Death and Dying

Death and dying can come any time — even at the most benign moment, while casually surfing Facebook. When I logged on yesterday, up popped the beautiful faces of long gone P. Scott Makela’s children. Fresh, grown-up yet innocent faces. While devoid of any suggestion of death and dying to the Facebook public at large, for me, death and dying lurched from the screen, larger than life.

Suddenly, it was 1997 and I was at Seven Ponds, Michigan, attending a summer picnic for Cranbrook Academy of Art Graduate students. The grass smells sweet as Scott Makela walks across the lawn towards my mom and me. Later, she would make a comment about what a sexual man he was. I remember thinking it was an odd thing for my mom to say, but she had picked up on his uniqueness.

Fast-forward to an evening a few years later, and he is over at our home with his wife Laurie for a small dinner party. We eat, drink, and laugh a lot. Scott mentions something about having a cold, but he seems healthy and vibrant as always. The following evening, we receive a call that Scott is at the local ICU, in a coma. Scott couldn’t breath and Laurie had called the ambulance — but no one really understood what was happening. Put simply, he went too long without air before they managed to open his throat again.

Like a dream, a handful of us from the Cranbrook Academy of Art arrive at the hospital. Death and dying was so palpable in the waiting room, it almost felt claustrophobic. Scott Makela had just hit the peak of his career, having designed the titles for the film Fight Club, and now he was fighting for his life.

Sometimes life is mysterious, and when it involves death, it can be best to keep its secrets. Like the man who heard Princess Diana’s last words and made a pact with himself to never speak them again. Death and dying is the most scared of sacred. The few of us who were there to support huddled as the whispered news causes Scott’s 7-year-old daughter Carmela to cry. A kind of deep wailing one never forgets. Scott was only 39, here one day and gone the next, simply taken by death. It was too surreal to comprehend.

Two ceremonies and an interment later, I stand at the low columbarium wall and watch as a small group slowly pours sand on Scott’s fabric-wrapped ashes, saying goodbye. I stand at the back… still stunned, unaware that everyone has filtered away. It is the awkwardness of the priest and his aid that snap me back into awareness. They are trying to push the urn box into the columbarium niche but it will not fit. Even in death, Scott is that unique square peg.

P. Scott Makela will be remembered most for the typeface he designed called Dead History — could he have known, somehow? Did he predict his life cut short by death? As the familiar faces of his children lurch out at me from Facebook, full of life yet flooding me with memories of death and dying, I realize those sweet faces hold the DNA of a very special history.

Dead History, to be exact.

Dead History

In memory of P. Scott Makela, who would grin widely to know he was still cherished.