D.O.A. – Accepting Life and Death

The majority of this blog was written by my son, Chris Snyder – a musician and animal shelter worker. I’ll lead off with some introductory text from his Instagram posts. After that, you will read the transcript of my interview with him. (The graphic above was created by Chris, using the Midjourney, a generative artificial intelligence program.)

Back in May of 2023 I started working at ACCT, an animal shelter in Philadelphia. On my 3rd day, the person training me asked if I wanted to help lift something heavy. I said "Yes." We went to the office where the supervisor told us there was a D.O.A. on the loading dock. I didn't know what that meant at the time, but the general mood in the room gave me an idea. As it turned out, D.O.A. means "Dead on Arrival".

This song was inspired by the first time I ever had to handle a D.O.A. I literally went home after and wrote this song as therapy to process what just happened. The song is available at these links:

Sample the song free on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/C1Yeh48irou/

Spotify link for D.O.A. : https://open.spotify.com/track/5XR0JS55VXp9I3gVLysy7V

I wanna thank @rebeccarovnyviolin again for playing violin and @john_townsend_music for mixing/mastering. They both did an amazing job and I am beyond happy with the results. Go follow Rebecca for awesome, epic violin covers and John for hard rock/metal covers and originals. Both are awesome people as well.

I'm not entirely sure what kinds of posts require trigger warnings, but I guess I'll say that just in case. Last week I made a post where I gave a general rundown of the event that inspired "D.O.A.". Now that it's officially released, I'll go more in depth about exactly what happened.

"Dead on Arrival" 

… an animal showed up dead at the shelter. Me and the co-worker training me grabbed a cart and walked to the side of the building. We were told the body would be wrapped in a black bag (which was kind of a relief to me, knowing I at least wouldn't be seeing the animal itself. Maybe that'd make it easier).

When we got to the loading dock, we stood there for a bit trying to figure out if the black bag we were staring at was indeed the body. My co-worker said she thought she could make out the shape of a head. I looked closer and saw she was right. It was clearly a dog's head, specifically that of a pitbull's.

I tentatively walked up to it with the cart. 2 women were sitting there next to it, one of which said "We're too weak to lift it," in a way that sounded like she was trying to lighten the mood slightly. I very gingerly lifted the body down onto the cart (it was much heavier than I was expecting. Apparently, the term "dead weight" is actually a thing). I found myself supporting the body's weight while simultaneously cradling the head to prevent it from landing in an awkward position and possibly breaking the neck. I then wheeled the cart back inside and into the morgue, which smelled like rot, where I lifted the body again.

My coworker was talking to me for 5 minutes afterward, and I didn't hear a word she said. I went home and wrote "D.O.A." as therapy to process what happened.

My interview with Chris Snyder:

1.      Your song, “D.O.A.” is lengthy – 8:55. Why so long?

I listen to a lot of progressive rock and metal, like Dream Theater, which is known for having longer songs.  That definitely rubbed off on me in my song writing.  I've always loved long songs if they're written well, since it feels more like an adventure.  When the climax hits it's that much more emotional, and when it ends it's that much more satisfying since you took more time to get there.  In progressive music the song length can vary from like 2 minutes to 30 minutes.  That might sound crazy to some people but to me it actually feels more natural.  Kind of like how a lifespan doesn't have a fixed time limit.  It can be really short, really long, or somewhere in between.

2.      Your recounting of the experience was shocking to read. Have you gotten over that initial shock?  

Yeah definitely.  It's been about 9 months since it happened so I've had plenty of time to process it.  Since then I've had to handle many more D.O.A.'s and after a while you kinda get desensitized.  You never totally get over it, there's no escaping what you're doing and what you're seeing, but I guess you start to accept it as normal.  You start to see it more like a thing that happens in life and there's no getting around it.  So it's still sad sometimes but no longer shocking.

3.      What have you learned from that experience?  

On the surface I learned what a dead body feels like, how heavy it can be.  I learned that the term "dead weight" is an actual thing.  I could pick up a living dog the same size as the D.O.A. with ease, but somehow the D.O.A. felt incredibly heavy to lift.  Maybe it has something to do with the fact that it was so limp.  On a more subconscious/visceral level I probably learned about the reality of life and death.  It's one thing to hear about death or to see it, but it's a very different thing to feel it, to carry it.  It kinda forces you to accept it as reality.

4.  They say that when working with the sick, dead, and dying, one has to keep their emotions in check. Have you learned to do that?

I think after doing this kind of thing for a while you naturally start to compartmentalize it.  And it isn't even something I've consciously tried to do, it just kinda happened like that.  A few weeks ago I saw a dead mouse in my apartment and freaked out.  Interesting that a dead mouse in my apartment still affected me, meanwhile I'm handling dead animals at work while barely flinching.  The hardest part is when you have to be there for a euthanasia, sit in on it and watch it happen.  That's still sad for me.  Other people who have been there longer barely seem affected by it though.  Not sure if that was a conscious decision on their part or not, but I'm assuming people sometimes need to figure out ways to protect themselves emotionally so they don't lose their minds.  I do wonder if there should be a balance though.  Like, yeah you definitely need to look out for your emotional well being but you also don't wanna lose your humanity as a result.

Chris Snyder (photo by Collette Snyder)

5. The music is a departure in style for you, based on all your recorded original compositions. Can you comment on that?

At the time when I wrote it I wasn't able to record my guitar, so I was actually kinda stuck with my laptop.  I made use of the VSTs (virtual instruments) in my recording software and wrote most of it that way.  So it kinda happened on accident.  Then later on when I was able to record guitar again, I wrote the guitar parts to go alongside the violin.  I realized I wanted an actual violinist to play on it, so I hired a friend of mine, Rebecca Rovny, who's amazing.  It's definitely the most orchestral song I've ever written, so in that sense it's different compared to my other songs.  That being said, the first instrument I ever learned was keyboard, and I would mainly use the piano and string sounds (violin, cello, etc.) to make music that sounded pretty similar to "D.O.A.".  So I'd say this style has always been in me, but maybe it took this kind of event to bring it out again.

6.  How did you get Rebecca and John to collaborate with you on this? To lend their artistry to something only you were feeling?

I've known Rebecca for a few years now through a Facebook group called Musician of All Trades.  It's run by Youtube violinist Taylor Davis, who's known for her violin covers.  I took Taylor's course called Musician of All Trades, which gives you access to the private Facebook group.  I met John on Instagram through another fellow musician I met in the Musician of All Trades group.  John had mixed and mastered another song of mine called "For My Boy", which is about my last dog.  So I just asked both of them if they'd be interested in working together and they both said "yes" which I was really grateful for.

As far as I know, John and Rebecca never had to handle a D.O.A., so in that sense they may not have been able to fully understand what I was feeling at the time.  But at the same time I'd say the emotion in the song is pretty universal.  It's basically about grief.  Both John and Rebecca are animal lovers, and both have experienced loss.  John had at least one dog pass away, and he's posted in social media about the death of one or two of his family members.  Rebecca said the story behind "D.O.A." hit home for her since she's a dog lover.  She told me she was imagining the events I talked about in the story while recording her parts and was getting emotional while doing it.  So even though they might not have ever handled a D.O.A., they were still able to empathize and understand it enough to convey the right emotion.

7. You’ve adopted a shelter dog since experiencing the D.O.A. Can you tell us about that?

I haven't adopted a dog yet (although I would love to in the future), but me and my sister Collette are fostering one.  So basically we took a dog from ACCT (the shelter I work at), and are keeping her at our place and promoting her on social media so someone can adopt her.  We'd both love to adopt her but there's certain limitations we have that are preventing us from doing that right now.  Her name's Sophia, and she's apparently a pit/boxer mix.  Super sweet and cuddly.  Can be shy/fearful of new people so it might take a little bit for her to warm up to you, but once she does she'll just wanna be around you all the time and cuddle.  She's one of the nicest dogs I've ever lived with and she's very smart.  She's medium energy, not super energetic but not lazy.  She enjoys going for walks, but is also kind of a couch potato and would love to just sit and watch movies with you.

8.  Does Sophia like to hear you play?

At first Sophia was scared of my guitar.  When I took it out the first time she backed away, and when I started playing she ran into the other room with Collette.  But since then she's warmed up to it and every now and then will even look mildly intrigued.  Usually she barely seems to notice though.  Maybe I just haven't found her taste in music yet.

Other social media links: https://linktr.ee/chrissnyderguitar

Emotions Evoked by Grave Markers

In September of 2024 I had a show of some of my cemetery photography at Box Spring Gallery in Philadelphia. It was called, “Ghosts.” Nine of my cemetery snow photographs were exhibited. The image you see here was one of the framed photographs.

During the opening reception, there was a woman with her daughter, walking from photo to photo, looking at each piece. I overheard their conversation in front of this one. The mom asked the girl, who was maybe six years old, “What emotion do you feel when you look at this?” The girl said, “I feel cold.”

The mom then said something like, “I feel cold too, but when I look into her eyes, everything seems to get warmer and the snow begins to melt away.” What an amazing observation. Very personal.

Because this statue has human-like qualities, it becomes easier to assign human characteristics to it. And so maybe it becomes easier to react to it in some emotive way. Annette Stott points out in her paper “Personhood and Agency: A Theoretical Approach to Gravemarkers in Mainstream American Cemeteries,”1 that there are various kinds of cemetery monuments ranging from those that bear no resemblance to a human being, to those that recall the human shape. These gravemarkers guarantee the deceased’s continued visibility into a distant future and bring new life to the person’s emplaced and re-bodied identity. 

That last line is a mouthful, but what she means is that long after the buried body has disintegrated, the gravemarker becomes a physical substitute for that person. If said gravemarker has a human form, it is that much easier to relate to it as the actual deceased person. 

Observers seem to find meaning in the images I make, probably different from the meaning or feeling the statue was originally intended to invoke. I try not to define these photographs. I’m usually surprised by peoples’ observations. I dislike giving the photographs titles, because that can very easily define a piece. The one at top is called “Denizen.” Kind of vague, right? Almost meaningless. That’s my intent. I would much rather the viewer find personal meaning in the work, as the mom did above.

Many of the images in the show were cemetery statues and all of them were photographed in the snow. They were challenging to make, since it was cold, windy, and sometimes snowing as I plodded through various cemeteries. So there is a story behind each piece, but I’m not there to recreate that for all viewers. That’s why I need each individual piece to stand on its own. Artists are sometimes urged to write an “Artist’s Statement” for an exhibit, to help put the work in perspective for the viewer. Sometimes this helps, sometimes not. As I said, I don’t really want to define everything for the observer. After they purchase a piece and live with it a few months or years, perhaps it will take on new meanings.

Artist Statement: A Frozen Elegy

Through the lens of a camera, cemeteries in the snow reveal a frozen elegy, where silence and solitude merge to create a visual ode to the eternal cycle of existence. The unpredictability of nature challenges me to create images that capture the ephemeral beauty of the moment.

A snow-covered landscape transforms cemeteries into a surreal and hauntingly beautiful realm. The soft white blanket conceals the intricate details of tombstones, creating a minimalist aesthetic that accentuates the stark contrasts between calm and suffering, between life and death.

There is something very intimate about being in a snow-covered cemetery by yourself. Leaving one’s footsteps in silence serves as a reminder of the shared human experience of mourning, remembrance, and the fact that life does, in fact, go on.

When I wrote the statement above, I was thinking more about the experience of making the photographs, and I hadn’t thought about the monuments, the statues, the tombstones themselves. The mom’s comments drew me back to the stones. 

At the time of the exhibit, I was finishing up a new book I’m writing called, “Abandoned Cemeteries of Philadelphia and its Environs,” and Stott’s comments kept coming back to me as I wrote about one abandoned cemetery after another. Her paper addresses the power that a gravemarker has over us. A stone is just a stone until a name and date are carved into it. Then it begins to take on an identity. When it is placed on a grave, it simply marks the spot where that person’s bones are buried. A century later, the bones are dust and the coffin probably disintegrated. At that point, when we look out over a cemetery filled with hundred-year-old gravestones, we see them as person substitutes. We don’t think of them all as simply marking the graves where the people are buried.

So to look back at a face in the snow and breathe life into it is not an unusual reaction. Many people have had some visceral response to a gravestone, a statue, a monument. Sometimes the encounter elicits an emotion that we have no name for. Stott does a wonderful job explaining why we react to gravemarkers the way we do.

“One way people demonstrate their humanity to themselves is through grave marking, an activity no other living being seems compelled to do.” – Annette Stott

The fact that the curator of the Box Spring Gallery, Gaby Heit, came up with the title “Ghosts,” for the exhibit was fortuitous. It made me think that the people buried beneath these stones are now nothing more than ghosts – the stone is all that is left. As there are probably no people still alive who even remember the deceased whose graves these stones mark, the stones may be the only tangible evidence left that these people even existed. They are truly, as Stott calls them, “person substitutes.” And because of that we react to them differently than we would to an unmarked stone found on a mountainside, for example.

Stott calls this “agency.” Art objects like grave markers have agency in that they are representative of the deceased, yes, but they can act as a surrogate, an “agent” for the deceased. The statue in the top photo, the denizen of some particular cemetery, is also bonded to that particular cemetery. All things equal, it will always be there, and only there. A sobering, if not chilling remark Stott makes is that:

“Gravestones designate a border between life and death, body and spirit, by marking the place on earth where the body is hidden from sight permanently.” – Annette Stott

So perhaps that is one reason we get a funny feeling when we look at a tombstone or monument in a cemetery - it brings to mind our own mortality. We see that border between life and death - our life, and eventually, our death. 

REFERENCES

1. Stott, A “Personhood and Agency: A Theoretical Approach to Gravemarkers in Mainstream American Cemeteries,” Association for Gravestone Studies, Markers Vol. XXXV, Sterling, 2019