Death

 My best friend of 57 years mentioned a week ago on the phone that he increasingly thinks about death and dying.  We are both now 73 years old.  More and more in the news we read about our cultural icons dead or dying, some of whom are either around our age or younger. 

With the death of Jerry Lee Lewis, nearly all of the most famous music icons from the 1950's are gone (Tony Bennett is one of the lone survivors).  Nearly all of the well-known bands from the 1960's, groups we knew and loved whose singles and albums we regularly bought, have lost more than one member (the Beatles, the Stones, Jefferson Airplane), sometimes only one member survives (Michelle Phillips of the Mamas & Papas).  The TV shows we watched then seem to have been even more devastated of cast members as the years roll by. 

In the 1970's, I read Raymond Moody's LIFE AFTER LIFE and a few books by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, the death and dying guru.  Regardless of cultural or national background, the experiences of those who have clinically "died" but came back seem strikingly similar.  Their consciousness (or soul, if you prefer) leaves their bodies.  If hospitalized, they are often able to see and hear, and later accurately describe what they experienced, from those who are not even in their hospital rooms.  In varying combinations, they are thrust through a tunnel and appear on the other side where friends and relatives who have gone before are there to greet them.  They quickly meet a "being of light" who reviews with them the course of their lives, though without judgment.  They are often made to realize that acquiring knowledge is a significant aspect to life on Earth.  (The ancient Greeks believed that sin was a lack of knowledge.)  After they return, they never fear death again because the experience was altogether quite pleasant.

The actor from HAROLD & MAUDE, Bud Cort, told a story about a painful car accident he endured.  He was told by a voice on the other side that he could return but it would be painful.  He did come back, and his injuries were exceedingly painful. 

My own mother, during her second open heart surgery, experienced an extreme reaction to the anesthesia and could have died had the anesthesiologist not recognized her reactions and countered the crisis.  She later told me that she felt she had died but there was nothing but blackness on the other side.  Nobody was there to greet her.

I have been put under anesthesia three times in my life:  when I had my tonsils out at 40, when I had double hernia surgery, and a couple of weeks ago when I had prostate surgery.  I only remember slowly coming to after the anesthesia wore off.  Never was I ever aware of being conscious of what I was enduring.  I was totally out.  Had I died during any of these three surgeries, would I have even been aware of the transition, or would I have simply ceased to think or come out of the surgery?

Does the electrical activity in our brains simply cease and that is all there is of us?  Is death, as A.E. Housman describes in one of his poems, "Night and no moon and no star upon the night"?  I do not know for sure.

I have thought of the W.S. Merwin poem, FOR THE ANNIVERSARY OF MY DEATH, when he ruminates, "Every year without knowing it I have passed the day/when the last fires will wave to me".  Each of us will, someday, die upon a single day of the year.  Most of us know the anniversary of our birth; but we have no idea, generally, what day will represent the day we die.  Whether we silently slip away or make a huge splash as we depart, that day will come and go.       

I have always thought that death was like high school dodgeball in gym class.  If the day in Southern California at South Gate High School was persistently rainy, the P.E. classes during each hour would gather in the gymnasium instead of going out of doors.  The ball would be tossed to one side or the other, to be forcefully hurled at members of the opposing team, picking them off one by one.  Our good friend Richard Meyers would always just stand there and allow himself to be taken out of the game as quickly as possible.  He could then contemptuously sit on the sidelines and watch the rest of us scurry from side to side as a disorganized mob, to avoid being taken out for as long as possible.  Everyone but the one winner on one side would eventually be eliminated, and the ball usually stung when it struck any part of your body because our most aggressive classmates were strong and did not hesitate to hurl the ball forcefully.

As this point in the history of our nation, all of the survivors of the Civil War are gone.  The Spanish-American War likewise.  So, too, those of the Titanic disaster.  And then WWI.  Soon enough, no survivor of WWII will exist on this plane.  So many of us Baby Boomers are making our way toward the exits.  By 2040 or 2050, we, too, will likely have departed.  Those who opposed integration or burned their Beatles albums when told to by right-wing media or fled to Canada to escape military service. 

So, Mike has a right to think about death these days. 

Once when we were on the phone back in the very early 1970's, just before Nixon's draft lottery came into being and he was far higher than I (he was 315 and I was 119), he contemplated avoiding military service.  Discussing our impending college graduation when we would finally be vulnerable to the draft, he coolly explained, "A lot can happen in a few months.  I could lose a limb.  I could die in a car wreck.  I'm optimistic."  I have never laughed so hard or for so long at such an unexpected observation.