The primary holidays I celebrate in my eclectic personal religion are the two solstices and equinoxes. Those are the “real” events that others celebrate as Christmas-New Years-Chanukah-Kwanzaa-Saturnalia-Brumalia-Sankranti, Easter-Passover-Zagmuk, Midsummer, and Ramadan. I always set my watch so that the alarm goes off at precisely the time the sun makes its direct hit on either the equator in the case of the equinoxes or the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer in the case of the solstices. These are the events of course which give Earth its seasons, and while humans might have flourished without the earth’s wobble on its 23 degree tilt, that tilt has made our lives richer, more agriculturally productive, and given us a big metaphor for the cycles of life, death, rebirth, and renewal.
This past June 21 at precisely 11:06 AM PDT, I had a sonographic probe up my ass when the sun hit the Tropic of Cancer. My doctor was looking at the TV projection of the sonographic photo of my prostate and telling me that MY cancer was so small and localized in a slow-growth area of the gland that he wouldn’t recommend any treatment at this time, that I was a candidate for active surveillance, or watchful waiting. This was of course exactly what I wanted to hear, and to hear it a such a spiritually powerful moment was yet another gratifying instance of synchronicity.
Of course for every such example of powerfully meaningful coincidence, there’s another counter example, like that bus last week in the French alps, full of pilgrims who had just prayed their hearts out at Sanctuary of Notre-Dame-de-la-Salette, where the Virgin had appeared to two boys in 1846. She was nowhere to be seen when the bus flew off the cliff and plunged into the La Romanche River, killing 26 of the pilgrims. Maybe the Virgin saved the other 25 who survived.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Saturday, July 21, 2007
FOUR: Faith healing
This writing project started out as a book, though I deliberately gave it a bloggy tone – casual, personal, even intimate, loosely structured. Then my ex-wife, a professional editor, read the first few chapters and said I had more of a blog than a book, so here we are. I like having immediate readers with a mechanism for their immediate reactions. Being a somewhat lazy writer, I don’t feel obliged to follow rigorous rules of structure. In the previous post, I was speaking of the practical aspects of dying. I’ll come back to that, but now I want to talk about cancer, and the practical aspects of surviving.
When I closed my eyes and clicked “post” for the first time a few days ago, and then announced the blog to my email list, I had forgotten that I had mentioned my prostate cancer, and also that I had vowed to tell as few people as possible about it. Oops. I wanted to avoid the reactions of horror that many people have. They aren’t helpful. And yes, I got of few of these reactions from the people reading my blog, thankfully not that many.
While of course I was upset upon first hearing the diagnosis, the prognosis has been excellent. If I wanted to scoop it out as my primary urologist strongly recommends – my sex chakra! – there is a 98% chance (so they say) of eliminating all traces of the cancer forever. There is also a 50% chance that I will henceforth be impotent and have continuing bouts of urinary dysfunction/incontinence. And almost a 100% chance that if (if?) I want to continue having sex, I will have to take Viagra.
So, I have been searching out alternatives to “radical prosectomy” as they so poetically put it. In researching the many different approaches and practitioners out there, I have concluded that they are ALL quacks, whether allopathic (medical), homeopathic, or naturopathic. This isn’t to say that they aren’t all well-meaning, sincere practitioners (most of them are), only that they claim to know more than they actually know. They justify this deception with the completely valid notion that part of their role is to keep the cancer patient hopeful. So of course they are going to exaggerate the efficacy of whatever treatment they recommend. Can’t blame them. Can’t fully trust them either.
And once you have severed your dependence on the at least nominally objective, “scientific” medical establishment, it’s a jungle out there. The struggle to find an approach that makes sense for you parallels – indeed, includes – the quest for a spiritual practice. You kind of have to go with what resonates for you as true, what inspires “faith.”
The approach I am currently using was recommended to my by my massage therapist, a woman who specializes in Afrocentric healing practices for men’s sexuality, in the form of a book called 90 Days to a Healthy Prostate, written by the unfortunately named Larry Clapp, a Phd., not an MD.
What I like about Clapp’s approach is that it is a comprehensive compendium of a number of alternative therapies, among which we are advised to choose those that make sense for us. The main aspects of his program are:
1. Doing an 8 day ultimate fast, drinking only lemonade with maple syrup
2. Eating fresh organic vegetables, with only a little (organic) meat and dairy, balancing pH toward a more alkaline than acid diet
3. Homeopathy
4. Dental hygiene
5. Exercise/yoga/massage
6. Emotional healing
7. Tantric sexuality
Most of these suggestions I’m following assiduously. I have a little trouble with homeopathy. Especially the “muscle testing” popular among homeopaths. The practitioner asks your body a question, and gets the answer by pressing down on your arm and assessing your resistance.
The biologic dentist Clapp sent me to at great expense (mine) tried this kind of test with me, and even got a couple of answers wrong. But then he asked me suddenly if I had ever been hit in the mouth. Why yes I have. 1973, or so at a demonstration against uniformed Nazis at the school board in San Francisco. Comrades of mine had secretly taken it upon themselves to physically eject these fellows from the meeting, and as the fight ensued, I saw some guy indiscriminately clubbing people. On impulse I grabbed his arm, got hit smartly in the mouth with his club, and was arrested for felony “assault on an officer.” The charges were later reduced to “disrupting a public meeting,” and I spent 3 long weekends in jail.
The dentist said that my lower front teeth were dead, their roots infected from this blow to the mouth, and that they were on the “prostate meridian” as described by acupuncturists. I can’t say I believe this, but the poetry of the idea that maybe that cop had “caused” my cancer was just too compelling. I let the dentist remove the teeth. Odd are the things that inspire faith.
When I closed my eyes and clicked “post” for the first time a few days ago, and then announced the blog to my email list, I had forgotten that I had mentioned my prostate cancer, and also that I had vowed to tell as few people as possible about it. Oops. I wanted to avoid the reactions of horror that many people have. They aren’t helpful. And yes, I got of few of these reactions from the people reading my blog, thankfully not that many.
While of course I was upset upon first hearing the diagnosis, the prognosis has been excellent. If I wanted to scoop it out as my primary urologist strongly recommends – my sex chakra! – there is a 98% chance (so they say) of eliminating all traces of the cancer forever. There is also a 50% chance that I will henceforth be impotent and have continuing bouts of urinary dysfunction/incontinence. And almost a 100% chance that if (if?) I want to continue having sex, I will have to take Viagra.
So, I have been searching out alternatives to “radical prosectomy” as they so poetically put it. In researching the many different approaches and practitioners out there, I have concluded that they are ALL quacks, whether allopathic (medical), homeopathic, or naturopathic. This isn’t to say that they aren’t all well-meaning, sincere practitioners (most of them are), only that they claim to know more than they actually know. They justify this deception with the completely valid notion that part of their role is to keep the cancer patient hopeful. So of course they are going to exaggerate the efficacy of whatever treatment they recommend. Can’t blame them. Can’t fully trust them either.
And once you have severed your dependence on the at least nominally objective, “scientific” medical establishment, it’s a jungle out there. The struggle to find an approach that makes sense for you parallels – indeed, includes – the quest for a spiritual practice. You kind of have to go with what resonates for you as true, what inspires “faith.”
The approach I am currently using was recommended to my by my massage therapist, a woman who specializes in Afrocentric healing practices for men’s sexuality, in the form of a book called 90 Days to a Healthy Prostate, written by the unfortunately named Larry Clapp, a Phd., not an MD.
What I like about Clapp’s approach is that it is a comprehensive compendium of a number of alternative therapies, among which we are advised to choose those that make sense for us. The main aspects of his program are:
1. Doing an 8 day ultimate fast, drinking only lemonade with maple syrup
2. Eating fresh organic vegetables, with only a little (organic) meat and dairy, balancing pH toward a more alkaline than acid diet
3. Homeopathy
4. Dental hygiene
5. Exercise/yoga/massage
6. Emotional healing
7. Tantric sexuality
Most of these suggestions I’m following assiduously. I have a little trouble with homeopathy. Especially the “muscle testing” popular among homeopaths. The practitioner asks your body a question, and gets the answer by pressing down on your arm and assessing your resistance.
The biologic dentist Clapp sent me to at great expense (mine) tried this kind of test with me, and even got a couple of answers wrong. But then he asked me suddenly if I had ever been hit in the mouth. Why yes I have. 1973, or so at a demonstration against uniformed Nazis at the school board in San Francisco. Comrades of mine had secretly taken it upon themselves to physically eject these fellows from the meeting, and as the fight ensued, I saw some guy indiscriminately clubbing people. On impulse I grabbed his arm, got hit smartly in the mouth with his club, and was arrested for felony “assault on an officer.” The charges were later reduced to “disrupting a public meeting,” and I spent 3 long weekends in jail.
The dentist said that my lower front teeth were dead, their roots infected from this blow to the mouth, and that they were on the “prostate meridian” as described by acupuncturists. I can’t say I believe this, but the poetry of the idea that maybe that cop had “caused” my cancer was just too compelling. I let the dentist remove the teeth. Odd are the things that inspire faith.
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
THREE: Everything I know
One week in March, 1964, I had the most fortunate – or unfortunate – experience of falling in love for the first time (her name was Rivvy, bless her soul, a Teaching Assistant in my creative writing class) and taking LSD for the first time. There was once a book called “Everything I Know I Learned on Acid,” and this title rings true for me. It’s quite true that on the good acid trips, you experience what feels like death, along with a vision of the clear blue light that can only be what others have called God. My shaky recollection (if you can remember the 60s, you weren’t there) is that the number of such “good trips” numbered about 10 out of a total of 50. So I have had as much first hand experience as one could ask for, and still I don’t quite believe. It strikes me as equally likely that LSD was introduced into the student movement by the CIA in order to confuse and disrupt the increasingly revolutionary civil rights and antiwar movements. I suppose both things could be true, that the spiritual experience of LSD is valid and the CIA used it to defend capitalism. But it also seems that any experience of death that doesn’t end in actual death could just be a trick of the imagination, designed by the “unintelligent” designer, evolution, to keep folks alive and the species on the survival track. So much as well for all the near-death experiences people report, the going toward the light, the vision of one’s dead relatives, and all that. The operative word is “near.” There is clearly a qualitative change that happens once you are already truly dead, even if it is just the nonexperience of eternal nothingness – the most “scientifically” likely possibility.
It is also true that it would be in the evolutionary interest of the species to regard death as unspeakably horrific and therefore avoid it at all cost. Were we to treat death as if it were benign, we would be less motivated to avoid it, one supposes. One thinks of the “suicide bombers” in the Middle East, supposedly expecting a glorious afterlife. Or those Buddhist monks and nuns who immolated themselves to protest the war in Vietnam.
However, my acid experiences gave me a good five years believing. I was able to get out of the army by becoming a Conscientious Objector – probably the only Zen Buddhist in Waukesha County, Wisconsin (where I grew up) at the time.
A few years after his encounter with ELIZA, despite his fear, my father committed suicide, or, as he liked to put it, committed “voluntary euthanasia,” at the age of 87 in his own home (the subject of another story of mine entitled “Paragraph,” which was published in the mass market magazine, “Moonfish”). His methodology of choice was a mixture of bourbon and Seconal. Since he was a doctor himself, this act might be characterized as “physician assisted suicide” – it may well have involved another physician prescribing the Seconal knowing full well what my father was up to – about which more later. I was angry at him for awhile, as one tends to be when anyone close to you takes his own life without consulting you. But he had had a couple strokes, he could no longer walk, he was in a lot of pain, his continence was growing increasingly iffy. I now understand that, given the alternatives, it may have been a rational choice.
A few years later, my mother, also 87 at the time, died in a local nursing home, where she had lived for about 6 months, the whole time asking repeatedly, “Do I live here?” She still recognized members of her family, but time and memory had become a frightening indecipherable jumble.
There must be a better way to do this, to get old, get sick, and die. This blog will explore the practical aspects of dying, alternatives to suicide or wasting away in a nursing home, considerations of what to do with one’s physical body once it expires, as well as the meaning of death. In short, it will be a manual of how to die, written for myself as well as for anyone else facing this transition.
It is also true that it would be in the evolutionary interest of the species to regard death as unspeakably horrific and therefore avoid it at all cost. Were we to treat death as if it were benign, we would be less motivated to avoid it, one supposes. One thinks of the “suicide bombers” in the Middle East, supposedly expecting a glorious afterlife. Or those Buddhist monks and nuns who immolated themselves to protest the war in Vietnam.
However, my acid experiences gave me a good five years believing. I was able to get out of the army by becoming a Conscientious Objector – probably the only Zen Buddhist in Waukesha County, Wisconsin (where I grew up) at the time.
A few years after his encounter with ELIZA, despite his fear, my father committed suicide, or, as he liked to put it, committed “voluntary euthanasia,” at the age of 87 in his own home (the subject of another story of mine entitled “Paragraph,” which was published in the mass market magazine, “Moonfish”). His methodology of choice was a mixture of bourbon and Seconal. Since he was a doctor himself, this act might be characterized as “physician assisted suicide” – it may well have involved another physician prescribing the Seconal knowing full well what my father was up to – about which more later. I was angry at him for awhile, as one tends to be when anyone close to you takes his own life without consulting you. But he had had a couple strokes, he could no longer walk, he was in a lot of pain, his continence was growing increasingly iffy. I now understand that, given the alternatives, it may have been a rational choice.
A few years later, my mother, also 87 at the time, died in a local nursing home, where she had lived for about 6 months, the whole time asking repeatedly, “Do I live here?” She still recognized members of her family, but time and memory had become a frightening indecipherable jumble.
There must be a better way to do this, to get old, get sick, and die. This blog will explore the practical aspects of dying, alternatives to suicide or wasting away in a nursing home, considerations of what to do with one’s physical body once it expires, as well as the meaning of death. In short, it will be a manual of how to die, written for myself as well as for anyone else facing this transition.
TWO: In loco parentis
Both my parents in their later years gave me the same advice: “Don’t grow old.” I was never inclined to follow parental advice, but in this case, I tried, and, I am sad to say, I have failed.
When my father was in his eighties, I brought home my Osborne computer upon which I had installed a somewhat primitive “artificial intelligence” program called ELIIZA, which functioned as a Rogerian nondirective psychotherapist. (I used ELIZA and its marvelously fractured syntax as a character in another prepublished novel, “Tales of Monkeyman,” but that’s another story).
I loaded the program and sat my father down at the keyboard. The miniscule screen prompted: “HOW DO YOU DO. PLEASE TELL ME YOUR PROBLEM.” I left my father alone. He called me back about 5 minutes later to show me what he had written.
“I fear death.”
“DO YOU SAY YOU FEAR DEATH FOR SOME SPECIAL REASON?”
“I don’t believe in an afterlife.”
“THAT’S QUITE INTERESTING.”
That was it, as far as he could go, and probably the longest psychological examination my father ever had (as well as his longest experience with a computer).
In many ways, ever since adolescence, I have defined myself in opposition to my father. He was a successful pillar of the community, a well-regarded opthomologist with owning class aspirations. I became a downwardly mobile quasibeatnik. He was an alcoholic, I became a pothead. As he became a Dupont Republican (to the right of Reagan), I became a communist. But here we were, staring each other in the face: I fear death. I don’t believe in an afterlife.
I have spent most of my life identifying as an atheist. I remember the exuberant sense of liberation I got when I took on this identity at age 13, the flush of pride when I told my very Catholic friend Kathy that I didn’t believe in God. A year or so previously, I had been confirmed in the Episcopal church, and I do remember enjoying the tranquility of my own thoughts as I prayed in church. Prayed for what? To be good at some sport. For my peers to like me. To grow pubic hair. Stuff like that. What convinced me that there wasn’t a God after all was quite simply the lack of evidence.
In college, I discovered Eastern religion and attempted to embrace it. Casting the I Ching every Sunday morning off and on for 40 years became my church even during my most atheistic years. Jung’s concept of Synchronicity – an acausal linking of events by ‘meaningful coincidence’ – a quasi-scientific justification for my beliefs. I continue this ritual to this day, the Book of Changes being full of at least as much good advice as the Bible, even if its predictive capacity is suspect. In my communist years, I broke with Jung when I heard that he got himself protected by the Nazis by announcing that “Semitic psychology is qualitatively different than Aryan psychology.” I began to see Synchronicity as a reactionary concept, which attempted to horizontally cut across and cripple the vertical cause-and-effect march of history toward socialism. Yet I continued to shake those coins, justified now by a sense of the very dialectical nature of ancient Taoist thought, yin and yang as Marxist thesis-antithesis.
When my father was in his eighties, I brought home my Osborne computer upon which I had installed a somewhat primitive “artificial intelligence” program called ELIIZA, which functioned as a Rogerian nondirective psychotherapist. (I used ELIZA and its marvelously fractured syntax as a character in another prepublished novel, “Tales of Monkeyman,” but that’s another story).
I loaded the program and sat my father down at the keyboard. The miniscule screen prompted: “HOW DO YOU DO. PLEASE TELL ME YOUR PROBLEM.” I left my father alone. He called me back about 5 minutes later to show me what he had written.
“I fear death.”
“DO YOU SAY YOU FEAR DEATH FOR SOME SPECIAL REASON?”
“I don’t believe in an afterlife.”
“THAT’S QUITE INTERESTING.”
That was it, as far as he could go, and probably the longest psychological examination my father ever had (as well as his longest experience with a computer).
In many ways, ever since adolescence, I have defined myself in opposition to my father. He was a successful pillar of the community, a well-regarded opthomologist with owning class aspirations. I became a downwardly mobile quasibeatnik. He was an alcoholic, I became a pothead. As he became a Dupont Republican (to the right of Reagan), I became a communist. But here we were, staring each other in the face: I fear death. I don’t believe in an afterlife.
I have spent most of my life identifying as an atheist. I remember the exuberant sense of liberation I got when I took on this identity at age 13, the flush of pride when I told my very Catholic friend Kathy that I didn’t believe in God. A year or so previously, I had been confirmed in the Episcopal church, and I do remember enjoying the tranquility of my own thoughts as I prayed in church. Prayed for what? To be good at some sport. For my peers to like me. To grow pubic hair. Stuff like that. What convinced me that there wasn’t a God after all was quite simply the lack of evidence.
In college, I discovered Eastern religion and attempted to embrace it. Casting the I Ching every Sunday morning off and on for 40 years became my church even during my most atheistic years. Jung’s concept of Synchronicity – an acausal linking of events by ‘meaningful coincidence’ – a quasi-scientific justification for my beliefs. I continue this ritual to this day, the Book of Changes being full of at least as much good advice as the Bible, even if its predictive capacity is suspect. In my communist years, I broke with Jung when I heard that he got himself protected by the Nazis by announcing that “Semitic psychology is qualitatively different than Aryan psychology.” I began to see Synchronicity as a reactionary concept, which attempted to horizontally cut across and cripple the vertical cause-and-effect march of history toward socialism. Yet I continued to shake those coins, justified now by a sense of the very dialectical nature of ancient Taoist thought, yin and yang as Marxist thesis-antithesis.
ONE: Nobody know
One of the five novels I’ve written that languish in a drawer (actually, on a disk) in a prepublished state is entitled “White Knight, or How I Came to Believe That I Was the One who Caused the San Francisco City Hall Killings and the Jonestown Massacre.” My favorite passage from that novel (to be honest, from any novel) has my autobiographical alter ego, Barney Blatz trying to teach a bunch of preschoolers a few days after Jonestown:
I'm conducting an extended circle time, because it's easy and uses up time. For a week now, everything I look at gives off emanations of death, even the children, as if death were an intrinsic quality of matter that radiates from it visibly, palpably, like the waves of heat given off by blacktop melting in the sun.
I read the children "Hansel and Gretel," a story in which children get away with murder.
Even the songs we sing have a morbid cast. "I know an old lady who swallowed a fly, perhaps she'll die." "Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home." "Oh my, no more pie," a call-and-response song of successive disasters ending in a train wreck. It's this last song we're singing when the phone rings.
...The car's too slow,
I fell and stubbed my toe.
My toe got a pain,
I got to catch a train.
The train had a wreck,
I nearly broke my neck.
Oh, my,
No more pie.
"Hello?"
There's nothing but snuffling on the other end.
“Hello!" I shout into the phone.
"It's Cali," says a nearly inaudible voice.
"Cali! Could you come into work? I can't do this myself."
"You haven't heard?"
"Heard what?"
"Dan White."
"What about him?" My patience is wearing thin.
"He shot the mayor and Harvey Milk this morning."
"What?" I nearly drop the phone." Oh, Cali!" I don't know what to say. "Are they all right?"
"They're both...dead."
"Oh my God."
That shivery feeling again, like the hole in the small of my back has opened up all the way through and my guts are slithering out like snakes.
"Can you come over?" Cali sounds no older than six.
"Of course. I'll close the school. Let me call the parents."
I go down the list calling parents while the children are doing who cares what in the classroom. I get all but four. Two have disconnected phones. Two have no answers.
While waiting for the parents to come, I bring the children back to the rug, but I don't enforce any of the usual rules. I can't seem to care whether they “criss-cross applesauce” their legs or not.
"A terrible thing has happened," I begin.
"Again?" says the narrow-faced Dathan.
"Again. Someone has shot the mayor."
"Dr. Martin Luther King was shot," says Dathan.
"That's true, Dathan."
"My uncle was shot," says Clarisse, her hair fixed in a dozen pig-tails.
"My auntie died in Jonestown," says one of the twins as if she were sharing her trip to Disneyland.
"Where do you go when you die?" Dathan asks.
"Heaven if you're good, Hell if you're bad," answers Clarisse.
"It's not quite that simple," I try to explain. "To tell you the truth, nobody has any idea what happens to you when you die." As I say these words, I have trouble believing them. Could this be true? With all our incredible scientific knowledge about the origin of the galaxies and the structure of DNA, nobody knows anything about something as simple and commonplace as death? A shudder passes through me as I try to accept this ignorance.
"Nobody know?" asks Dathan again, incredulous himself.
“Nobody knows," I say.
This blog is a response to Dathan. It will explore the mystery of death and the art of dying. I am currently in my early sixties, and the days tick by with breathtaking speed. I have recently been diagnosed with a “small amount” of prostate cancer (I think this is like being “slightly pregnant’). I used to think about death a lot, say, ten times a day. Now I think about it pretty much all the time – almost as often as sex – especially since I’ve decided to write a blog about it.
The reason that time seems to speed up as you get older is simple, I think. It’s because every successive day is a smaller proportion of your elapsed life. For a two year old, one year is half one’s life. For a 62 year old, one year is 1/62nd of one’s life, and so on.
I'm conducting an extended circle time, because it's easy and uses up time. For a week now, everything I look at gives off emanations of death, even the children, as if death were an intrinsic quality of matter that radiates from it visibly, palpably, like the waves of heat given off by blacktop melting in the sun.
I read the children "Hansel and Gretel," a story in which children get away with murder.
Even the songs we sing have a morbid cast. "I know an old lady who swallowed a fly, perhaps she'll die." "Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home." "Oh my, no more pie," a call-and-response song of successive disasters ending in a train wreck. It's this last song we're singing when the phone rings.
...The car's too slow,
I fell and stubbed my toe.
My toe got a pain,
I got to catch a train.
The train had a wreck,
I nearly broke my neck.
Oh, my,
No more pie.
"Hello?"
There's nothing but snuffling on the other end.
“Hello!" I shout into the phone.
"It's Cali," says a nearly inaudible voice.
"Cali! Could you come into work? I can't do this myself."
"You haven't heard?"
"Heard what?"
"Dan White."
"What about him?" My patience is wearing thin.
"He shot the mayor and Harvey Milk this morning."
"What?" I nearly drop the phone." Oh, Cali!" I don't know what to say. "Are they all right?"
"They're both...dead."
"Oh my God."
That shivery feeling again, like the hole in the small of my back has opened up all the way through and my guts are slithering out like snakes.
"Can you come over?" Cali sounds no older than six.
"Of course. I'll close the school. Let me call the parents."
I go down the list calling parents while the children are doing who cares what in the classroom. I get all but four. Two have disconnected phones. Two have no answers.
While waiting for the parents to come, I bring the children back to the rug, but I don't enforce any of the usual rules. I can't seem to care whether they “criss-cross applesauce” their legs or not.
"A terrible thing has happened," I begin.
"Again?" says the narrow-faced Dathan.
"Again. Someone has shot the mayor."
"Dr. Martin Luther King was shot," says Dathan.
"That's true, Dathan."
"My uncle was shot," says Clarisse, her hair fixed in a dozen pig-tails.
"My auntie died in Jonestown," says one of the twins as if she were sharing her trip to Disneyland.
"Where do you go when you die?" Dathan asks.
"Heaven if you're good, Hell if you're bad," answers Clarisse.
"It's not quite that simple," I try to explain. "To tell you the truth, nobody has any idea what happens to you when you die." As I say these words, I have trouble believing them. Could this be true? With all our incredible scientific knowledge about the origin of the galaxies and the structure of DNA, nobody knows anything about something as simple and commonplace as death? A shudder passes through me as I try to accept this ignorance.
"Nobody know?" asks Dathan again, incredulous himself.
“Nobody knows," I say.
This blog is a response to Dathan. It will explore the mystery of death and the art of dying. I am currently in my early sixties, and the days tick by with breathtaking speed. I have recently been diagnosed with a “small amount” of prostate cancer (I think this is like being “slightly pregnant’). I used to think about death a lot, say, ten times a day. Now I think about it pretty much all the time – almost as often as sex – especially since I’ve decided to write a blog about it.
The reason that time seems to speed up as you get older is simple, I think. It’s because every successive day is a smaller proportion of your elapsed life. For a two year old, one year is half one’s life. For a 62 year old, one year is 1/62nd of one’s life, and so on.
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