Death of Nothing

Void in the Rust Belt

In pre-modern societies, the ends of life are given at the beginning of life: people do things in their generation so that the same things will continue to be done in the next generation. The idea is to make the world go not forward, only around. In modern societies, the ends of life are not given at the beginning of life; they are thought to be created or discovered. The reproduction of the customs and practices of the group is no longer the chief purpose of existence; the idea is not to repeat, but to change, to move the world forward. Meaning is no longer immanent in the practices of ordinary life, since those practices are understood by everyone to be contingent and time-bound. This is why death, in modern societies, is the great taboo, an absurdity, the worst thing one can imagine”

– Louis Menand, Introduction to Edmund Wilson’s, To the Finland Station (1940)

In August, a funeral director in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, I’ll call him Robert, one of three funeral directors who spoke on condition of anonymity, arranged seventeen memorial cards on his desk, all overdose deaths, all men between twenty-four and forty-three, moving them like tarot cards, searching for patterns in the names: Tyler, Brandon, Josh, another Tyler, Michael, three Davids, as if the configuration might reveal why these particular men, born between 1981 and 1999, the gap generation that inherited nostalgia for mill jobs they never worked, raised on their fathers’ stories of $28-hour wages while they graduated into Amazon warehouses paying $15, died within thirty days of each other. “Used to be,” he said, still moving the cards, “people died of things. Now they’re dying of nothing.”

Looking at those seventeen cards, the funeral director’s fingers moving them into patterns: By age, by neighborhood, by the particular poison that killed them, and in that gesture was the whole architecture of what had collapsed. These men’s fathers had known exactly what their sons’ lives would be from the moment they were born: Mill work, union wages, a house on the hill. The same life repeating, each repetition confirming the worth of the one before. Pre-modern societies gave the ends of life at the beginning: People did things so the same things would continue, meaning was immanent in the customs inherited from the past. The premodern “loop” is where tradition itself was the point.

But watch the funeral director’s hands now, trying to find a pattern in these seventeen deaths, and you see what happens when the loop breaks. Not exactly chaos. Something worse: Men still waking at shift-change time for jobs that vanished decades ago, their bodies keeping faith with a schedule that no longer keeps faith with them. As Bruce Springsteen wrote, “Foreman says, these jobs are gone, boys. And they ain’t coming back.”

The nothing Robert described operates with a precision that CDC data, with 69 overdose deaths in Beaver County in 2022, 71% involving fentanyl, cannot quite capture. Almost half of overdoses clustering in the first three days of each month when disability checks clear at midnight, dealers texting at 11:47 p.m. knowing deposits hit at 12:01 a.m., and by noon the coroner has made his first pickup, a sequence so reliable that emergency services directors staff according to the calendar, doubling crews the first week, what one paramedic I talked to called “harvest time.” Research from British Columbia documented the same pattern: A 40% increase in overdose deaths during social assistance payment weeks. The mathematics of managed death became so precise that dealers time their supply chains to government disbursement schedules.

Tony Costanza’s son, Mike, makes coffee at exactly 4:52 a.m., thirty years after Tony died, the same time Tony made it every morning for twenty-three years at the mill. The body keeps time even when time has lost its purpose, cells keeping appointments with ghosts from the past. Mike doesn’t decide to wake at this hour; his muscles remember what his mind forgets, the rhythm of labor outlasting the labor itself.

Outside the empty Aliquippa Works site, where the Jones & Laughlin Steel Company plant lived along the Ohio River in Beaver County, men drift through the Dollar General parking lot at 2 p.m. on weekdays, their movement neither purposeful nor random: The peculiar suspended animation of those who have nowhere to go but can’t stop moving. The movement has the quality of waiting, though no one’s coming and nothing’s about to happen.

Nihilism arrives here with its two-fold problem: Disorientation when highest values lose their grounding, and despair when those values prove unrealizable. The God that died here was Jones & Laughlin Steel - the mill whistle that organized time, the union that organized solidarity, the certainty of purpose. What followed wasn’t the hedonistic numbness of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “last men” but something more specific: Men deprived of resistance.

The will to power requires resistance to overcome, a self-perpetuating desire that needs obstacles to define itself against. But watch these men in the parking lot and you understand they face no resistance, only absence - no bosses to resist, no production quotas to exceed, no solidarity to build, just the smooth frictionless slide from disability check to dealer and finally, to death. Without resistance to overcome, they’re left with only willing nothingness rather than not willing at all, their overdoses the logical endpoint of lives stripped of any meaningful opposition.

The phenomenology of heroin follows a dark kenotic tradition of the radical mystical Christian tradition, stretching from Paul to Measiter Eckhart to Simone Weil. In Philippians, Paul writes of Christ who “emptied himself (ekenōsen heauton), a voluntary divine self-limitation to enter human suffering. Eckhart transformed this into an existential imperative, urging followers to achieve what he called “poverty, annihilation, humility, nudity, barrenness,” to “abandon the possessive soul that wills and knows in favour of an empty soul,” seeking life “without a why,” Weil pushed further, describing how “the soul empties itself [se vide] of all its own contents,” accepting affliction so overwhelming it becomes an exile from meaning itself and a vassal for the divine.

The opioid offers this same vocabulary of mystical emptying but inverted. “The getting ‘high’ part goes away pretty quickly,” a 23-year-old male from Monaca, PA described to me, “Giving way to just getting relief... Once you are in the spider web, relief is the best one can hope for.” Another finding described how “the experience of heroin addiction entails focusing on the present with a diminished ability to think of one’s past or future.” The same temporal collapse the mystics sought. Users report becoming “just a shell of a person,” experiencing what researchers call “ego dissolution” identical to mystical states: “the dissolution of the sense of self and the loss of boundaries between self and world.”

Tommy, revived seven times, describes watching “someone else wake up in my body,” experiencing what Eckhart sought when he urged believers to become “inhabited by God” after abandoning subjective selfhood. Except here the emptiness opens onto nothing. Where Paul’s kenosis promised redemption through voluntary suffering, where Eckhart’s “letting-go-ness” revealed immanent divinity, where Weil’s affliction could become attention to the other, these men find only chemical slavery: Taking “the form of a slave” as Paul wrote, but enslaved to absence itself. The heroin becomes what a 28-year-old male from Aliquippa, PA described to me as, “The thing I had been searching for.” Except what he’s searching for is the end of searching, consciousness using its last power to overcome its own resistance to oblivion, a kenosis that empties into void.

Now we progress from will to void into another existential bear trap: time as a flat circle. Nietzsche wrote of eternal recurrence: Time as an infinite loop where the same events continue to occur in the same way, over and over again. He posited the question of whether you would want to relive the same negative experiences repeatedly as a test to see if you loved your fate (amor fati). Here in Beaver County, time flattens into its own malignant circle, except these men lack the tragic grandeur of eternal return. They’re trapped in circles within circles, each smaller and tighter than the last.

Without resistance to overcome, the essential element of will to power, they cannot break their circles. Zarathustra himself feared eternal return, speaking always more softly, afraid of his own thoughts. These men live that fear, condemned to repetition without transcendence, proving that time’s flatness isn’t metaphysical but economic. When the future offers nothing different from the present, when progress becomes impossible, time loses its vertical dimension and collapses into a plane where nothing changes except the names on memorial cards: Tyler replacing Brandon replacing Josh replacing another Tyler, the circle continuing, seventeen this month, seventeen next month, regular as clockwork, flat as the abandoned mill floor where nothing is manufactured anymore except death on schedule.

The seventy-two-month circle repeats with mechanical precision: month zero the pink slip arrives, month six unemployment expires, month eight the deliberate injury, one former steelworker now living in Elk County told me guys would hurt their backs on purpose, better than nothing coming in, month twelve the first opioid prescription, month thirty-six disability approval after standard denials, $943 monthly that maintains existence without enabling life, month forty-eight the switch to street drugs when prescriptions tighten, month seventy-two the fatal overdose. Each predominantly white man traces this exact arc, as if following grooves worn into time itself.

Inside this larger circle spin smaller ones. The monthly cycle: Disability checks clear at midnight, dealers text at 12:01, overdoses arrive by noon, funerals scheduled by week’s end. The daily repetition: Tony Costanza’s son wakes at 4:52 a.m., thirty years after Tony’s death, making coffee at the exact time his father made it for the mill that no longer exists, then driving to Dollar General, sitting in the parking lot with engine running, returning home having gone nowhere. The generational circle inverts itself: Where fathers once passed mill jobs to sons, each generation repeating to preserve meaning, now fathers pass nothing to sons except nostalgia for wages that bought houses, and disability application strategies that barely buy food.

Sarah, one of three social workers I interviewed, recognizes this arithmetic: “Nobody says it outright, but there’s this assumption that these men chose this, that they're culpable in their own destruction. But what was the alternative? They were born into an economy that didn’t want them, given pills by doctors, then criminalized for dependence.”

Tommy, one of the four men I interviewed who survived multiple overdoses, forty-three from New Kensington PA, revived seven times, sits in his efficiency apartment near the Dollar General: “First time they brought me back, I was grateful, crying, promising to change, second time I was angry, third time I didn’t feel anything, like watching someone else wake up in my body, and after that, you stop believing you’re really back, you’re waiting for the one that sticks,” showing arms with collapsed veins, scars tracking toward his neck where paramedics found new insertion sites.

Christine Lerussi, a paramedic in East Liverpool, describes the normalization: “Do you know how many houses we go into where kids are sitting on the couch watching us work on their parent, not crying, not scared, just watching like it’s TV?”

Patrick, a composite of two paramedics who also work in funeral services, works both sides: “Tuesday I’m hitting someone with Narcan, watching them gasp back angry that I’ve interrupted their high, Friday I’m meeting with their mother to pick out a casket… We have payment plans now, $200 down, $50 a month. We’re happy if we get 20 payments before they die.”

The Dollar Store Economy is changing the landscape. At 3:14 p.m. on a Tuesday indistinguishable from any Tuesday since the mills closed, three men sit in separate trucks outside Dollar General, engines running at $3.89 per gallon. Jerry, one of three men I talked to living on disability, forty-one, back injured at Amazon, arrives at 2:30 most afternoons: “It’s something to do, I like the vibration in my truck.” Dollar stores now constitute 11% of all American retail, targeting what the industry calls “under-served communities” but what residents experience as extraction infrastructure, selling products that cost more per unit than supermarkets that no longer exist.

Sarah, another social worker, explains the mathematics: “We get funding to keep them alive, not give them life—$147 for Narcan, $3,200 for emergency response, $8,500 for inpatient treatment with a 9% success rate, but $0 for job training, $0 for anything else.”

Bill Harris found these words on an eighteen-year-old’s palm: “A slave to addiction”: “I think he knew, writing those words, that this was it, that knowing you’re enslaved doesn’t free you.” Father Michael, one of two priests I interviewed, conducts three funerals for every baptism: “We’ve become not a place of worship but a place of waiting, waiting for the next overdose, the next funeral, the next mother collapsing in the pew.”

Standing in Robert’s office watching memorial cards accumulate: twenty, twenty-three, twenty-six by month’s end, each arriving as a text notification, I noticed how he’d arranged them chronologically, documenting not individual events but ongoing catastrophe, like debris from one continuous disaster that started with Black Monday and continues through every seventy-two-month pipeline.

Robert’s fingers move the cards with the careful attention that phenomenological psychologists describe as a way to bear witness to systematic violence, through specific gestures, through the handling of objects that carry unbearable weight. Sitting in that funeral home, watching him arrange and rearrange the dead, I understood we’re witnessing industrial infrastructure repurposed. The same systems that once processed ore into steel now process people into mortality statistics, the same efficiency, the same mechanical precision, only the raw material has changed.

“I don’t know,” Robert says, spreading twenty cards like a losing hand, “Cancer, heart attack, even murder made sense, but this is different, they’re dying of nothing”

He keeps the cards through November, adding more until they cover his desk like leaves from a tree that fruits death, still arranging them, searching for patterns in names that could belong to anyone who graduated from Aliquippa High between 1995 and 2015, ended up here regardless, processed through the same pipeline, their deaths arriving with bureaucratic punctuality, their funerals attended by fewer mourners each passing month, as if grief itself were a depleting resource, which in Beaver County, population 166,993 and falling, it is.

Note: Some names and identifying details have been changed. Multiple sources requested anonymity to speak frankly about addiction, death, and economic collapse in their communities.

Brian Nuckols is a journalist at Hesitation Media and contributor at the Lever. Founder of the school of empathetic journalism.