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.