An Inconvenient Truth

Still fit, feisty, and staunchly independent at eighty-seven, my mother concedes only two infirmities to the march of time: a measured, slightly unsteady gait and recurring lapses in her short-term memory -- although during a recent psychological test at which I was present to bear witness, I fared no better than she when asked to regurgitate three objects a mere five minutes after they were fed to us by the examiner: "Table, lamp, and, I'm sorry, but I don't remember the third (and I'm in the furniture business)."

Occasionally, however, she will startle and amuse me by extracting some priceless, heretofore unknown nugget from her distant past and flashing it before me in all its revelatory brilliance. Last week, for example, when the topic of miscarriage came up, she innocently gave notice that, during her pregnancy with me, "spotting," as she called it, dispatched her to bed for an extended period of rest, lest my fetus suffer such a fate -- although many who know me well might consider the term an apt characterization of my subsequent arrival and career.

Seriously, though, supposing the worst had ensued, how does one confront the curious concept of his non-birth? To state the obvious, every person's life is unique to him and him alone, and to think that I might have been incarnated in some other form (such as either of my younger siblings) is to engage in mind-numbing -- and frightening -- sophistry.

Even to contemplate some sense of emptiness, of having been deprived of a whole lifetime of experiences, is a fallacious exercise in science fiction, as absurd as an eighteenth-century George Washington on horseback or my loquacious father lamenting the premature deaths that would forever preclude the former's enjoyment of air travel or the latter's of a portable phone. Of course, the analogy is imperfect; while dreamers and visionaries might conjure up some future marvels (which indeed often materialize into the commonplace), a non-being imagines -- and regrets -- nothing.

The reality of one's singular existence hanging by a thread as tenuous as a routine act of conception or an accidental organ malfunction has provocative implications, should he be inclined to pursue them.

I remember reading excerpts from a eulogy delivered at the funeral of some celebrity or dignitary, perhaps Senator Ted Kennedy, during which the minister sermonized that "death is a mystery," an assertion which struck me as irrefutable yet myopic.

Every creature born or hatched on earth is destined for extinction after its brief eruption on a continuum that stretches infinitely backward and forward, a scenario for which the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins suggests the metaphor of a "laser-thin spotlight moving inexorably along the immense ruler of time. Everything that the beam has passed is lost in the darkness of the past; everything ahead of it is hidden in the darkness of the yet unborn. Only what is lit . . . lives." (Yalom, p. 197)

The mystery here is not the void that lies outside the parameters of the spotlight, which in its limitlessness and omnipresence seems the natural order of the universe, but rather the illumination itself -- the emergence of human life fifty thousand years ago on one level; on another, the birth of my first grandchild a few weeks hence, a self-aware individual whose eighty-plus span of years will encompass all the wonders of joy and sadness, love and loss, success and failure, and hope and despair.

While not my intention, reflections on such matters invariably lure one into a maze of religious controversy. If the true believer appreciates life as a blessing from his Creator, and thus no mystery, the skeptic -- or rationalist -- like me regards it as a fortuitous confluence of biological impulses and chemical elements 4.6 billion years after myriad specks of cosmic dust coalesced into a planet -- but still inexplicable. If the former anticipates death as an eternally mysterious heaven or hell, the latter recognizes it as final in its nothingness.

If I had ever pondered intimations of immortality, they expired twenty-four years ago with the quiet suddenness of a candle being extinguished when I was summoned to my father's deathbed in the house where I now reside. Stricken with lung cancer, he had managed to sustain his normal, active, gregarious schedule for about two years until breathing difficulties, a throat tumor, and a steady deterioration of his strength and bodily functions drove him into seclusion for the last six months of his life.

Arriving moments after he succumbed peacefully to pneumonia, gazing with helpless sadness as his pajama-clad remains -- from which the spark that had invigorated them for sixty-eight years had vanished forever -- were wheeled on a stretcher through the hallways, I was shaken by the duality of an inconvenient truth. Although I was forty years young and in excellent health, my invincibility was a fantasy, and I was fated to follow in this last of my father's footsteps as I had in so many others. And, with all due respect to those whose faith is anchored in bedrock, any lingering or subsequent consciousness for the inert form lying before me seemed outside the realm of possibility.

Unless it hits close to home, involving a family member or dear friend, death, particularly our own, is not something we think about often. Why would we, since it's not a pleasant prospect? Aside from reminding us of our own mortality -- but only for an instant, like the prick of a needle, after which we revert to a blissful inattention -- the death of another evokes a peculiar range of emotions.

The most natural and transparent of these is sympathy for his survivors, who will no longer delight in his presence or be animated by their mutual love. More problematic is an empathetic sense of loss, since, while we mourn a deceased for whom there is no future, however uncomfortable or pleasurable it might have been, a life snuffed out prematurely is obviously more poignant than the demise which relieves the suffering of an aged or critically ill person. And finally, can any among the living, no matter how absolute his grief, wholly stifle the somber elation of knowing his own span of time has not yet run its course?

I am one for whom our contemporary culture's sanitation of death is an essential subterfuge, although there is a fine line between hygiene and denial. I've been reading about war lately, and, putting aside a congenital reluctance to test my physical courage, I can't imagine facing the carnage of battle or even dealing with the inevitable as a physician, nurse, or mortician. While I can devour murder mysteries -- and their gruesome renderings of gunshot wounds, strangulations, and postmortem dissections -- like tortilla chips, the thought of a real live dead body makes my stomach churn -- even one all decked out in his finest suit lying in a coffin.

Doesn't this viewing enhance the illusion that he's merely resting, or perhaps retired to a better place?

The danger of banishing death to hospital corridors and retirement homes is that it shelters us from the baneful reality we are increasingly reluctant to accept. While this is not the place to examine the moral and economic consequences of prolonged end-of-life care -- mainly because I lack the expertise to do so -- anecdotal evidence suggests that well-intentioned family members -- and providers -- will subject terminally ill patients to painful, complex, unproven, and costly treatments when there is no hope of cure.

It's easy for a disinterested observer to be judgmental. I wonder, however, if I would have permitted a surgeon to remove my father's obstructive throat tumor and replace it with the tracheotomy he despised if I had known the procedure would extend his life only two months.

If my father knew he was dying, and was calmly resigned to it -- after all, what other choice did he have -- having been blessed with good health for sixty-four years, I have only apprehended death as an accident. For years I harbored an irrational fear of flying, envisioning at the onset of minor turbulence a vicious wind shear or catastrophic mechanical failure upending the plane and sending me, after a terrifying thirty-second free fall, to oblivion.

I can recall half a dozen near misses, while running or riding in an automobile, in which sheer luck, it seemed, enabled me to avoid being struck while blindly trudging through an intersection or escape by inches a fatal collision when the driver, either myself or a friend, wasn't paying attention or lost control of the vehicle.

I've had instantaneous death-wishes, imagining myself stepping in front of an oncoming truck, for no reason whatsoever, and once, years ago, when my self-esteem -- never very sturdy back in those days -- had been shattered by a failed romance, I even contemplated suicide. Fortunately, I wasn't able to muster the fortitude to stop my car on the Rivermont Bridge, clamber atop its concrete barrier, and fling myself into the creek bed below.

Now, however, with my life in order, I'm aiming to match the longevity of Lynchburg's most illustrious citizen, former president of Randolph-Macon Woman's College, bank officer, and Community Trust executive, at whose century birthday fundraising celebration I recently had the honor of contributing a dose of topical humor, including the top ten reasons why I want to live to one hundred.

In spite of my mother's legacy, I expect the odds are against me. While death is a certainty, no one knows when the Grim Reaper will come calling. And as one grows older, and he comprehends that the path before him "no longer ascends but slopes downward toward decline and diminishment," concerns about death -- whether in indirect, explicit, or acute forms -- are never far from mind. (Yalom, p. 5)

In his magisterial opus, Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death, Psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom tackles the difficult subject with elegance, sensitivity, and insight.

Yalom's philosophical worldview -- which I find very appealing -- is existential; that is, it is grounded in mankind's unique capacity to reflect on the enigma of existence. It "embraces rationality, eschews supernatural beliefs, and posits that life has arisen from random events." Though humans crave some manner of immortality, they are "finite creatures . . . thrown alone into existence without a predestined" course of experience, each of whom must decide how complete, happy, ethical, and meaningful his journey will be. (Yalom, pp. 200, 202)

Such a vision, says Yalom to a rabbi training to be a therapist but conflicted by his religious background, is incompatible with the worship of an omniscient, omnipresent personal God, watching, protecting, and guiding his servants. Challenged by the rabbi to explain how he can live without a "belief in something greater than himself" to provide him "with meaning, wisdom, morality, and divine comfort," Yalom replies that those commodities are not dependent on a belief in God, and that he doesn't need religion to supply him a moral compass. (Yalom, pp. 192-194)

Yalom references the Athenian thinker Epicurus (341 B.C.E - 270 B.C.E) as the proto-existential psychotherapist. Epicurus believed that the root cause of human misery is the fear of death. While in most individuals the phobia is subconscious, its pervasiveness may be inferred from its various disguised manifestations, such as excessive religiosity, overzealous accumulation of wealth, and ruthless lust for power, all of which offer illusions of perpetuity. (Yalom, pp. 2,78)

To alleviate man's anxiety about death, Epicurus constructed a series of arguments that have been analyzed and debated for over two thousand years.

First, Epicurus taught that the soul is mortal and perishes with the body. He stood diametrically in oppostion to his one-hundred-year predecessor, Socrates, whose expectation that his soul would outlast his physical dissolution and join an eternal community of like-minded truth seekers foreshadowed and influenced Christian theology. In fact, Epicurus vehemently condemned the priests and prophets who augmented their authority by threatening heretics with a harrowing post-existence. He insisted that, with the expiration of body and soul, there is no consciousness, and therefore no reason to regret what has been lost or fear the gods or an afterlife. (Yalom, pp. 79-80)

"Epicurus posits that death is nothing to us, because the soul is mortal and is dispersed at death. What is dispersed does not perceive, and anything not perceived is nothing to us. In other words: where I am, death is not; where death is, I am not." We won't know when death happens nor that we are dead, because it and life can never co-exist. Therefore, what is there to fear? (Yalom, pp. 80-81)

Epicurus's third argument -- and most convincing to me -- "holds that our state of nonbeing after death is the same state we were in before our birth." In the opening lines of his autobiography, Speak, Memory, the great Russian novelist, Vladimir Nabokov, captures the essence of this symmetry, as he writes: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for." (Yalom, pp. 81-82)

Is it not logical for one to conclude that after death he returns to his pre-birth nothingness, rather than be distracted, even tormented, by the "incongruous and convoluted" notion of an unpredictable afterlife? (Yalom, p. 82)

Our sense of an ending, our comprehension of finality, should lead, says Yalom, not to despair, but to hope. Because, as great thinkers down through the ages have reminded us, while the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death saves us. (Yalom, p. 33)

"Cicero said that 'to philosophize is to prepare for death.' St. Augustine wrote, 'it is only in the face of death that a man's self is born,' Many medieval monks kept human skulls in their cells to focus their thoughts on mortality and its lessons for the conduct of life. Montaigne suggested that a writer's studio should have a good view of a cemetery in order to sharpen his thinking." (Yalom, pp. 32-33)

In Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, a visit to Ebenezer Scrooge from the Ghost of the Future, and visions of his neglected corpse, strangers pawning his possessions, and acquaintenances unmoved by his death transform him from an isolated curmudgeon into an amiable benefactor. In Leo Tolstoy's epic War and Peace, a last-minute reprieve from a firing squad prompts Pierre to mend his sensual ways and embark on a new course with zest and purpose. (Yalom, pp. 31-32)

Another signature example of such renewal is the protagonist of Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a self-absorbed, arrogant bureaucrat suffering from a fatal abdominal illness. As his condition worsens, he realizes his preoccupation with prestige, appearance, and money has been the mechanism for him to deny his mortality, and he berates his sympathizers for their hypocrisy in offering false promises of recovery. Then, in a moment of great clarity, following a remarkable internal conversation, he grasps that he is dying badly because he has lived badly, that "in shielding himself from death, he has shielded himself from life as well." (Yalom, p. 35)

Even as his last breath approaches, Ivan Ilyich finds it is not too late for redemption. He grows aware that not only he but all things must die. For the first time, "he feels a tenderness for others: for his young son kissing his hand; for the servant boy who nurses him in a natural, loving manner; and even . . . for his young wife. He feels pity for them, for the pain he has inflicted, and ultimately dies not in agony but in the joy of intense compassion." (Yalom, pp. 35-36)

The catalyst for my own awakening experience was the sight of my father's dead body -- a silent alarm signaling that the mysteries of life, good health, and an inquiring mind are too precious to squander, even if their proper exercise might entail stretching my comfort zone and shouldering some unwanted responsibilities, which had been all too easy for me to defer or foist upon others. The burdens proved to be more rewarding than onerous, and fostered my maturity as a competent manager, empathetic mentor, involved citizen, and intermittent extrovert.

Yalom merely confirmed what I already knew when he wrote: "a confrontation with death arouses anxiety but also has the potential of vastly enriching life." (Yalom, p. 75)

APPENDIX

Here are the top ten reasons why I want to live to one hundred: I want to see the Arabs and Jews stop shooting at one another; I want to get a dividend from my investment in Bluffwalk; I want to drive up Rivermont Avenue without ruining my car chassis; I want to drive two ways on Fifth Street; I want to see a new Heritage High School; I want to attend a show at the restored Academy of Music Theater; I want to see Virginia beat Virginia Tech in a football game; I want to see the Democrats win a local election; I want to see the Republicans win a national election.

And the number one reason I want to live to one hundred is, well, use your imagination.

REFERENCE

Yalom, Irvin D. Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008.