I have heard of brave people. I have seen pretend brave people on TV. I know for a fact that they exist because they have gone to the moon, gone into underground bunkers of the enemy, floated thousands of feet below the ocean in submarines, and climbed El Capitan without ropes. Brave people all, and I am not one of them.
Oh, I have had my moments; I have stared down muggers with knives and Indians with spears and flown in sputtering airplanes over trackless jungle, all without soiling my pants, but I know me all too well. Sometimes, as with that Italian captain of the infamously grounded cruise ship, things get “too a-scary!” Sometimes, and inevitably, we non-brave people blow it bad and have to hand in our Dirty Harry cards under an umbrella of shame.
But there are other times that almost all of us share when we become unafraid of death itself. This happens when we are suffering from certain kinds of long-term pain or illness. In his beautiful but soul-searing book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl tell us of how people in Nazi death camps would “go to the wire,” that is, walk into the electrified fences used to keep people in. These people were not looked upon as brave by the others, others who wanted desperately to live and needed community support, but what else could we call them if they had lost the fear of death? More common, there are those among us today who are in constant pain, either physically or mentally, and come to welcome death. Again, is this not brave? If someone is dangling from a line on a cliff and has no fear of death, we call him brave, so why not those who are hanging by their nerve cells?
Finally, and more common still, are those who are suffering from certain illnesses, and it is to this that I want to recall my own personal experience.
I was seventeen and in the best shape of my life, immortal in my own view of things, when the flu struck. It was in the late spring and, as far as I can recall, there was no concern for any particular bug going around. No one else in my family got it either, but I sure as hell did. It came on as quickly as a shot of bourbon and sent me into intense sweats with a 105 degree fever. I lay on the couch while everyone else sat around watching TV or getting snacks, almost as if I didn’t exist. I was young and healthy overall and I’m sure they saw my illness as a simple passing bug, but it wasn’t a small thing to me. My mind seemed to float on the kind of wavy haze one sees coming off of hot highways, bringing me nearer to a conscious form of non-existence than I had ever experienced. That is, I was there, but not there. More importantly, I did not care. I did not care that I barely existed and, over several hours of this, started to believe that my existence was to come to an end. Good. I welcomed death then, not as a relief for a suffering I was barely aware of, but because of its soft allure. It was a comfort rather than a horror, a final end to a resistance I had never understood had been there in my life all along. I saw that life was indeed a struggle, an endless force exerted, and I was glad to let it go, not out of sorrow or self-pity, but out of shear relief. The life force seemed exhausted and I was just fine with that.
It was literally a twenty-four hour flu, and by the next morning I was hungry and washed out but ready to take on the world again. If I had known all the hassles that were in store for me, mostly because of my own poor decisions, maybe I wouldn’t have felt such renewed energy, but that is the power of youth. “Come on, world, give me your best shot!” says life – until, that is, we have another Italian cruise ship moment.
Or until we have another intense illness. Then we just might find, as most of us have, that, although dying might be bad, death is not. In fact, as the man on the cliff could tell you, even dying if often quick and painless. In such cases, then, why do we fear?
I have a theory. Dying might be very painful and bad, but it is not that which we fear so much, but rather the death that might come of it. We can tell this by the number of people who are willing to go through hell with cancer treatments and transplants and any other of the many startling ways doctors nowadays use to (try to) stave off death. The cure, it seems, is often worse than the disease, but most of us would and will cling to the cure anyway out of fear. I include myself, for as stated, I am not one of the brave few. But still we have to wonder why. Death itself is not only inevitable, but we are shown now and then in our lives that it brings relief from the never-ending stress of life. It is peace. We do not know what happens to consciousness after death, but we also learn that losing our present state of consciousness is not bad, either, and in fact, is necessary to gain that peace. Someday we are going to lose it; so when that time comes, we should let go of the rope. In the end, we all, or at least most of us, do just that, finding that we have courage after all and can learn to trust in the universe rather than in ourselves – at last. What a relief.
Ah, but for the Era of Corona! Our inherited fear of plague has been aroused, a fear that is justly founded in the periods of time when half of us would die from horrible deaths in a few years’ time. With the old Black Death, massive dark-purple pustules would form on the faces of loved ones, blood would poor from every orifice, and our sparky children or spouse would become groaning, dying corpses that would add to the pile of stinking dead in the streets. Could anything be more horrifying? We do not have that now, to be sure. Perhaps one in three thousand will die from this, with nearly no chance of death for those under fifty, and the symptoms are similar to flues and pneumonia, neither of these presenting a horror to the eyes. Still, the source of fear is the same, and it is here that we come to the nut of my theory: we fear death not for how it is, but for how it looks to us, the healthy, both externally and internally in our imaginations.
That is how it usually is, isn’t it? We fear falling from the cliff because we have seen (at least on TV) what our bodies would look like after we hit. We imagine ourselves shattered like that and are horrified, forgetting to acknowledge that we will not feel the hit for more than a brief instant, and will never see our broken bodies, at least not with mortal eyes. We would drift painlessly for a few seconds in the air and then be dead. It is different with disease-related deaths, as we do have times of great pain and panic when our horror at the prospects of death are aroused, but again, we will ultimately arrive at that moment when dying makes sense and becomes the best thing in the world. Peace and freedom will be ours. At last.
I say all this from a distance. Bring me to the hospital in a screeching ambulance as I struggle to breath and you would see what a coward I can be. Still, the big picture is the truth. While we hate pain and certain moments when we struggle to stay alive, in the end the worst comes from how it looks and how we imagine it to be. It is this, this perspective from the outside, which I believe is driving the fears of this pandemic to such troubling heights. Good ‘ol FDR put it best with his “nothing to fear but fear itself” phrase, although that doesn’t account for interim pain and discomfort. It does account, however, for our irrational destruction of a way of life that was imperfect but still comparatively good. A drowning man will pull down his own mother and even his child with his uncontrolled terror. It appears we are doing the same to our nation with this drama that at times seems more made from TV than anything else.
In the end we have to realize that we were made for death – not to seek it, but to lay in it when the time comes. Most of us cannot control the sudden panic of drowning, but we certainly can control this slow-burner of a disaster that has run on way too long. In another era, many people on the Titanic truly went down with the ship with just the kind of resigned peace that much of us will find on our own death beds. Here in the Era of Corona, almost all of us will remain only as spectators, and it will be fear alone which brings down the ship.
I have heard of brave people. I have seen pretend brave people on TV. I know for a fact that they exist because they have gone to the moon, gone into underground bunkers of the enemy, floated thousands of feet below the ocean in submarines, and climbed El Capitan without ropes. Brave people all, and I am not one of them.
Oh, I have had my moments; I have stared down muggers with knives and Indians with spears and flown in sputtering airplanes over trackless jungle, all without soiling my pants, but I know me all too well. Sometimes, as with that Italian captain of the infamously grounded cruise ship, things get “too a-scary!” Sometimes, and inevitably, we non-brave people blow it bad and have to hand in our Dirty Harry cards under an umbrella of shame.
But there are other times that almost all of us share when we become unafraid of death itself. This happens when we are suffering from certain kinds of long-term pain or illness. In his beautiful but soul-searing book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl tell us of how people in Nazi death camps would “go to the wire,” that is, walk into the electrified fences used to keep people in. These people were not looked upon as brave by the others, others who wanted desperately to live and needed community support, but what else could we call them if they had lost the fear of death? More common, there are those among us today who are in constant pain, either physically or mentally, and come to welcome death. Again, is this not brave? If someone is dangling from a line on a cliff and has no fear of death, we call him brave, so why not those who are hanging by their nerve cells?
Finally, and more common still, are those who are suffering from certain illnesses, and it is to this that I want to recall my own personal experience.
I was seventeen and in the best shape of my life, immortal in my own view of things, when the flu struck. It was in the late spring and, as far as I can recall, there was no concern for any particular bug going around. No one else in my family got it either, but I sure as hell did. It came on as quickly as a shot of bourbon and sent me into intense sweats with a 105 degree fever. I lay on the couch while everyone else sat around watching TV or getting snacks, almost as if I didn’t exist. I was young and healthy overall and I’m sure they saw my illness as a simple passing bug, but it wasn’t a small thing to me. My mind seemed to float on the kind of wavy haze one sees coming off of hot highways, bringing me nearer to a conscious form of non-existence than I had ever experienced. That is, I was there, but not there. More importantly, I did not care. I did not care that I barely existed and, over several hours of this, started to believe that my existence was to come to an end. Good. I welcomed death then, not as a relief for a suffering I was barely aware of, but because of its soft allure. It was a comfort rather than a horror, a final end to a resistance I had never understood had been there in my life all along. I saw that life was indeed a struggle, an endless force exerted, and I was glad to let it go, not out of sorrow or self-pity, but out of shear relief. The life force seemed exhausted and I was just fine with that.
It was literally a twenty-four hour flu, and by the next morning I was hungry and washed out but ready to take on the world again. If I had known all the hassles that were in store for me, mostly because of my own poor decisions, maybe I wouldn’t have felt such renewed energy, but that is the power of youth. “Come on, world, give me your best shot!” says life – until, that is, we have another Italian cruise ship moment.
Or until we have another intense illness. Then we just might find, as most of us have, that, although dying might be bad, death is not. In fact, as the man on the cliff could tell you, even dying if often quick and painless. In such cases, then, why do we fear?
I have a theory. Dying might be very painful and bad, but it is not that which we fear so much, but rather the death that might come of it. We can tell this by the number of people who are willing to go through hell with cancer treatments and transplants and any other of the many startling ways doctors nowadays use to (try to) stave off death. The cure, it seems, is often worse than the disease, but most of us would and will cling to the cure anyway out of fear. I include myself, for as stated, I am not one of the brave few. But still we have to wonder why. Death itself is not only inevitable, but we are shown now and then in our lives that it brings relief from the never-ending stress of life. It is peace. We do not know what happens to consciousness after death, but we also learn that losing our present state of consciousness is not bad, either, and in fact, is necessary to gain that peace. Someday we are going to lose it; so when that time comes, we should let go of the rope. In the end, we all, or at least most of us, do just that, finding that we have courage after all and can learn to trust in the universe rather than in ourselves – at last. What a relief.
Ah, but for the Era of Corona! Our inherited fear of plague has been aroused, a fear that is justly founded in the periods of time when half of us would die from horrible deaths in a few years’ time. With the old Black Death, massive dark-purple pustules would form on the faces of loved ones, blood would poor from every orifice, and our sparky children or spouse would become groaning, dying corpses that would add to the pile of stinking dead in the streets. Could anything be more horrifying? We do not have that now, to be sure. Perhaps one in three thousand will die from this, with nearly no chance of death for those under fifty, and the symptoms are similar to flues and pneumonia, neither of these presenting a horror to the eyes. Still, the source of fear is the same, and it is here that we come to the nut of my theory: we fear death not for how it is, but for how it looks to us, the healthy, both externally and internally in our imaginations.
That is how it usually is, isn’t it? We fear falling from the cliff because we have seen (at least on TV) what our bodies would look like after we hit. We imagine ourselves shattered like that and are horrified, forgetting to acknowledge that we will not feel the hit for more than a brief instant, and will never see our broken bodies, at least not with mortal eyes. We would drift painlessly for a few seconds in the air and then be dead. It is different with disease-related deaths, as we do have times of great pain and panic when our horror at the prospects of death are aroused, but again, we will ultimately arrive at that moment when dying makes sense and becomes the best thing in the world. Peace and freedom will be ours. At last.
I say all this from a distance. Bring me to the hospital in a screeching ambulance as I struggle to breath and you would see what a coward I can be. Still, the big picture is the truth. While we hate pain and certain moments when we struggle to stay alive, in the end the worst comes from how it looks and how we imagine it to be. It is this, this perspective from the outside, which I believe is driving the fears of this pandemic to such troubling heights. Good ‘ol FDR put it best with his “nothing to fear but fear itself” phrase, although that doesn’t account for interim pain and discomfort. It does account, however, for our irrational destruction of a way of life that was imperfect but still comparatively good. A drowning man will pull down his own mother and even his child with his uncontrolled terror. It appears we are doing the same to our nation with this drama that at times seems more made from TV than anything else.
In the end we have to realize that we were made for death – not to seek it, but to lay in it when the time comes. Most of us cannot control the sudden panic of drowning, but we certainly can control this slow-burner of a disaster that has run on way too long. In another era, many people on the Titanic truly went down with the ship with just the kind of resigned peace that much of us will find on our own death beds. Here in the Era of Corona, almost all of us will remain only as spectators, and it will be fear alone which brings down the ship.
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