Is death life’s greatest mystery? Or would we just like it to be? (Therefore, ghosts, devils, heaven, hell, organized religion, and Halloween candy.)
Those are not among the five major questions that serve as an organizing mechanism for the Field Museum’s expansive new exhibit, “Death: Life’s Greatest Mystery,” however much they hang in the air.
The actual questions are these:
What is death?Answer, more or less: depends on how you define it.
What will happen to my body?Probably won’t be a fossil. Most likely, buried or burned. Ecologically correct but less popular choice: served up as another creature’s dinner.
Do I have to die?Um, yes.
How will my death affect others?Most animals won’t notice.
The big question—What will happen to my spirit? (And what is the spirit, anyway?)—is posed, but basically ducked.
Designed to be “a safe and welcoming place for visitors to get curious,” the exhibit presents “all the different answers offered by the natural world as well as human cultures through time,” according to a museum press release.
“Visitors will see that these questions don’t necessarily have just one answer, but many,” exhibition developer Ben Miller says in the statement.
Translation: there’s a lot here about the rituals various cultures have developed to help people cope.
“Death: Life’s Greatest Mystery”Through 8/27/23: daily 9 AM-5 PM (last admission 4 PM), closed Thanksgiving and Christmas, Field Museum, 1400 S. DuSable Lake Shore Dr., 312-922-9410, fieldmuseum.org; exhibition included in the Field’s All-Access Pass, starting at $32 for Chicago residents
So, anodyne enough for a G or PG rating. Not surprising since museums are fighting their own dinosaur status and school field trips are vital to their survival. Still, there’s plenty of interesting stuff, all drawn from the museum’s vast collection. The Field, with its 40 million objects and specimens—stuffed, pinned, floating in preservative—is our own spectacular temple of the dead.
The exhibit’s scariest element might be the ominous musical soundscape that covers nearly the entire 7,500-square-foot space with an aura of foreboding. Unlike the few items prefaced by warning signs—a series of illustrations depicting a decomposing body or a chance to sniff the scent of human death—it’s not something you can choose to avoid.
Would you rather be buried or cremated? Visitors can tap a touch screen to record their answers for comparison with the hive mind. On opening day, cremation was winning, 56 to 44 percent. This, in spite of a display titled “All about cremation, as told by chickens” that included the sparse remains of said birds after they’d been incinerated, hydrolyzed, freeze-dried, or transformed into a diamond.
According to the exhibit, “Life [though not exactly your life] goes on after death, and could not without it”—a situation illustrated by a model of a “whale fall,” in which a mob of underwater creatures feast and set up housekeeping on the body of a sunk dead whale. The human version of this circle-of-life outcome: a “green burial” pod that turns a decaying former person into tree food.
Model depicting the sunken body of a whale and the new ecosystem it creates. This model is included in the exhibition “Death: Life’s Greatest Mystery” at the Field Museum. © Field Museum, artwork by Blue Rhino Studios, photo by Edgar Lopez
Some creatures are good at holding off death. Among them, the tardigrade, represented by a blimp-like model 4,000 times its actual size, which is the width of two human hairs. Tardigrades are the most resilient creatures on earth, capable of surviving dehydration and starvation, able to live underwater and in outer space, and, we’re told, klutzy cute.
Unlike tardigrades, human lives are highly dependent on their environment. In one of the exhibit’s potentially most interesting sections, the point is made that in the United States, “the best predictor of your life expectancy is where you live.” When I was there, however, its main feature, an interactive map that was supposed to allow visitors to check specific locations, was, well, dead. (At press time, a museum spokesperson said it should be operable now.)
Decomposition can be stopped by processes like mummification, but to get a good look at that, you’d need to exit Death, enter the Inside Ancient Egypt exhibit across the great hall, and descend to the lower level of the museum, where, in an appropriately tomblike environment, actual mummies are displayed.
The Death exhibit does not include any real human bodies.
Speaking of bodies, the immortal Mae West has been given the exhibit’s final wall text quote: “You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.” Visitors have a chance to add their own words as they exit, by completing this statement on a blackboard: “Before I die I want to . . .”
Answers I saw included “get a pet snake,” “fall in love with myself,” and “pass the NY bar.”
So, yes, life goes on. Probably still better than the alternative.
