All the Ways It Ends: Steve Cutts on the Statistics of Dying

Some nights I lie there running through the scenarios. Bus. Train. Cancer. Some variant of choking that involves pizza. A fall down stairs that starts mundane and ends permanent. What gets me isn’t the dying itself—it’s the arbitrariness of the morning it happens on. Someone wakes up, showers, makes breakfast, and then somewhere between the kitchen and wherever they were going, the sequence stops. For no reason that maps onto who they were or what they deserved.

How does mine end? A stray bullet from someone I’ve never met? An ex-girlfriend with a specific grievance and something sharp? The slow accumulation of something internal and invisible that I’ve been ignoring for years? I have run through enough versions of this to know it doesn’t resolve into anything useful—but I keep running through them anyway, usually around three in the morning when sleep has made other plans.

The animator Steve Cutts made a short film mapping the most probable causes of death by country—which sounds clinical but lands, in his hands, as something wry and almost tender. His style is bright and cartoon-unserious in the way the best dark humor is unserious, which makes the actual data go down easier than it should. It doesn’t answer any of my three-in-the-morning questions. But one thing in it lands regardless: everyone dies. Every single person currently showering and making breakfast and heading out the door. Maybe soon, maybe not. The exit is the same for all of us—which is either the most comforting or the most terrifying fact available, depending entirely on the night.