The Torajan people of Indonesia don’t believe biological death marks the departure of one’s self from one’s body. For them, a person isn’t truly dead until a water buffalo, a soul’s vehicle to the afterlife, has been sacrificed at their funeral. Until that time families will keep the deceased relative at home for weeks, months, even years. They preserve the bodies with a mixture of formaldehyde and water, ensuring the bodies do not putrefy. Family members dress the bodies every day and bring them breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Sometimes afternoon tea. Here I’m saying “bodies,” even though they are still persons; in the subjective experience of their relatives, they are still living people. It’s almost impossible for the English language to articulate the nature of these un-dead individuals — they are not “bodies,” they are not “the deceased,” they are not “the dead.” Even after their funerals, after their burials, families return to their tombs and change the corpse’s clothes — a new suit jacket, tie, trousers, pair of sunglasses — because as the bodies decay their forms change. The old clothes no longer look good. Families will then pose beside the newly dressed corpse for photos. For the Torajans the threshold between life and death is not a concrete wall but a chain-link fence.

You and I have always had different relationships with death. Yours is reverential. You respect it. My favourite coffee mug, on the other hand, is literally emblazoned with the words Fuck Death. This slogan speaks to me, as an atheist and a gay man. Throughout history queers have survived by confronting death through fearlessness and humour. “Fuck Death” feels like a slogan for my people. It’s absurd and irreverent, and I derive a tiny bit of power and comfort from it, the same way one might from spray-painting graffiti about a dictator on a highway overpass. You hate this mug. When you stayed at my place last summer, I found it tucked into the back of the cupboard. I could feel your hand in its placement, trying to gently dissuade me from using it, or perhaps simply burying it so you wouldn’t have to see it. You said you disliked the mug because it was “disrespectful,” but to whom or what was never exactly clear to me.