Deader Than Dead

“Mom, come here,” one of us would plead, racing through our back screen doors with a slam.

It was the late 70s, early 80s, and few of our mothers worked, even fewer worked during the summers.

We had two or three moms on the street who were local school teachers. My mother did not work at all. Mostly, she could be found sewing on the quilt stretched across her quilting rack, pinning patterns to fabrics in order to make clothes in the dining room, or baking in our kitchen that lacked decent counter space.

If it was a Saturday, she was likely baking—probably an apple pie, or maybe sugar cookies, or, if we had a potluck at church the next day, then I’m sure it was broccoli casserole or something equally as distasteful to my young palate.

Coaxing one of our moms to judge one of our games was not easy, and if we could snag one, then they usually came in pairs. My mom and my next-door-neighbor’s mom would appear together.

Our reason for requiring such careful judging was a game—one of our most macabre. It was called Deader Than Dead.

As children, we had a variety of games: Capture the Flag, Kick the Can, Hide-n-Seek, Swedish, a wretchedly named game called Smear the Queer (The object was to not have the ball. If you did, everybody tried to jump on you and tackle you), Flashlight Tag, Ghost in the Graveyard, and, of course, a game we called Deader than Dead.

The objective of Deader than Dead was to look more “dead” than everyone else. This usually involved tightly closed eyes, the shallowest of breathing, and an Oscar-worthy pose. This required arms flung open, legs eschew, heads allowed to droop to the side, mouths open, occasionally tongues poking out—the more theatrical the location, the better.

Most of us ended up on the neighbor’s picnic table, brick backyard fireplace, or simply left to lie in the grass.

You had to seem limp, like you dropped right there on the spot. We did not often use props. Apparently, our staged demises were meant to be of natural causes.

As I think back, it was a horrible request we would make of our mothers. We were asking them to look at their “dead” children and decide which was the most convincing. But, as children, you do not think of things like that. I don’t know who invented this game, but what a dark game for us to play!

Dead things always seem to fascinate children.

For me, it started with our poor K-mart hamsters who we would wake up and find cold and hard tucked into the corners of their cages. Some only lived a few short weeks. It wasn’t due to poor care. They were petted, spoken to, fed, watered, given all of the comforts any retail store hamster could want. After a while, you stopped crying when “Cupcake” or “Carmel” didn’t move anymore. You just sighed and unceremoniously buried him or her in the backyard and began your begging for a new one.

Fish were actually more fun dead than alive. It’s hard to say why flushing a fish was so much fun, but it was; maybe it was the irreverence of the moment. A living thing had ceased to live, and we were simply plunking it into the toilet, like a piece of waste, allowing its body to swirl in the bowl towards fish heaven.

During elementary school, I remember passing a decomposing raccoon in the alleyway behind our house every day when I walked back and forth from school. I remember the buzzing of the black cloud of flies, the horrid stench. I watched the progress of the carcass as it became more and more a part of the earth, a natural erasure of existence—Life covering Death’s tracks by consuming the evidence. I would not even consider doing such a thing now. In fact, I would avoid walking by once I knew what was there.

As an adult, it seems that I am much more preoccupied by Time. I feel the passing of an hour or two. I am much more conscious that that swinging pendulum is shaving off seconds and minutes and hours that no time machine can recapture. I appreciate what time I have been given. Each tick is precious.

As a child, though, I seemed much more fascinated by Death, perhaps because as children we have just emerged from the Abyss—that alchemy of chromosomes, that delicate waltz of DNA. We have just awakened from the secret place where all souls will eventually return.

So much can be contained in a children’s game.

I don’t know if I ever won Deader Than Dead. There was some pretty “stiff” competition. What I remember most about the game was that our mothers did not like to judge it.

And, now, years later, on this bitter cold night in January, with so many losses and years of grief, in my memory still smelling that freshly mown grass, feeling the trickles of sweat from a humid summer day in Northwest Ohio, I finally understand why our mothers often denied us, and why I could never play such a game anymore.