I know it is coming, and I do not fear
it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to
fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path.
I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the
same state. I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder
and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s
memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them
for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I
brought home from Paris.
I
don’t expect to die anytime soon. But it could happen this moment,
while I am writing. I was talking the other day with Jim Toback, a
friend of 35 years, and the conversation turned to our deaths, as it
always does. “Ask someone how they feel about death,” he said, “and
they’ll tell you everyone’s gonna die. Ask them, In the next 30 seconds?
No, no, no, that’s not gonna happen. How about this afternoon?
No. What you’re really asking them to admit is,
Oh my God, I don’t really exist. I might be gone at any given second.”
Me
too, but I hope not. I have plans. Still, illness led me resolutely
toward the contemplation of death. That led me to the subject of
evolution, that most consoling of all the sciences, and I became
engulfed on my blog in unforeseen discussions about God, the afterlife,
religion, theory of evolution, intelligent design, reincarnation, the
nature of reality, what came before the big bang, what waits after the
end, the nature of intelligence, the reality of the self, death, death,
death.
Many readers have informed me that it is a tragic and
dreary business to go into death without faith. I don’t feel that way.
“Faith” is neutral. All depends on what is believed in. I have no desire
to live forever. The concept frightens me. I am 69, have had cancer,
will die sooner than most of those reading this. That is in the nature
of things. In my plans for life after death, I say, again with Whitman:
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
And with Will, the brother in Saul Bellow’s “Herzog,” I say, “Look for me in the weather reports.”
Raised
as a Roman Catholic, I internalized the social values of that faith and
still hold most of them, even though its theology no longer persuades
me. I have no quarrel with what anyone else subscribes to; everyone
deals with these things in his own way, and I have no truths to impart.
All I require of a religion is that it be tolerant of those who do not
agree with it. I know a priest whose eyes twinkle when he says, “You go
about God’s work in your way, and I’ll go about it in His.”
What I
expect to happen is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to
function and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I
have had no children. I am comforted by Richard Dawkins’ theory of
memes. Those are mental units: thoughts, ideas, gestures, notions,
songs, beliefs, rhymes, ideals, teachings, sayings, phrases, clichés
that move from mind to mind as genes move from body to body. After a
lifetime of writing, teaching, broadcasting and telling too many jokes, I
will leave behind more memes than many. They will all also eventually
die, but so it goes.
O’Rourke’s had a photograph of Brendan Behan on the wall, and under it this quotation, which I memorized:
I
respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals.
I don’t respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything
connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer
stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the
winter and happier in the summer.
That does a pretty good job of summing it up.
“Kindness” covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them
out. I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have
done something to make others a little happier, and something to make
ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make
others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all
crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true
no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try.
I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it
out.
One of these days I will encounter what Henry James called on
his deathbed “the distinguished thing.” I will not be conscious of the
moment of passing. In this life I have already been declared dead. It
wasn’t so bad. After the first ruptured artery, the doctors thought I
was finished. My wife, Chaz, said she sensed that I was still alive and
was communicating to her that I wasn’t finished yet. She said our hearts
were beating in unison, although my heartbeat couldn’t be discovered.
She told the doctors I was alive, they did what doctors do, and here I
am, alive.
Do I believe her? Absolutely. I believe her literally —
not symbolically, figuratively or spiritually. I believe she was
actually aware of my call and that she sensed my heartbeat. I believe
she did it in the real, physical world I have described, the one that I
share with my wristwatch. I see no reason why such communication could
not take place. I’m not talking about telepathy, psychic phenomenon or a
miracle. The only miracle is that she was there when it happened, as
she was for many long days and nights. I’m talking about her standing
there and knowing something. Haven’t many of us experienced that? Come
on, haven’t you? What goes on happens at a level not accessible to
scientists, theologians, mystics, physicists, philosophers or
psychiatrists. It’s a human kind of a thing.
Someday I will no longer call out,
and there will be no heartbeat. I will be dead. What happens then? From
my point of view, nothing. Absolutely nothing. All the same, as I wrote
to Monica Eng, whom I have known since she was six, “You’d better cry at
my memorial service.” I correspond with a dear friend, the wise and
gentle Australian director Paul Cox. Our subject sometimes turns to
death. In 2010 he came very close to dying before receiving a liver
transplant. In 1988 he made a documentary named “Vincent: The Life and
Death of Vincent van Gogh.” Paul wrote me that in his Arles days, van
Gogh called himself “a simple worshiper of the external Buddha.” Paul
told me that in those days, Vincent wrote:
Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map.
Why, I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?
Just
as we take a train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a
star. We cannot get to a star while we are alive any more than we can
take the train when we are dead. So to me it seems possible that
cholera, tuberculosis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion.
Just as steamboats, buses and railways are the terrestrial means.
To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot.
That
is a lovely thing to read, and a relief to find I will probably take
the celestial locomotive. Or, as his little dog, Milou, says whenever
Tintin proposes a journey, “Not by foot, I hope!”
