I Am Not Afraid to Die

I am not afraid to die, even though I am agnostic about the afterlife, if there is one—about judgment, bliss, suffering, and all the other elements that tradition has accreted onto the afterlife, creating Heaven and Hell.

I am afraid of dying, the process of life coming to an end. If it occurs by gentle decline, I will be okay with it; I am already trembling and weak and have many old-man emergencies. Nobody escapes these things. I just don’t want to die in any of the spectacularly painful and outrageous ways that we hear about on the news literally every day all over the world, whether it is a kid getting shot at school in America or a kid dying of malaria in Africa.

A quiet death at the end of a good life does not bother me. What makes me and almost everyone who thinks about it furious is an untimely death, for example, of a young person (a child, or a soldier, or in a death camp). An example is the Franz Schubert song Death and the Maiden, which he wrote into a quartet. Why should death come to a young woman who has done nothing to deserve suffering? The thought of this made Schubert furious. The Death and the Maiden quartet is one of the few places in Schubert’s music in which his fury makes him totally lose control. Usually he weaves his musical motifs together beautifully, even when the subject is depressing (as many of his songs are). But if you listen to this piece of music you can hear a couple of measures where the musical structure just falls apart into clamor. It was Schubert’s brief excursion into insanity.

I refuse to continue this list of examples. But if the end of my life can be quiet, then I can slip into death. I have no fear of this, for several reasons.

First, I won’t know I’m dead. I won’t be caught in blankets of darkness and silence, but with a conscious mind telling me, oh no, I’m dead, and I have to be aware of being dead forever. Literally nobody believes this. I won’t wake up dead some morning. It’s like the song set to the tune of Irish washerwoman:

McTavish is dead and his brother don’t know it

McTavish is dead and his brother don’t know it

They’re both of them dead, they’re in the same bed

And neither one knows that the other is dead.

If this seems bloody obvious, I merely point out that it is also comforting.

Second, the story has to come to an end sometime. I finished an academic career, and I figured out a lot of things about life during my journey from fundamentalism to agnosticism, and about the world of science. What an exciting journey it has been, from the top of Mt. Whitney to the bottom of Badwater, from the tropical forest to the desert, seeing the large and small wonders of the natural world that most people walk right past without noticing. I have written books in which I have shared my excitement about the world with my readers. But I retired and am preparing for the final phase of my life, primarily as a grandfather. There is no plot if there is no conclusion. I want to draw my life into a conclusion that makes sense and makes sensible all of the things I have thought and experienced, in such a way that I can help other people make sense of their lives.

We all know this. We all know that, as we grow older, certain investments are ridiculous. I take hikes and eat moderately in order to maintain health in my remaining days, for my own comfort but also so that I do not make myself a decrepit nuisance on others who will take care of me. A few years ago a dentist tried to interest me in straightening my lower teeth. Nobody can see them. This might be a sensible investment for someone who is just entering a profession, to put a good face on things, but for a fifty-year-old man, as I was at the time, it is like decorating something that you will soon discard. There is a relief in knowing that old things, such as old bodies, do not need to be maintained in pristine condition

The story has to draw to a conclusion. Can you imagine the tedium of playing harps and singing hymns forever? To explore this idea further, you should read Mark Twain’s Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.

Third, suppose there is an afterlife? There are lots of fundamentalists who think that if you disagree with them on even the tiniest theological point, even from ignorance, you will suffer infintely forever. Yet they also claim that God is love. This is utterly ridiculous. I have chosen to live a life of love. Every day and every year I look back and evaluate myself: Have I made the best use of my opportunities? Have I made life better for other people (maybe not everyone, but most people)? These are not vague thoughts. I keep a very detailed diary, which is separate from my journal. Nobody will ever read them; there are too many millions of words in them. Their main function is to focus my mind on the way I am living, to be consciously happy about the blessings I receive each day, but also to plan ahead. I plan ahead to accomplish things that will make the world better; and if I fail in some of those things, I try to let go of them. As John says in the New Testament, “He who loves is born of God and knows God; he who does not love does not know God.” It’s pretty simple. If there is an afterlife, I am ready for it, by any reasonable standard

I do not want to die before I have finished my work. I may not have a choice in this, but I try to keep my body and mind healthy so that I can finish more books, for example. I do not want an untimely death.

 

In many cases, dying is a tragedy. But timely death is not.

Fixation on the Afterlife

At the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa there is an exhibit of ancient Egyptian sarcophagi and artifacts. I remember that it was in Tulsa, long before I lived here, that I saw my first ancient Egyptian items. I had grown up in a California town where even the historical museums had nothing from before 1800 (CE, that is) and was amazed to see something that was actually from the time of the Old Testament stories. I was in awe. But this time, as I looked at item after item, some of them over 5000 years old, I felt burdened. Here is why.

The Egyptian fixation upon death and the afterlife was total and stifling. Egypt is famous as an archaeological treasure trove, because of its long civilization and the dry conditions that allowed exquisite preservation even of things that had not been mummified. It should be a tremendous source of information about the everyday lives of ancient people. But in reality, besides the records of kingly conquests, most of the hieroglyphics are incantations that will guide the departed person through the afterlife. So, for instance, you have a sarcophagus covered with hundreds of hieroglyphics. They tell you that it is so-and-so-and-so son of so-and-so-and-so, that he was a scribe or the keeper of the granaries, and the rest of it is please-Osiris-don’t-hurt-me-please-Ra-don’t-feed-me-to-the-alligators-please-Horus-I-wrote-down-the-right-words-so-I-deserve-to-live-in-the-underworld-forever-along-with-my-mummified-cat-no-longer-Fluffy. No biography, just religious hocus-pocus.

The extravagances expended upon preparation for the afterlife of Egyptian kings and nobles are infamous. But so imbued was Egyptian culture with this fixation that middle-class people were expected to make these preparations also. I saw the sarcophagi and other items of artisans. Preparation for death could cost the artisan a year’s wages. They had various cost-cutting measures. The middle-class sarcophagi had red and yellow paint to imitate the gold sheet they could not afford, and painted patterns to make limestone look like granite. Even the lowest professionals had to have something, so they made mummy-covers out of terra cotta (pretty amateur work, resulting in faces that looked almost Neanderthal). If they found a tomb that had been abandoned, they recycled the contents by erasing the names of the previous owner-inhabitant. Some of these items could have been a chance to preserve a record of, for example, how the pyramids were built—did the artisans (who were not slaves, but contractors) push the blocks up inclined planes? Or did outer space creatures use anti-gravity devices, as Erich Von Däniken claimed? Just how were the contractors chosen and how much were they paid? There is a little information, but not much. The Egyptians wrote a lot, but mostly incantations for the afterlife.

So powerful was the cult of the afterlife that conquerors got sucked into it. One of the sarcophagi was of a Greek ruler just before the Common Era. Everything looked just like it was Egyptian, even with hieroglyphics (which were used only for religion; commerce used a primitive alphabet)—but the face plate was a Pompeii-style painting.

The Egyptians were not the only ones to focus all their attention on religion and leave little record of their ordinary lives. In another part of the museum there are medieval paintings. They are all of religious themes. Occasionally a little bit of ordinary life and landscape would slip in as background. Only later did ordinary life and lives make it into paintings. At the end of one hallway is a permanent exhibit at the Philbrook: Bouguereau’s painting of the little sherpherdess, more lifelike than life, and whose eyes, everyone agrees, seem to follow you wherever you are.

Some of my own writings have suffered from religious limitations in the past. I have kept a daily journal (today’s entry was number 7548) for 21 years. The recent entries contain many things that I have learned from my experiences, observations, and from the news. Whoever reads them someday, should they happen to survive, will learn much about our times and how at least one thoughtful person reacted to them. But when I started the journal, it was a devotional book, in which I wrote only about the Bible, and wrote prayers of adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication (the ACTS system). A little bit about me, hardly anything about the world. My journal, at its inception, was very much like an Egyptian sarcophagus, covered with writing that would tell a person of the future very, very little, and which did not even help me very much. I felt an obligation to be pious rather than wrestling with difficult spiritual issues honestly. I am thankful that enough life remains to me that I can finally begin examining it.