Did you ever see 2010’s Buried, the survival thriller in which Ryan Reynolds awakes to find himself buried alive and, using what little he’s been left with, must find a way to escape?
Me neither, but like many cowards I have read its synopsis and it’s as grim a fate as any imaginable. Waking in terror, oxygen running out, burial suit itchy, my last awful moments stuck with Ryan Reynolds. Horrifying.
And while Reynolds is trapped by sinister pretences which he must unravel alongside the whole busting out of the ground thing (he’s gonna be working late!) the prospect of shadowy figures entombing me is still less terrifying than the idea of being buried alive accidentally.
God, imagine it. A clerical error, a budget cut, some intern who skipped the pulse-checking seminar and suddenly you’re knocking meekly from the inside of a coffin and asking if anyone has seen your phone. I’d rather you shoot my body out of a cannon directly into the ground just to make sure I’m gone.
Which leads me to my point: please shoot my body out of a cannon directly into the ground to make sure I’m gone.
I’m not joking. As someone who thinks more or less nonstop about their mortality — never in a productive sense, more in the “surely that construction crane will Final Destination me the moment I drive under it” type of way — you can’t beat an accidental burial in the nightmare stakes. And while I know the likelihood of it happening is remote there’s just no way I can rest easy knowing there’s the slightest possibility of it happening.
Use any amount of due diligence you’d like. Have the doctors call it, leave me lying in state and kick me in the shins twice a day to make sure I’m not faking it. Extract any vital organs that are still serviceable after my years of standing too close to the microwave. But after that it’s your duty to get out the cannon and, if a cannon isn’t available, then trebuchet my body off a gorge, or let under-resourced schools use me as a javelin target. Get creative! Have fun!
This is obviously not an isolated fear. Premature burial has always been an anxiety du jour. There seems to have been a particular mania in the 19th century, with reports of “hundreds” of people in the US being buried alive and the rise of a market for safeguards – alarm buttons, hatches and ladders, morse code, strings leading to gravestone bells, breakable windows (which doubled as a portal through which loved ones could have a little look at the body if the fancy arose).
With modern medical technology the need for a wifi-connected coffin has become less pressing. But how do you know? How can you be sure someone doesn’t drop the ball? Take this week’s case of a 82-year-old US woman who was found breathing by funeral home staff several hours after being declared dead at her nursing home. It follows a creepily similar incident in which another woman was pronounced dead in a hospice, only to be discovered “gasping” in her body bag after being transported to a funeral home.
It seems like the kind of thing that would seem on the nose in a found-footage horror film. It also seems like the grim inevitably of the rise of predatory privatised aged care, which doesn’t seem to be getting any less predatory or any less privatised. It’s not a stretch to imagine this sort of horror negligence happening in Australia, where we’ve fallen into a habit of outsourcing care for our elders to hazardous containment sites whose staff are paid roughly the equivalent of a single airport sandwich to provide twilight care, something which for thousands of years had been seen as the privilege of the community.
It feels impossible to imagine being forgotten in this way but there you go. Neither of those cases made it as far as the grave – though there are stories of others who weren’t so lucky – and to be extremely clear I don’t think my request is something anybody would reasonably want to share.
But for me? The risk just isn’t worth it. Bring! Out! That! Cannon! Do what you need to do. Churn me up with a Thermomix if you have to. Give me the old Tibetan sky burial with whatever birds you can find at short notice (seagulls are acceptable but not the mysterious kind you see miles away from any beach). Donate me to a local vampire hunter group so they can get their staking accreditation, whatever!
I don’t care how you do it, so long as you just make sure. Because the alternative is too much. To be forgotten like that. To wake in the lonely earth, dark and utterly alone, grasping for a bell that isn’t there.
Jack Vening is a writer living in Melbourne
