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.