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.