a wall, or a tree bent from years in the wind.

To misquote Heraclitus: Nothing is. All is becoming.

To us, in the West, this aesthetic is anathema. We scorn impermanence, modeling our view on Platonic ideas of the Form, perfect and immutable. Not a table. Tableness. The essence of table. Eternal. To us, if it withers and wrinkles and dies, it’s more than inferior; it’s fatally flawed, for perfection is timeless.

And in today’s popular culture, trying to banish or dissolve the idea of the self at the center of all is akin to fomenting a Copernican revolution, when that Polish (then Prussian) astronomer challenged the Church and dared presume that the sun was the center of the universe, not the earth.

As we desperately try and fabricate a Platonic ideal of our lives, it is the idea of self that sits at the heart of this generation’s Instagram solar system, hyperinflated by the American notion of rugged individualism. But as particle physics has taught us, dualism is a myth. The observer and that which she observes are inexorably connected.

DISRUPTING THE FUNERAL INDUSTRY

As a novelist and poet, and as an entrepreneur, I’ve made a career dreaming up and creating new worlds. Literally — when it comes to the characters and realities of my novels. And, in some fundamental way, as an entrepreneur too. After all, behind every new business venture is an idea that reflects a new way of looking at things, some consumer need or business problem that needs fixing.

Let me ask you all a question again, if I may. How many of you out there have lost a loved one, someone close to you, in the past few years? Please raise your hands, and keep them up for a moment. [SHOW OF HANDS.] Now, if you were happy with the outcome, if everyone was pleased with the event, and if the final price was what you expected, drop your hands. [ONLY A FEW HANDS DROP.]

A few years ago, I found myself in your position. My father passed away and I saw first-hand the horror show that is the traditional funeral industry in this country today. Overpriced. Complicated. Time-consuming. And, ultimately, unsatisfying.

Back in 1984, as I launched what became known as the first interactive ad agency in the business, I recognized that the unique benefits of digital technologies and interactivity would eventually revolutionize the ad world. Today, digital accounts for more ad spend than TV, print, radio, outdoor and every other media channel combined.

In the same way, when my father passed, I realized that the deathcare industry needed to be disrupted, to be dragged from its Dickensian business practices and antediluvian methodologies kicking and screaming into the 21st century. The industry as a whole faced then, and still faces, 3 major challenges:

• The way in which we manage deathcare in the US today
• The way in which we memorialize lost loved ones
• And the way we look at our own mortality and at death itself

FIVE KEY DRIVERS IMPACTING DEATHCARE IN AMERICA

To address these challenges, we spent a lot of time analyzing the traditional model. Here are 5 key drivers impacting the funeral industry today.

1. The high cost of traditional end-of-life practices
   • Today, funerals cost between $7,000 and $10,000, and cremations more than $6,000. Even direct cremations (no embalming, expensive coffin, or traditional memorial service) average $2,000 – $3,000. But between 40% and 50% of all Americans do not have $500 set aside for a rainy day! This has stimulated the adoption of lower-cost cremation over traditional burial. In 2000, 75% of Americans opted for traditional burial. Today, more than 58% prefer to be cremated, and in some states the cremation rate is more than 80%. (Overseas, especially in Asia, it’s often more than 95%.) Americans care less and less about having a traditional funeral anymore, pumping our dead with toxic chemicals, gaping at their painted faces for an hour or so in a house of worship or funeral home, and then burying their polluted corpses in some expensive metal or hardwood casket in the earth, never to be seen again.
2. The secularization of the American culture
   • We may not go to Church like our parents did, but we’re still spiritual and in need of systems to help us while recovering from grief. If we are no longer looking for comfort and closure in our houses of worship, where will we find it? Friends and family? Support groups? Chat bots?
3. Greater mobility
   • We retire far away from where we were born. It’s a lot easier and cheaper to ship ashes than a body in a casket.
4. Heightened ecological awareness.
   • With the planning literally on fire, people are finally beginning to wake up to the challenges of the climate emergency.
5. And new technologies & buying methodologies.
   • Let’s face it: if it can go digital, it will. The Internet has transformed the way Americans look for information and buy. No longer do families have to endure two in-person trips to the funeral home (one to shop and sign, and one to settle up), which is where far too many funeral directors take advantage of grieving families to upsell them unnecessary products and services: “Doesn’t your mom deserve the gold handles on her casket” you cheap bastard, implied?

It was because of the experience I had following my father’s death, as well as these trends, that I eventually launched a deathcare service called Cremstar. After advertising and novel writing, I guess you could call this my third act. My daughter had grown and I was ready to sink my teeth into something new.

By offering our service exclusively online, with text and phone support, we at Cremstar (and companies like ours on the West Coast) are able to price our direct cremation solution starting at just $893 (vs. the national average of $2-3K), and instead of 150 minutes of meetings and travel when you’re least inclined to do it, you can order and arrange a direct cremation completely online in about 15-20 minutes.

While cost is a major factor in the transition from traditional burial to cremation, increasingly, so too is the environment. Studies have shown that traditional burial has a significantly higher ecological cost than cremation.

ECOLOGICAL IMPACT AND CONCERNS

This chart details the environmental impact of cremation versus traditional burial as measured by a composite measure called the ‘shadow price’; the higher the shadow price, the higher the cost to the environment and the less eco-friendly it is. Using these ecological metrics, burial has a 23% higher environmental cost than cremation.

One exciting technological development is the greater adoption of aquamation. Aqua cremation (or aquamation) is a water-based process also known as alkaline hydrolysis, which uses a combination of water flow, temperature, and alkalinity to accelerate the natural breakdown of the human body. Many highly regarded institutions – the Mayo Clinic, UCLA Medical School, and UTSW Medical School – have utilized aquamation for over twenty years.

Unlike flame cremation, which is already ecologically superior to traditional burial, aquamation adds no direct emissions of harmful greenhouse gases or mercury into the atmosphere. The process is very energy-efficient, offering over 90% energy savings compared to flame cremation, with only 1/10th of the carbon footprint. Furthermore, this smaller footprint can be mitigated via carbon offset programs. All that’s left over is water, which can be used for commercial irrigation. Already, one of our investors, who happens to be class of ‘78, has shown an interest in using it to irrigate some of his tree farms in Florida.

And what is the ecological cost of deathcare the old-fashioned way?

• More than 800,000 gallons of formaldehyde are dumped into the earth as a result of burials every year in the US.
  • That’s enough to fill a couple of Olympic-sized swimming pools. Every year.
• Conventional burials use 30 million board feet of hardwoods, 2,700 tons of copper and bronze, 104,272 tons of steel, and 1,636,000 tons of reinforced concrete every year in the US.
  • 104,272 tons of steel. That’s enough to build a 400-story skyscraper, 2 ½ times as tall as the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the skyscraper Tom Cruise ran down in Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol. Again, that’s every year!
• The amount of casket wood alone is equivalent to about 4 million acres of forest and could build around 4.5 million new homes every year in the US.
  • 4 million acres of forest: to put that in perspective, that’s roughly an area the size of Texas. And 4.5 million homes: That’s about 1 for every person in Philadelphia, where I currently live. But instead of building new homes, we’re burying them in the ground, never to be seen again.

Today, folks are still choosing to be buried …

but more and more folks are opting not to be embalmed, but to be buried naturally …

perhaps in a mushroom shroud …

or under a living tree.

Where available, instead of traditional flame-based cremation (top), they’re opting for aquamation (bottom) …

and even human composting, where the decedent is placed in a sealed chamber in a special solution, resulting in mulch that you can use to fertilize your garden. Though I will add that human compositing is rather expensive and not as green as it first appears.

While scattering remains the most common choice (and here is the complementary Cremstar scattering tube we provide), more and more families are choosing from the many unique and highly personal options available when it comes to the disposition of their loved one’s cremains.

• Putting the Cremains in a potted planter (clockwise from bottom left)
• Hand-crafted glass jewelry
• Transforming them into a diamond
• Embedding them in fireworks
• Shooting them up into space in an Elon Musk rocket to create a shooting star
• Scatterings on land and at sea, including by drone
• Green burial of cremains in forests or mangrove swamps
• And Integrating cremains into a live coral reef

Even urns have had a facelift. Another Spring company called Final Spring uses 3D printing technologies to create personalized high-quality funeral products — from urns to new products like biodegradable scattering stones and personalized night lights and mobiles.

Our bespoke Scattering Stones are made of biodegradable polymers and seaweed extracts, within which we embed the cremains. I’m sure you all remember that scene in The Big Lebowski, when John Goodman spills Donny’s ashes all over The Dude, Jeff Bridges.

For some reason, when it comes to scattering ashes on a beach, people seem to forget the properties of physics: the wind generally blows off the sea and onto the land. That’s just the way it works. With our customized Scattering Stones, instead of spilling out ashes into a sea breeze at the beach during a scattering, families can skip stones of their lost loved one out into the ocean, knowing they’ll dissolve and disperse their embedded ashes into the water over time … and not blow back all over those attending the ceremony.

RFID TRACKING OF LOVED ONES

I have a confession to make. I’m rather lazy. I have no interest in chasing animals across the African plain when I’m hungry. I’d rather hang out at the waterhole, at the spring, and wait for the animals to come to me. That was my approach when staking out our claim in the nascent realm of digital advertising back in the ‘80s. And that’s our approach at Cremstar today. Indeed, that’s the reason we call our parent company the Spring Holding Group. Our guiding principle is, if I or my funeral directors can’t do their job from anywhere they happen to be, we have failed. Everything has to be mobile-first.

This rather daunting picture (above) displays the Cremstar process. We are the only company in the US currently using RFID technology to place a chip on the decedent when we perform removals, and then tracking that individual using the driver’s GPS-enabled phone from initial removal all the way to the final cremation. Our funeral directors dispatch drivers using the Cremstar Funeral Director App, drivers accept and track removals using their own Driver App, and our crematories intake and record cremations using the Cremstar Crematory App.

This is tech at its best and it represents where the industry is going.

Finally, while Americans may be less religious today, we are still spiritual and, increasingly, we’re holding our own life celebrations at alternate venues — from natural settings to private homes, museums, halls and restaurants. Rather than funeral plots and stone mausoleums, folks are turning to digital remembrances at online media repositories such as MemoryBox.com, another Spring business.

Here, for example, is a MemoryBox in the Metaverse that we’ve created to memorialize those of us from the Class of ’79 who are no longer with us. Why spend a fortune on a physical venue, caterers, decorations, and printed materials to honor the passing of your loved one, especially in these pandemic times? For families that are distributed far and wide, for those who find traveling difficult, for folks who are sick and tired of videoconferencing, there is an alternative. Hold your Celebration of Life event … in the metaverse, an online location to memorialize lost loved ones and host virtual Life Celebrations in real-time, with live eulogies, and guests from anywhere in the world.

Take a look around this MemoryBox in the Metaverse after the presentation, and leave a Note by the portrait of friends you’ve lost. And if you have a photo of someone who’s missing a picture, please let me know. We’d be happy to add it.

These types of technologies are very exciting, especially as families become more far-flung. Another one of our investors from the Class of ’78, used the same tech to showcase artwork she’d created to promote animal preservation. I urge you to check it out the EyeAm.Art Show in the Metaverse for another example of what can be done.

With an entire generation of Baby Boomers beginning to transition, with the climate emergency, with animal life disappearing from the planet at an unprecedented rate, with war enflaming the Middle East and Eastern Europe, famine in the Sudan and Gaza, and with the world suffering from lethal pandemics, it’s no wonder we’re more focused on mortality today than we have been in years. Unfortunately, we are woefully ill-prepared for what’s coming. Here are some sobering facts:

• How many of you out there plan to, or would like to die at home? [SHOW OF HANDS. GUESSTIMATE PERCENTAGE.]
  • 90% of people want to be kept at home if they become terminally ill.
    • In reality, only 20% of Americans die at home; the figure is the same in Australia, slightly higher in New Zealand (30%), and lower in South Korea and Japan (15%).
• How many of you have an Advance Directive laying out your medical wishes (like a Do Not Resuscitate or DNR)? [SHOW OF HANDS.] And how many of you have a Will designating someone to decide what happens to you once you pass? [ANOTHER SHOW OF HANDS. GUESSTIMATE PERCENTAGE.]
  • 40% of Americans ages 65 and older don’t have an Advance Directive and fewer than 50% have a Will.
    • It’s important to note that the authority granted by a “Power of Attorney” loses validity once a person passes.
• How many of you have already pre-paid for your funeral or cremation? [SHOW OF HANDS. GUESSTIMATE PERCENTAGE.]
  • Fewer than 30% of Americans pre-pay for their funeral or cremation.
    • The rest leave this burden to their surviving loved ones to pay for and manage.
• How many of you have children who will take care of what happens to you once you pass? [SHOW OF HANDS. GUESSTIMATE PERCENTAGE.]
  • Of the 76.4 million Baby Boomers living in the United States, 20% do not have children to act as caregivers.
    • In fact, nearly 50% of U.S. adults are single today. In 2034, adults aged 65 and over will outnumber children aged 18 and younger for the first time in U.S. history.
• And finally, just in case you were wondering who is going to be there to take care of you in your twilight months, here are some sobering statistics:
  • The number of people aged 65 and over is projected to increase from 52 million in 2018 to 98 million by 2060. And yet, as the number of elderly people is increasing, the number of medical professionals is decreasing.
    • The U.S. could see a shortage of 120,000 physicians and will need 12 million new nurses by 2030!

It is the inevitable intertwining of mortality and nature that is key to understanding wabi-sabi. As author Andrew Juniper notes in his book Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence, “(Wabi-Sabi) uses the uncompromising touch of mortality to focus the mind on the exquisite transient beauty to be found in all things impermanent.”

Like the falling of cherry blossoms.

Alone, natural patterns are merely pretty, sometimes mesmerizing, baubles for the eyes. But in understanding their context as transient items that highlight our own awareness of impermanence and death, they become truly profound.

Despite the promise of “Barbie”, the movie, the Barbie doll influencers we see on Instagram today are not real…and never will be. They are unrealizable, Tantalus crack, and doomed to make miserable all who reach for such sticky fruit, like monkeys in the upadana forest.

This is largely why we face a crisis of depression amongst our young—mostly young girls. This is why we’re now making the purchase of high-strength skin products to teens and tweens illegal. You’ve got 15-year-old skin; why do you need a skin cream, for crying out loud?

Rather than have us grasp for the unreachable, the cold and timeless Platonic stars, wabi-sabi lets us recognize the value and beauty in all that passes and fades.

Indeed, it is because of its individual stretch marks and wrinkles and scars, as well as its mandala transience, that life has beauty at all instead of a Groundhog Day banality. How monotonous would eternal perfection become!

It is our “flaws” that make us unique and special, not cookie-cutter impeccability.

Kintsugi

So enamored of these individual imperfections are the Japanese followers of wabi-sabi that some have gone so far as to actually highlight the cracks in their crockery. Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum.

Here there is no attempt to hide the damage; the repair is literally illuminated.

Look, see, I’ve lived, the golden cracks proclaim. I’m not out there, like some Platonic ideal, nauseatingly perfect, forever young. I am right here, in this moment, not timeless but timeful, not uniform but unique, with the eternal river literally written upon me.

Given our growing acceptance of multiculturalism and our evolving sense of what and who is beautiful, I’m hopeful that the wabi-sabi aesthetic will encourage a new appreciation for the cracks in all of us, diminish our fear of aging and death, and ultimately foster a heightened sense of tolerance and equanimity.

I started this talk by saying that the funeral industry faces three major challenges today:

• the way in which we manage deathcare;
• the way in which we memorialize lost loved ones;
• and the way we look at our own mortality and death itself.

By adapting to new market trends, by leveraging the latest digital technologies, Cremstar and companies like ours operating on the West Coast are well on our way to meeting the first two of these challenges. But the rebranding of death in our hearts and in our minds is an ongoing, almost Sisyphean exercise, and one which I hope you will help us in meeting.

As I stand here and gaze at my 2,500-year-old Etruscan vase, as I ponder each nick and scratch, and think about my own wrinkles and stretch marks and brown spots and scars, I have to smile a little. Once, someone toasted the ancient eternal gods and took a sip of wine from this small, simple cup. But where are the ancient deities today? Trapped in eternal youth, that nectar of Western dreams, do they sit idle and all-powerful, waiting for something — anything — new to happen?

In truth, I pity them. No matter how colorful, think how dull and flavorless their feast! For they will never taste the sweet fruit of mortality.

CONCLUSION

I’d like to leave you with some practical things you can do:

• Talk with your family about your end-of-life desires. PLAN, PLAN, PLAN.
• Get the legal stuff out of the way; i.e. define an AA or Designated Agent as POA goes away
• Set up a Living Will so your family and friends know what to do in case you become incapacitated
• Prepay for your funeral or cremation so your family doesn’t have this worry
• Begin to create your MemoryBox now so that you’re remembered the way you want to be remembered
• Plan your Ultimate Party (the one you’re guaranteed not to attend)
• Become a Wabi Sabi Brand Ambassador

The only way that we will rebrand death in this country is with your help.

Thank You.

For more information, visit https://SpringHoldingGroup.com, or email us at info@SpringHoldingGroup.com.

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The post Rebranding Deathcare for the 21st Century – How Eastern ideas can help us overcome Western prejudices against death appeared first on Home.

With only 350 official residents remaining after the terrible hurricane of ’55 in which 2,500 people died, with only a couple of restaurants, a fruit stand, a marine barracks, a dozen or so bed-and-breakfasts/small hotels spattered along the coast, with barely a beach and no distended cruise ship peer, today Xcalak is all but forgotten.  Only the intrepid traveler from Cancun, who ponders what lies beyond that bay, just along that coast, and who then travels for five hours by unforgiving road due south ever gets to know this quintessentially Mexican town as more than a dot on the map.

As the soldiers in camouflage finished rifling though our own bags, a white pick-up truck arrived and a lanky narrow-hipped gringo with a baseball hat slipped from the cab like a spoonful of molasses.  “I’m glad you had the sense to buzz the bar,” he said.  “I’m Dean.  Mike of Marina Mike’s had to go back to the States.”  He motioned toward the Mexican Marines.  “It’s okay, El Capitan.  I brought beer.”

*   *   *

 “The soldiers have been here in strength now for about a week,” Dean explained, as we bumped along in his beat-up Chevy pick-up over the broken coral road.  It seemed that only the week before, some boat had either run aground, or dumped her cargo at sea for fear of being boarded:  40 bales, and each one carried 30 Kilos of cocaine with a local value of $200K – one million on the street.  As the last town on the southernmost tip of Mexico, Xcalak is a main thoroughfare for smugglers making their way north from Colombia to the States.

 “A week ago,” added Dean, “there were only a couple of beaten-up scooters in town.  Now everybody’s got at least one.”

“How’s the fishing?” I asked.

Dean shrugged.  “Well, that’s just it.  No one really knows.  It’s off-season.  The entire east side of Chetumal Bay will only see one fisherman this week.  And that’s you.”

*   *   *

Victor Castro had been a member of the local fishing union for more than thirty years when he decided to strike out on his own and become a full-time guide.  “I had heard what was happening in Ascension and Spiritu Santu bays to the North,” he told me later on that night at Mike’s Marina.  “Their camps are drawing fishermen from all over the world.  I am getting ready.  Chetumal Bay is twice as big as Ascension and Spiritu Santu put together.  And it is the last place left, abutting Ambergris Cay to the south, another bonefish and permit paradise.  Yet it is unexplored.  I’ve fished these waters for 30 years and I’ve only just begun to venture deep into the Bay.  I tell you, these fish have never seen a fly.”

*   *   *

The next morning at 6:30, Victor came by with a woeful tale.  It was the conjunctivitis, the pink eye.  It was sweeping through the Yucatan.  More than half of the population was afflicted.  “But I have a replacement,” he added with a puffy pink wink.  “Jesus will be here in ten minutes with the panga.  He is very strong.  He can pole you around all day.”

“A half day,” I reminded him.

Jesus arrived with the boat and tied her up immediately in front of Marina Mike’s. The ocean was wearing whitecaps.  There was a brisk wind that made the palm trees creak.  It was not going to be easy casting.  We got in the boat and roared across the choppy waters of the bay, heading due south.

There were a few clouds in the sky, nascent thunderheads, the high-stacked snowy clouds of the Caribbean, bruised underneath.  As we skirted the town pier, I took in Xcalak:  primarily one-story concrete dwellings, skinny mongrels standing transfixed on the beach, reclining fishing boats, a battered abandoned truck.  This was Mexico to me – not Cozumel or Cancun.  This sleepy little fishing village, where everybody knew each other, where gringos still earned a stare or two from the locals ambling by, where only the night before, a giant feral pig rooting around in the garden behind the hotel had awakened me from my dreams about New York.  Only a line of modern windmills towering over the palm trees reminded me of the century.  Then, suddenly, Xcalak was gone, replaced by coconut palm and mangrove, the land of the crab and the ant.  The wind blew the salt spray into our faces as we swung around the coast.  The boat slowed down through choppy water and we spied the cut the Mexican military had dynamited through the reef.  To our right, a dredger sat lethargically on a barge, baking in the sun, slap dab in the middle of the canal leading to Chetumal Bay.  Jesus gunned the engine and we headed further south, around a bend in the coast, then slowed down and made for shore.

A passageway opened up in the dense greenery, a seemingly natural canal.  Jesus maneuvered the boat with ease along the Boca Bacalar Chica.  “Sometimes,” he shouted above the engine noise, “we see manatee in here.” 

Then we were through.  The narrow passageway began to widen, to open up onto a blue lagoon, hemmed in on every side by coral outcroppings or impenetrable vegetation.  Jesus cut the engine and began to pole.  I was using a Scott, 4-piece, 8’ graphite fly rod, and a Crazy Charlie with weighted eyed, tied light in pink to match the vast expanse of sand.  The water here was about 4 to 5 feet deep.  We inched forward toward the lee of a mangrove island.  I make a cast and wet my line, then stripped it back, laying it out carefully on the plywood deck behind me, fitted with Astroturf.  I pinched the fly in my left hand, pulled down my cap, and started to hunt.

It took me a while to find the windows in the quivering water but when I did it was just in time.

“Bonefish.  3 o’clock,” said Jesus.  He swung the panga closer.

“I see him,” I replied.  He was alone and he was big.  I lifted the rod, shot out some line, double-hauled on the back cast and let it fly.  The line slithered perfectly through the guides, riding a little high against the wind, unrolled and settled with a graceless splash almost on top of the fish.  To my utter and complete amazement, the fish did not spook.  It simply looked and turned away.

And this is how it went, all morning.  Of course, I lined my share of single fish, put down more schools than I’d ever care to admit, but most of the bones were generous to a fault.  As Victor Castro had said, it’s as if they’d never seen a fly before.  Without lodges and air-conditioned hotels, without flats boats and marinas, without ready access except for a grueling 5-hour drive from Cancun, and with only the occasional diver/fishermen to even begin to probe the vastness of Chetumal Bay, these fish pounced on my flies.  They fought over them.  They raced to be apprehended.

Jesus turned out to be a master with the boat.  He brought us into the most sheltered islands, the most protected lees, and I switched over to a Gotcha.  We tried everything:  from sight-casting to cruising singles, to dropping flies in tonsures in the turtle grass alive with schooling fish.  Within two hours, I had caught six bones, ranging in size from a mere two-pounder to one of nearly five.  Anxious for my friend to catch a bone, his first, I let Jimmie take the bow.  While not a fly-fisher, he put up a plucky effort with a borrowed spinning rod and pink shrimp jig.  But Jesus had no live bait, and Jimmie had a hard time getting the jig out.  Eventually Jesus felt sorry for us and we headed for a senota, a 30’ deep blue hole in the flat, carved out by freshwater aquifers.  Over time, the upper casing of the underground channel collapses, linking the lagoon via submarine river to the sea.  We caught jack and snapper on nearly every cast until our arms were sore.

As we made our way back to camp through the cut, we noticed a huge mud just downstream from where the barge was dredging.  But the source was no machine.  Not even in Belize or Argentina have I ever spotted such a school.  More than thirty permit winged their way past our boat in a flash, mooning their sides at us, giving us the finger with their carbon tipped dorsal fins.

*   *   *

The next morning, Jesus and I angled out across the bay to the same cut; Jimmie had elected to stay behind.  The weather had turned.  The day before had been windy and clear.  But a bank of rain clouds had swept in from the northeast during the night and the sky was pewter and pink.  The wind had died and I was worried.  Without the sun, our visibility would be next to nil, and with it our ability to hunt.  Frankly, I didn’t fancy the idea of blind casting into dark spots the whole morning.  Once again, Jesus didn’t let me down.

We made our way through the canal and deep into Chetumal Bay, threading through countless mangrove passageways, gliding along tranquil lagoons and flats for a good hour.  Eventually, I heard the motor slow and felt the boat begin to settle.  Jesus cut the engine and we drifted into another medium-sized lagoon.  There was a large spit of land jutting out into the bay.  Small mangrove plants and razor grass sprouted up from the sandy soil.  The flat seemed to stretch on indefinitely, no more than a few inches deep against the bank.  Jesus poled us forward.  The water looked like mercury, impenetrable in the half-light.  Then I saw the telltale sign of tailing fish.  We could hear them in the reeds, nosing around for shrimp and crab, up and down the entire coast.

I spent the next 4 hours sight fishing to tailing bones.  September may not be the premier time to fish the Yucatan but that morning Chetumal gave up twelve bones and I must have lost or lined at least two dozen more.  Some say the bones here are less numerous but larger than their cousins to the north in Spiritu Santu and Ascension Bays.  In my experience, they rival the fish of Belize, and they’re a lot less leader shy.  My largest fish that morning was about 8 pounds, but 10-pound fish are not uncommon, and a thirty-bone day is considered only a decent outing.

I fished mostly Crazy Charlies and Gotchas in light brown or cream or pink.  Crab patterns were more problematic.  Given the stillness of the water, they often drew too much attention to themselves as they penetrated the surface, putting the fish down.  At one point, as Jesus poled us into a narrow weedy bay no more than twenty-five feet across and fifty or so feet long, I realized that the inlet was alive with bones.  There were four distinct schools of between six and fifteen fish, and several singles and doubles rooting around in the weeds.  I began to pick up fish on almost every cast, moving from school to school, and although each hookup produced stinging runs down to my backing as they fled the inlet for the larger bay, although they often churned the waters to a froth, the remaining bonefish in the inlet never spooked.   They simply moved about in nervous circles for a few moments, then settled back to eating.  I was transfixed until Jesus pulled my sleeve and pointed.  I hadn’t even noticed him draw near.  I followed his finger and saw the telltale waving of a permit’s dorsal fin as it cruised casually around the opening to the inlet.  I spun about and cast, backhand, across my left shoulder.  In a second the fish would either enter the inlet or turn away, back toward the body of the bay.  The loop unfurled clumsily and landed with a great splash only inches from the permit’s nose.  I never saw the fish again.  It simply disappeared, without so much as a wake.

We shifted over to permit fishing after that, cruising through vast lagoons and sandy bays, in deeper water now, perhaps ten feet or more.  But despite our diligent efforts, the fish that had been so ubiquitous the day before – the authors of that impressive mud near the canal – eluded us today.  We made our way back under a threatening sky.  In the distance, lightning bolts clawed at the Caribbean, like stingers from the bruise-blue thunderheads above, celestial men-of-war.  We floated in between two liquid worlds.  We even enjoyed a small mud in a narrow bay as we headed back toward the canal; I picked up two more fish blind casting into the cloud.  Then I gave up.  I was tired.  Despite those last two bones, the day had really ended when I had spooked that permit back at the inlet.  I had known it even then.  I laid my rod back in the holder and buttoned up my shirt.  It had grown suddenly cold.  The front was heading our way.

We raced the storm back through the cut, then north to Marina Mike’s.  The storm won.  We got soaked.  And while I never did spot any bales in the mangroves during my stay, I was leaving Xcalak with a lot more than I’d carried in.

If you’re looking for the amenities of a fine fly fishing lodge, for tidy air-conditioned rooms, for experienced guides with well-maintained flats boats, for nightlife and shopping and restaurants too, Xcalak is not for you.  But if you’re one of those people who – for some unfathomable reason – simply have to know what’s down that road, due south, along the coast there, pack your bags.  But you’d better hurry.  Cancun was once a place where you buzzed the bar to arrange for pickup at the airport.  Already there are discussions about building a couple of large hotels and a marina just south of town.  Victor Castro is buying another boat and Jesus is going to work for him full-time.  A few miles up the coast they’ve put in a new cruise ship pier and a resort; they plan to transport 400 snorkelers a day to the Chinchorro Bank.  As Jimmie and I headed back out to the airport to fly back to Cozumel and home, we noticed a cherry-picker stringing a power line along the road.  Soon the entire town of Xcalak would be wired for electricity, 24 hours a day.  “There goes the Yucatan!” Jimmie said.

September 2003

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In contrast, I would argue that if free markets were truly free, laissez-faire economics would not be so patently pernicious. But they’re not free.

Rather, rich and powerful corporate interests do everything in their power to distort the market by securing tax breaks and special privileges through their armies of lobbyists resulting in the oligarchy in which we operate today, as revealed by the exhaustive research of Prof. Gilens of Princeton University. Indeed, corporate welfare completely undercuts the so-called free market system extolled by conservatives.

Commercial or “private” insurance administrative costs, for example, hover around 14–22%, according to the industry trade group American Health Insurance Plans. Meantime, Medicare’s “public” administrative costs are around 6–8% (including the cost of outside agencies). Why? Because these commercial overhead costs include 4–6% for commissions and 3–5% for profits.

It’s funny how when companies want to merge and consolidate in order to drive efficiencies of scale — despite the fact that this actually diminishes competition — it’s fine. But when it’s government doing the same thing, the Right screams bloody murder.

Human beings are bi-manual creatures, and yet those on the Right always seem to ignore the other hand of cooperation and collective endeavor — the “Helping Hand,” so to speak.

This conflict between the “fighting fist” and “helping hand” doesn’t just date back to the founding of our nation and the Age of Enlightenment. It dates back to the dawn of our species, or even earlier. Indeed, one could argue that without it, we would all still be living alone in our own Paleolithic caves, fighting off predators singlehandedly, trying to survive in singular isolation.

Instead, it’s the hand that saw infants handed off to relative strangers by females of the clan so that they could go out and gather nuts and berries unobstructed. It’s the hand that grasped the spear so that, back to back, we could collectively face predators. It’s the hand that gathered up seeds so that we could conjointly plant and harvest efficiently as the basis of agrarian sustenance. It’s the hand that, with others, eventually built and maintained the machinery that made possible the industrial and digital revolutions. And it’s the hand that today is manifested in such “socialist” organizations as our local police and fire departments, our road and bridge builders and inspectors, our public school system, our military, our Social Security and Medicare systems, the EPA, and all aspects of government.

“No man is an island,” Donne said, and yet so-called free market ideologues would have us celebrate this state of singular animal competition as the basis of all that is good and efficient and natural but it is, in reality, only one part of the natural order of things and, indeed, often far from efficient — as illustrated by the true state of private health insurance cited above, notwithstanding what the GOP tells us. In fact, there is a growing body of scientific evidence that this difference is not just naturally manifested but naturally based. The “me” (based on selfishness) vs. “them” (based on empathy-based cooperation) dialectic predates humankind.

As primatologist Frans de Waal said in his essay The Evolution of Empathy:

“We are so used to empathy that we take it for granted, yet it is essential to human society as we know it. Our morality depends on it: How could anyone be expected to follow the golden rule without the capacity to mentally trade places with a fellow human being? It is logical to assume that this capacity came first, giving rise to the golden rule itself … This capacity likely evolved because it served our ancestors’ survival in two ways. First, like every mammal, we need to be sensitive to the needs of our offspring. Second, our species depends on cooperation, which means that we do better if we are surrounded by healthy, capable group mates. Taking care of them is just a matter of enlightened self-interest.”

While those on the Right like to trot out Adam Smith when underpinning their justification for selfishness, it’s worth noting that this patron saint of economics only mentioned the “invisible hand” twice in his writings, and he never did so to justify heartlessness.

On the contrary, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), he said, “This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition (is) … the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”

Yes, the “invisible hand” of we angel-apes cannot be denied. But as angel-apes we are not merely apes. Each and every one of us also has another hand, one of cooperation and collective assistance that is not simply angelic. It’s what’s helped us crawl out of our singular caves, abandon our Ayn Randist self-centeredness, and gave us succor and support as we fashioned and built civilization itself.

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On 9/11, I was living in a loft in lower Manhattan and I saw the towers fall. It was natural, I suppose, that as a writer I look to see which cataclysmic events had scarred New York as deeply. There was that Triangle Shirt Factory fire. There were a few tenement fires, some epidemics. And then I came across the largely forgotten Slocum disaster. Why, I asked myself, was the Triangle Shirt Factory fire so infamous, when fewer than 150 people died, and yet no one seemed to even know the General Slocum, when more than a thousand burned to death or drowned?

Then, it dawned upon me. The Slocum disaster had happened only a few years before the Great War. And when World War I arrived and so many Americans perished, no one cared about the Germans any longer. Now, they were the Hun, or the Boche. Somehow sub-human. Unworthy of remembrance.

When I decided to tell the story of the General Slocum tragedy as a YA novel, it was inevitable that the narrative should revolve around xenophobia and antisemitism, misogyny and prejudice of all kinds. In writing fiction, particularly historical fiction, one tries to create a narrative that speaks a truth transcending one specific life or set of lives, but rather one that represents all lifelines from that time, a bridge connecting the reader to the thoughts and feelings of the people living in that age. It also grants us an opportunity to relearn the truth that—despite vast differences in years—humans are driven by motivations which transcend time.

Kiss Me, I’m Dead is a story about love, about a love so strong that it conquers time and death in the face of prejudice, misogyny, antisemitism, and the mindset of the mob. It may be set in 1904, but these themes are very much eternal, indeed too omnipresent in our culture today. And yet the 120th anniversary of the General Slocum tragedy is more than that. It’s also the anniversary of New York’s greatest act of misremembering, the intentional collective sublimation of an idea, and the vanishing of a people.

In today’s culture, where we can create digital personae of ourselves on Tik Tok and Instagram that bear little resemblance to our true selves (just look at our politicians), at a time when AI makes it increasingly easy to manufacture alternate realities, indeed when VR permits us to actually immerse ourselves within these artificial worlds, the need for memory, to keep a foothold in truth, is more important than ever. To forget the past, Santayana warned us, means we are doomed to repeat it. To forget the holocaust, slavery, the Armenian and Rwandan Tutsi genocides, and all the other countless genocides before is to forget the current conflagrations in Gaza and the Sudan and the DRC, the wars of colonial occupation in West Papua and the Western Sahara.

One hundred and twenty years ago, New York experienced the greatest single loss of life in its history. That’s not fake news. No matter how hard we tried to ignore the event a few years later, it did happen. Indeed, our collective misremembering may be a truth as great as the loss of life itself. If the sinking of the Slocum teaches us anything at all, I hope it teaches us the power and essential nature of memory. Our most sacred trust, and our greatest obligation to future generations is to remember. Unflinchingly. Warts and all.

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J.G. Sandom is an international best-selling author of a dozen novels including Kiss Me, I’m Dead. Originally released in hardcover by Penguin/Dutton under the title The Unresolved and pen name T.K. Welsh, the novel is being re-released by Cornucopia Press in both English and German under the title Kiss Me, I’m Dead in time for the 120th anniversary of the General Slocum tragedy.

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