Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

Fear itself

You know I'm scared to die, right?

Obviously. I come back to that theme in one way or another about every six weeks, unless somebody I know has just died, than I dwell on it for daily for six weeks.

I hear that awareness of our own mortality is what separates humans from the rest of the animal world.

With Paul dying last month, then the notion that I might just be walking around with (let's whisper it like they did back in the day) cancer, the dying thing has been up at the front of my mind.

I have a book: No Death, No Fear, by a Buddhist monk named Thich Nhat Hanh. He wrote

Our greatest fear is that when we die we will become nothing. Many of us believe that our entire existence is only a life span beginning the moment we are born or conceived and ending the moment we die. We believe that we are born from nothing and that when we die we become nothing. And so, we are filled with fear of annihilation.

The Buddha has a very different understanding of our existence. It is the understanding that birth and death are notions. They are not real. The fact that we think they are true makes a powerful illusion that causes all our suffering. The Buddha taught there is no birth, there is no death; there is no coming, there is no going; there is no same, there is no different; there is no permanent self, there is no annihilation. We only think there is. When we understand that we cannot be destroyed, we are liberated from fear. It is a great relief. We can enjoy life and appreciate it in a new way.

I've had this book for several years and I have read it many times, but when I'm at a funeral, it's impossible for me to think of death as an illusion.

But also at a funeral, I'm feeling sorry for myself. I wanted to show Paul some pictures I took. I wanted to go the baseball game with him. I wanted to hear what he thought about Olie Kolzig going to Tampa...I missed my friend.

That's why I'm scared of other people dying: I'll miss them. Why am I scared to die?

To contrast scholarly Buddhist monks, I give you humor columnist Gene Weingarten. He has a regular chat on the Washington Post web site, where this exchange occurred earlier this summer:

...I would like to be more settled about mortality--as I don't want to spend time/energy worrying about the inevitable.

How would you suggest overcoming this problem?

Gene Weingarten: Do what I did. Get a fatal disease and recover from it. Everything changes. You don't worry as much because you feel you're living gift time, anyway.

If THAT'S out of the question, remember what my father told me when I was about ten or so and asked what it was like to be dead.

He said, "Well, what was it like for you in 1918?"

Uh...

"Well, that's what it's like to be dead."

Not so scary, right?

Put that way, it really isn't. Now, if you believe you might be roast on a spit for eternity for the bad things you've done, or if you think you could be reincarnated as a bug, that's scary, but non-existence really isn't.

I was rolling this over in my mind for much of the night last night.

When I was a little kid, I never wanted to go to bed. I would go downstairs to the dark living room, listening through the screen door to my parents and the neighbors sitting on the patio talking. I'd linger in the hallway, peaking around the corner to watch McMillan & Wife. Conversation that went over my head, tv crime drama, whatever was going on after bedtime, I didn't want to miss it.

I guess that is why I don't want to die. It's not really that I am afraid of what comes after, I just don't want to miss what will be going on here.

And then in terms of what is wrong with me...the thyroid, I mean, not all my other problems...it is statistically improbable that I am suffering from anything fatal, anyway. If I had to put down money, I'd place the bet on benign follicular adenoma. And I'm afraid of surgery, but that is because I spend a good portion of my day reading about drug reactions gone bad. Realistically, it's probably more dangerous for me to drive around suburban Washington on a rainy Friday with people distracted by the holiday weekend than it is to undergo this common surgery.

So there it is. Nothing to be afraid of. Let's see how this gets me through til Tuesday, 2:30 p.m.

Posted by Nic at August 29, 2008 12:52 PM | TrackBack