Alliteration is Accidental
I wrote the following a bit ago, and I’ll get to why, but I’m including it here mostly as I left it. At the end, I’ll go back to Now. The first bit, about death, is from the Before (a month ago, or slightly more).
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I’ve been thinking about death a lot lately. I’ve been thinking about it so much I tweeted it:
Thinking about death a lot
— JF (@jamesforeman) February 18, 2021
Where Does This Death Come From?
When Rush Limbaugh died, a lot of people were talking about death, how he deserved to die, or that they’re happy that he’s dead.
While I intellectually understand why somebody might be happy when certain people die, and I agree that he was a garbage person, I could not participate in the glee. This is not a new insight brought to me by life’s meandering surprises, because I think my relationship with death has always been complicated.
This is also not an indictment of their reaction. I was never a target of Limbaugh’s awfulness, even remotely, so I have no horse in the fight. That probably influences my reaction. I was never his target, so I had the privilege of not having an opinion. Being free to not have an opinion on something is a privilege I have only recently come to understand.
Death Was Cool?
When I was in junior high, I would intentionally write extremely violent or gross things for vocabulary words (for example), knowing that they would get a reaction. These would invariably involve death or murder. I understand now that it was attention-seeking behavior, and not a sign of something deeper that was happening in my life or in my mind. I wasn’t a threat to anyone, I was just a middle child with crippling social anxiety who sought the most efficacious opportunities for attention. I think my teachers knew that, too, and entertained me as much as they could.
I reign with my left hand, I rule with my right
I’m lord of all darkness, I’m queen of the night
Queen, March of the Black Queen
I had been caught up in thoughts of my own death. I am versed in mental health, so I know what “ideations” are and I was not thinking about killing myself. I’ve never been tempted to end it all early. Suicide has never approached my radar.
I feel like that’s important to disclaim early in any writer writing about death, and his own death particularly, especially when he has a history of writing about his challenges with depression, cancer, etc. I’m fine. I was just thinking about death.
Vivid Ideations
My thoughts on my own death centered around these two scenarios. Skip this part if you might be bothered by graphic depictions.
Scenario 1: me, in a violent accident. Blood-soaked whiskers. Red snow. It scared me. When I thought about driving somewhere, that image invaded my mind. It passed as the anxiety-induced imagery it was. It was not a portend. I have had so many anxiety-induced “glimpses” into the future, since my very youngest memories, that know none of them can be trusted. Exactly none of them have ever come true.
Scenario 2: how my family and friends would behave in my now-empty apartment, after my death. If I were to leave here and die, I would leave behind this apartment exactly as it is. Having experienced this from the point of view of a loved one exploring the crypt-like remnants of another person’s life, frozen in time, I can easily spiral into obsessive thoughts about what my heirs would encounter.
“I found another power strip that wasn’t plugged into anything!”
“How many socks did he have?”
“Why is this here?” X 100
“How much did he spend on this?”
They will see the things I bought or kept in case I needed them in the future, in a future I will never see. They will comb through my diaries, and journals, and find things in them that might make them blush, or cry, or remember me fondly. They would divvy up my belongings though I think most of this stuff would go to the auction or the garbage. I could write more about the value of another person’s valuables, but I would not blame anybody for getting rid of anything they inherited that they felt no connection to. I know, from experience, that there are plenty of things remaining after a person dies that not every single thing they touched has the same weight. I value and treasure items from Posy and Miles, and they will always have more value to me than anything with a price tag on it.
But Not Yet
I’m here, and taking up this space, and eating this food, but some day I’m going to leave this place and never come back, and my family will have to go through it all. What will they think? What will they find?
I am confident that they will find nothing scandalous. One joke among people my age is “delete my browser history before my mom sees it” but I could show my unfiltered browser history to everybody who ever mattered to me and not be even slightly concerned or embarrassed by what they would see. I am both very predictable and not scandalous.
Dying To Live
I read a short story about time travel. The time travel actually didn’t really matter to me as much as other parts of the story that I found far more compelling. Within this story about time travel was a secret society of magic-practitioners who discovered the confirmable existence of an unavoidable afterlife. Heaven and hell were real, and you went to one or the other when you died.
Because they were a secret society of very nasty people, they weren’t very interested in spending an eternity in hell, so the majority of the story involved them looking for a way to obliterate themselves.
I don’t just mean “obliterate” in the physical way, I mean it in a wholesale spiritual way. Faced with an afterlife of suffering, they were looking for a way to make themselves cease existing, as if they had never existed.
The complete erasure of identity or selfhood that we all fear awaits us in death was something they actively wanted, because oblivion was preferable to eternal suffering. The story is a novella I read called Salvage and Demolition.
Not Existing
The sudden non-existence is frightening to us, as creatures who have existed. The fact that we may some day return to the nonexistence we experienced pre-birth is so unsettling that we have created entire belief systems around it (or, about it, at least). I don’t know if religion exists because of a fear of the obliteration of permanent death, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Death is a funny thing
It happens to everybody. Nobody on earth has ever escaped it. It is a fundamental part of life. There are things that live a long time, but they die eventually. Everything has a lifespan, from bacteria to stars, measured in minutes or billions of years.
This inevitability has made it creep into every culture, in some way. The more appealing cultures, to me, embrace it and celebrate it, or at least they don’t try to hide from it.
The religion of my upbringing, presbyterianism, teaches that we are all destined to die, and then wake up again (?) in the afterlife we deserve determined by 1) how much we believe in Jesus and 2) whether we were good people, though 2 was not as important as 1. This thinking led to Pascal’s Wager and other inadvisable digressions.
Consciousness is a tenuous experience
I spent a lot of time watching documentaries about science and the brain. They were looking at human brains in an MRI, trying to find the source of consciousness, of that experience we all have, that sense of “me-ness,” that identification of who we are and how we relate to the world
We like to think that what we experience as our day-to-day, standard average life is the one we will carry into whatever afterlife we hope lies beyond the veil. It doesn’t take long to find that the consciousness we think is so emblematic of our experience as human beings is tenuous. A shot of vodka under an overpass with friends who stole a bottle from their parents is enough to show us entirely new ways to experience the world around us.
When one of the scientists investigating the seat of consciousness was asked about the physical location of consciousness in the human brain, he had no satisfying answer. It wasn’t, say, in the pineal gland.
Instead, consciousness was a flickering wave of neuroactivity that swept across the brain like a passing breeze or flashing fire. Consciousness, the essential you-ness, the experience of now, the intersection of sensory data and our current thoughts, was not a place but an event, constantly moving. The similarity between this and the revelations of Zen Buddhism are not lost on me. But this is not the place for that.
“Matter flows from place to place, and momentarily comes together to be you. Some people find that thought disturbing; I find the reality thrilling.” – Richard Dawkins
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Back to Now
As I said, I wrote the preceding at an earlier time. I was unclear about how much thoughts of my own death had interrupted the steady flicker of MY consciousness. I would stumble and trip over invisible ottomans and blame something or other for the difficulty.
I got the first dose of my vaccine recently, an injection that everybody will hopefully soon be getting, and it immediately made me glad to be alive. The ruminations on death dissipated.
The systems in place for getting the vaccine, like all systems, are apathetic. Systems are designed to serve the most people, harm the least, for the most net gain. Systems are not overly concerned with how anybody feels. This makes most systems hostile to human happiness, but we have no choice but to endure them.
The thoughts of death I had before disappeared a few hours after the shot.
I wish this relief for everyone.
I’m hitting Publish on this one, just to get it out of my drafts. I’ve been working on it too long. It’s enough. No more ruminating tonight.
I love this video with my whole heart. It’s an incredible 20 year anniversary of Andrew WK’s first album, I Get Wet, which mixed heavy metal vibes with party anthems and traditionally-metal-adjacent topics like death and killing and victory.
There were a bunch of weird conspiracy theories about him that are fascinating to read and bonkers and intentionally played up (if not directly started) by Andrew himself. He maintains this mystery in interviews, mixing a weird performance art aesthetic with relentlessly positive messages of self-acceptance and a celebration of life while also somehow being completely genuine. He is a force of goodness and unapologetic cartoonish glee and I am so very happy that he has a new song out.