northing at midlife
Reader Jim Lemire comments:
All this talk of death, these midlife blog changes. what’s next? A Ferrari and a bikini-clad coed?Reader A.C. emails:
You mention other books in waiting. All parenting? All secularist? Out with it!
In the face of those two perfect setups, I am unable to muster the simple self-control to not share an excerpt from one of my unpublished books, Northing at Midlife — my death-obsessed philosophical secular travel narrative. I know I know, the Sombrero Galaxy doesn’t care that I had my midlife crisis while hiking the long-distance trails of Britain. Shut up.
Excerpt from NORTHING AT MIDLIFE ©2005 by Dale McGowan
At midlife, in the absence of much else to strive toward, Death snaps back into focus as – let’s face it – the actual, ultimate goal.
That’s when you begin to notice your heartbeat as you lie in bed and wonder how it just keeps, you know, doing that, and how long it will keep doing that, and whether thinking about it for hours at a time could make it stop doing that. It is gently suggested that you increase your visits to the doctor from – well, never, to pretty much always, and to start inviting gloved fingers to go adventuring through some of your least-often-fingered regions – in search, of course, of Death.
When you hit that barrier to your timeline’s eastward progress, that increasingly three-dimensional awareness of your own impermanence, you have two choices: carom wildly to the south, or veer purposefully northward. It all depends on whether your reaction to that glimpse of the Reaper is screaming denial or a sort of terrible fascination. The forty-five-year old in a convertible with the Texas A&M Pep Squad and Drill Team in the back seat is Southbound. He is busily denying Death by embracing youth – quite literally, in this guy’s case. He has a lot more alcohol, sex and speeding tickets than I, but he will still Die. There’s just a greater chance in his case that when it finally gets him, it will come as a genuine surprise.
Something to be said for that, I suppose.
No I don’t suppose. Not really. I’m Northing, myself. While Southbound Guy is trying to think himself younger, I’m actually thinking myself older, squinting into the distance with ever-less-capable eyes. It’s meditative, Northing is, and introspective, and quiet, and mature – and, I’m fiercely proud to say, humble. Southing happens in public while dressed in a Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned to the crotch. Northing is solitary. Southing crushes a beer can on its forehead while shouting “Woooo.” Northing drinks alone.
During my first career, teaching at a small midwestern liberal arts college (the name of which escapes me at the moment), I had the golden opportunity of a semester’s leave, during which I took my family to live in England. Being forty-two, I thought it an ideal time to schedule my midlife crisis. I’d long since decided that my crisis, when it occurred, would be of the Northerly ilk, if for no other reason than fourteen years ago I made the tactical error of marrying happily and well, which leaves all the really fun bits of Southing off-limits. So I knew it was to be then, at age forty-two, and there, in England. Still didn’t know just exactly how.
Northing is my authorial heartbreak, the work of mine for which I have the greatest affection but cannot seem to get published after two years trying.
Okay, enough self-indulgence! Back to, uh…blogging!
the long habit, part III
- September 07, 2007
- By Dale McGowan
- In death
- 9
Death [is] the only immortal who treats us all alike.
MARK TWAIN’S last written statement, quoted in Moments with Mark Twain by Albert Bigelow Paine
Why is it, that those who die (or nearly die, depending on your definitions) and are revived, regardless of culture, religious beliefs or age, so often describe the near-death experience in the same way – a journey through a tunnel toward increasingly bright light, accompanied by out-of-body sensations, flashes of memory, visions of loved ones, and feelings of overwhelming peace and contentment?
The traditional answer, of course, is that the dying person has glimpsed a paradise beyond death. And the universally paradisaic nature of that moment seems to suggest we all make the grade in the end. Who ever heard of people coming back on the operating table with stories of flames?
Near the beginning of my midlife stare-down with the Reaper, I got to wondering if any competing hypotheses existed for the Everybody-Goes-to-Heaven explanation of the near-death experience. Not that I had any problem with that one, you understand: having taken Pascal up on his Wager, I’d be happy to have a free pass in the unlikely event that I and my fellow Sunday morning recumbents have it all wrong. But I’ll settle for the actual truth anytime. So I wondered.
Imagine my surprise to learn that not one of those phenomena – tunnel with bright light, out-of-body feelings, hearing what others in the room said after you’ve died, memory flashes, appearing loved ones, peace and contentment – not one of them is the least bit mysterious. We know why they all happen.
The Air Force puts its high-altitude pilots through intense testing. One of the tests involves sitting a pilot in the world’s largest centrifuge and spinning him or her until all of the blood runs out of the brain into the blood vessels on the periphery. (Call your local Air Force recruiter.) They pass out when this happens (wimps) – at which point the centrifuge slows, the blood returns to the brain, and they very often wake up laughing and woohooing. Ha ha ha, woohoo!
Guess what else? Tunnel, bright light, memories, loved ones, contentment. The works. These pilots report experiences that are essentially identical to the “near-death” experience. Why?
When your heart stops beating, the blood, not surprisingly, drains from your brain. The Air Force centrifuge simulates that blood-starved brain without stopping the heart. And we know, from these and other experiments, what happens when the blood drains out of the brain: billions of cortical neurons begin to fire randomly. Neurons in the visual cortex are more densely packed toward the center (fovea), so when those neurons begin to fire randomly, the person “sees” darkness at the periphery and increasing brightness toward the center. As more and more neurons fire, the bright center grows in size. The effect is one of moving toward a bright light down a long tunnel.
The neurons firing randomly in the prefrontal cortex trigger random flashes of memory, giving the effect of “life flashing before your eyes.” As the sensory neurons connecting us to our bodies fail, an out-of-body feeling naturally kicks in. Again—these aren’t guesses, a competing hypothesis to put next to heaven in the lineup. We know they happen, and how, and when, and why.
Hearing is the last sense to go, which explains reports of having heard what others have said after apparently being demised.
And the laughing of the pilots, the woohooing? This is the loveliest part, the experience that cured Montaigne of his fear of dying. As our head loses its lunch, the anterior pituitary gland, our private little opium den, floods the brain with endorphins. Whenever the body is stressed – and having the blood sucked out of your brain apparently qualifies as stress – these endorphins, powerful opiates that they are, suffuse us with feelings of tremendous happiness and well-being, an adaptive response that helps us make the best possible decisions in dangerous circumstances. We feel wonderful, peaceful, contented. This contentment combines with the fireworks in the prefrontal memory to produce scores of our happiest memories—like loved ones embracing us, accepting us, welcoming us. So that’s what’s most important to us: love. I’ve got to write that down. Hey, I just did! Woohoo!
The near-death experience stands fully explained not by guesses but by things we know for a fact occur. So why do we still opt for the other explanation?
Silly rabbit.
And it all fits with Montaigne’s description rather nicely, don’t you think? One minute you’re vomiting blood and writhing in pain; the next you can’t feel your body and you’re stoned on methadone. Going forward would have to seem more attractive than heading back. Hell, I’d push life off my lips, too.
There’s a symmetrical loveliness to the fact that my body’s lifelong tendency to cling to survival is reversed once it’s time to go — that the gears that now keep me impelled toward existence will, when the time is right, shift ever so gently, and impel me no less confidently toward nonexistence. I’m consoled by the way that underlines the naturalness of death, and by the further realization that this body of mine, yet again, seems to know what it’s doing. I can relax a bit further into my seat and enjoy the ride.
We’re never going to be free of our natural, adaptive, and understandable fear of losing the magnificent experience of being alive. But the thoughts of other mortals like Epicurus, Montaigne, and Lewis Thomas – who all had the same personal stake in the subject that you and I do – lead me further away from fear and closer to acceptance and understanding. Closer. And they can do the same for our kids as they get older and more sophisticated in their wonderings. The single most significant and profound thing about our existence is that it ends, rivaled only by the fact that it begins. The more knowledge I gather about the two profound bookends between which I find myself, the more I seem to settle into my seat.
I’m still not ready to give Death a big wet smooch, but thanks to some of these reflections, I can at least bear to look at it now. From a distance.
Let’s say about forty years.
***
For more on near-death research, see this article in The Guardian.
A summary of the study that first noted similarities between G-LOC (gravitationally-induced loss of consciousness) and near-death experiences can be found here (there’s also some hooey on this website–but this page, at least, is useful)
I first learned of the centrifuge studies from Intimate Universe, a simply spectacular video series about the human body and human development that was created by BBC Films several years ago. Discovery Education apparently issued an American version of the series, leaving out (imagine my surprise) the last segment, which deals directly and poignantly with death. Grab the BBC version if you can — many public libraries carry it.
***
the long habit, part I
What, me worry?
Epicurus of Samos, philosopher
The long habit of living indisposeth us to dying.
Thomas Browne, dead person
If you haven’t visited The Death Clock, you really must. Enter your date of birth, height, weight and Body Mass Index — a measure of fitness, or more to the point, fatness — and the Death Clock spits out the day and date on which you’ll hear the galloping hooves of the pale horse.
Mine is Tuesday, December 9, 2036.
Until that date I can step whistling into the paths of all manner of passenger and freight vehicles. I can season my steak with asbestos and press my vital organs against the microwave oven as it cooks.
Unless, here at midlife, I absorb the other, far more important, more honest and less entertaining message of the Death Clock. You’re probably not going to Die today, goes that message — but you are, most assuredly, on some actual date in the easily-conceivable future, going to Die.
The difference between death and ice cream — and yes, there is one
I am afraid to die. This puts me in the company of most sane people, Christians included. It’s something to leave off the résumé should I ever apply for a position as a suicide bomber, but aside from that, I don’t think it should count against me.
Reporters always (always) ask how, in the absence of religion, I intend to make the contemplation of death go down my children’s conceptual gullets like butter brickle ice cream on an August day. Or words to that effect. Depending on my mood, I either pretend that’s possible, or I don’t, since it isn’t. Death is hard to take, and it always will be. Darwin rather insists on it. And I like seeing a bit of the fear of death in my kids’ eyes now and again. Makes crossing the street so much easier.
And I can tell by the applause all around me — ancestors behind, descendants ahead — that “I don’t wanna die” is just the sort of thing that I, as the ziploc-baggie-of-the-moment for my family’s genetic material, am supposed to feel, for their sakes. I’m the keeper of the keys.
Wait a minute. Come to think of it, that’s no longer true. Between 1994 and 2000, I lent my wife the keys enough times to produce three new bags of DNA, then went under the knife to ensure that, genetically speaking, I would be of no further use. My shift is over. I can clock out any time.
As a result of having completed my sole genetic responsibility, my fear of death no longer serves any real purpose. Perhaps vasectomies will eventually engender a population-level selective response whereby the severing of the vas deferens leads the now-superfluous man to impale himself, thornbirdlike, on the surgeon’s waiting blade, thus relieving the tribe of thirty additional football seasons of pressure on the stocks of Cheetos and Michelob. Until then, boys, fear death and eat up.
Doubting (Dylan) Thomas
I do think there are ways to diminish the fear of death and dying, and a post last spring (Milk-Bones for the Immortally Challenged) included a tip or two from Epicurus, who has now had 2,277 years to test his hypotheses. (No word yet on how it’s going, which tends to support his point.) But there are others, and a recent conversation with my boy reminded me that I hadn’t blogged death in awhile.
I don’t remember how it came up, but Connor and I were talking about the last moments of life. Though I don’t want or expect my kids to ever find death yummy, I’d like to keep their concerns about it manageable, and I’ve always found understanding to be the best path away from fear. In this case, I was able to draw on another in my arsenal of death-softeners — the fact that most people, by all accounts, don’t go out kicking and/or screaming, but do, in spite of Dylan Thomas, go gentle into that good night.
Here’s another Thomas — doctor, biologist and essayist Lewis Thomas — writing in one of the most profoundly wonderful popular science books of the past century, Lives of a Cell:
In a nineteenth-century memoir on an expedition in Africa, there is a story by David Livingston about his own experience of near-death. He was caught by a lion, crushed across the chest in the animal’s great jaws, and saved in the instant by a lucky shot from a friend. Later, he remembered the episode in clear detail. He was so amazed by the extraordinary sense of peace, calm, and total painlessness associated with being killed that he constructed a theory that all creatures are provided with a protective physiologic mechanism, switched on at the verge of death, carrying them through in a haze of tranquillity.
I have seen agony in death only once, in a patient with rabies; he remained acutely aware of every stage in the process of his own disintegration over a twenty-four-hour period, right up to his final moment. It was as though, in the special neuropathology of rabies, the switch had been prevented from turning.
Lewis isn’t the only witness against Dylan. There are countless testimonies suggesting that the process of dying is more often a peaceful, tranquil one than not. And that’s some darn useful consolation — since Epicurus really (truly) cured me of the worst of my fears of death itself, only the fear of dying remains to be dealt with. For that, I’ll turn next time to my favorite little Frenchman.
god’s burning love for me
The Minneapolis Star Tribune contacted me a few weeks back to see if I’d mind being featured in their “Believer” profile, a weekly sidebar in the Faith & Values section. Why not. They sent a few questions and gave me a 200-word limit. Here’s the result:
BELIEVER
Dale McGowan, 44, RobbinsdaleOccupation: Writer.
Identifies as: Secular humanist.
Favorite work of music
Piano Concerto in G Major, Maurice Ravel. The whole bittersweet human comedy is in that one amazing piece.What do you believe in?
This natural universe is all there is. We are all made of the same material as the stars, but unlike most of the stuff in the universe, we have the astonishing good fortune to be conscious for a short while. We should never stop dancing and singing in the face of that magnificent luck. We are cosmically insignificant, inconceivably unimportant — except to each other, to whom we should therefore be unspeakably precious.Describe something your values have helped you navigate.
I’ve spent 30 years reflecting on my father’s death. Now that I’ve reached his final age, a naturalistic understanding of death has led me to fear it less. I’ll never experience death, since my death, by definition, will be the absence of me. I won’t be there — so what’s to fear? Our identities spring entirely from a constantly recomposed electrochemical symphony playing in our heads. Asking where my “self” goes when that electrochemical symphony ends is like asking where the music goes when an orchestra stops playing. We are living music. How wonderful is that?
Only two Baptists called to save me, followed by weeks of silence. I thought I was out of the woods — until today, when I received this letter:
Dear Dale,
I’m sending these booklets to you so that you know God loves you. When you die, you don’t die like a dog. You will go on forever!
I’m 74, & received Christ into my life at age 11. I’ve never regretted it for a minute.
Love, & Rejoicing in the Lord Jesus,
Virginia H—
Enclosed were two signs of God’s burning love for me: a Jack Chick tract, including this panel:
…and a second pamphlet:
She sent them, she said, so I could know God loves me.
If that’s God’s idea of love, Virginia…well, he can frankly go love himself.
Jerry Falwell and the absent dancers
To philosophize is to learn how to die.
Michel de Montaigne
Oh relax. I’m not going to impugn the recently departed Jerry Falwell. Christopher Hitchens is taking care of that, God bless ‘im. I will grant, for reasons unclear to me, the traditional period of immunity enjoyed by the newly demised. It was Falwell’s death that got me thinking, but this post isn’t really about him. It’s death itself I’m on about, not the corpse-of-the-moment. Death and the absence of dancers.
But first, that immunity thing.
My first experience of the weird immunity we grant to the recently dead was at my dad’s funeral. I was thirteen and he was forty-five, my age next year. I loved my dad. He was a good guy.
Still, the eulogies offered by Dad’s friends and colleagues struck me as…weird.
I remember one colleague of his saying, “Dave didn’t have an enemy in the world.” “He was always thinking of others, never a thought for himself,” said another. “Everyone loved him.” “He loved his family more than any man I’ve ever known.”
Okay. I guess.
Like I said, he was a good guy. But this was my first experience of the genuine canonization of the dead that is socially mandated. Although my dad was funny and smart and hardworking and endlessly curious, he also lost his temper frequently and even sprained his thumb once. Oh, while beating me, I left that part out. I had been a shit to my younger brother, again, and Dad had come off a 60-hour week, and he couldn’t find it in himself to not sprain his thumb on me.
In addition to occasionally thrashing us, he wrote poetry and read Cyrano de Bergerac and smoked like a chimney and ate like a bison. He also taught me everything he knew about astronomy and yelled at my mom. A lot. And he sang with her. A lot. A mixed bag, like the rest of us.
Why do we need to pretend someone was a perfect saint in order to remember him fondly? And why the particular need to deny the mixed bag just because someone is recently dead?
Purgatory. That’s why.
In the medieval church, the recently dead were believed to stop in Purgatory before being dispatched to heaven or hell. It was during this layover that incoming prayers were tallied up and the person’s life assessed. Even marginally bad thoughts might tip the balance southward, so if you had anything bad to say, it was crucial to hold your tongue while all the hanging chads were counted. You know, if you can’t say anything nice, keep it inside, where God can’t hear it. Like saying “bless you” after a sneeze, the post-mortem immunity is a habit based in antique superstitions.
Well, whatever the reason, we can’t say anything bad about Jerry Falwell for a little while, because this terrible, tragic, unexpected thing happened to him: his body stopped working. And that was awfully sad.
Which gets me at last to the missing dancers.
President Bush issued a statement of condolence: Laura and I are deeply saddened by the death of Jerry Falwell, a man who cherished faith, family, and freedom. Various religious leaders have “mourned” Falwell’s passing or “grieved” his loss. Great rivers of tears will certainly be loosed at his funeral.
You see where I’m headed. Stick with me anyway. I want a credible answer.
According to the stated beliefs of Jerry Falwell and virtually every person who is “mourning” what happened to him, he has shed his earthly vessel and become a glorified being in the very presence of the Living Lord and Creator. He is in Heaven. This is the big time, the radiant confirmation of all his cherished hopes, the fulfillment of the promises of the scriptures to which he devoted his life, a happiness beyond anything mere words can devise.
And the proper response to this, apparently, is to be “deeply saddened.”
This question hit me for the first time not at my dad’s funeral, but at a funeral I attended for the mother of a friend one year earlier when I was twelve. The distraught sobs of the congregation and the soothing promises of the minister that she was “with Jesus, smiling down upon us, happy and free of pain” provided such a stark contrast that it suddenly hit me — they don’t believe him!
I hesitate to say such a thing. Having been confidently informed that I, a nonbeliever, really do believe in God, way way down deep, I shudder to make confident claims about what other people believe. I make this claim out of true bafflement at what else can explain the evidence. It’s the only credible explanation I can find for the day-and-night contrast between what Christians say happens at death and how they behave upon hearing someone has died. They pray like mad that a sick person’s glorious transfiguration will be put off, then weep and gnash their teeth when the person finally attains it. So I’m stuck with one hypothesis — that they wish with all their hearts to believe it and actual believe they believe it, but do not believe it.
If they did, wouldn’t they be singing and dancing and shouting praise-choruses to the sky? The funerals of children should be occasions for particular celebration — Little Suzy’s passed up the whole vale of tears and gone straight to Jesus! Instead, the loss of a child is seen as the greatest of all tragedies. Why? Where are the dancers? Shouldn’t the phrase “I’m glad Falwell’s dead” draw something other than shocked outrage? Shouldn’t a true believer who really loved him and wanted the best for him say, “I’m glad he’s dead, too!” — not as a mumbled coda, that’s common enough, but as a statement of certain joy?
The image of Snoopy dancing on a grave beneath Jerry Falwell’s name looks like the prelude to a stinging critique. You may well have assumed as much when you saw it. But shouldn’t it look like the polar opposite — like an elated confirmation of what Falwell believed to be true? Shouldn’t a Christian look at that and say, “At last, the atheist gets it!”
My wife claims that funereal tears are for the survivors, not for the departed person, and of course that’s a part of it. But why then, when a believer hears of a death — especially an untimely one — do they gasp and say things like, “Oh, that poor, poor girl”? Shouldn’t it at least be seriously mixed?
Imagine, for example, a Tutsi mother in Rwanda at the time of the genocide. The UN is pulling back as machete-wielding Hutus approach the village. After much tearful pleading, a UN peacekeeper agrees to take the woman’s four-year-old child to safety in another country. She is unlikely to ever see him again. If she survives, she will miss him terribly. But her tears would be undeniably mixed with profound joy that her son has a chance at happiness and safety. You can picture a relieved smile beaming through her tear-streaked face as the truck pulls away.
If I truly believed in heaven as advertised, that would have to describe my face at the funeral of a loved one. Right? He made it out to happiness and safety. Next time you’re at a funeral, see if you can spot even one such face.
Coming to grips with mortality is the greatest of all challenges for a conscious being. It’s a life’s work. When someone asks how on Earth I can bear the idea that my death will be the end, I want to look the person in the eyes and say, “Yes, it’s very hard…isn’t it.” I’ve never tried that, but I dream of doing that just right, just once, and connecting with the honest knowledge of mortality we all carry inside ourselves.
I’m not one of those secularists who pretend that our mortality is no big deal. It’s a very big deal. I don’t especially like it. But I’m a big boy, I can handle it — especially since I never bought into its denial, and so had no childish illusions of immortality to abandon.
And neither will my kids, I’ll wager. They know about the heaven hypothesis, and they know the oblivion hypothesis, and like their dad, they’ll spend a lifetime working it out and coming to grips with the fact that, no matter what comes next, this life ends. I hope also to instill a passionate love of reality so they’ll work to understand and accept what is rather than what goes down most easily. Heaven sells itself, for the most part. My job is to help them, and myself, find the genuine comforts in the naturalistic model. There are many, and I’ll yammer about those soon.