EIGHT: The meaning of meaninglessness

Something I don’t like to hear from the spiritual side of this equation is how “everything happens for a reason,” a corollary being that if someone dies, it’s because “it was their time.” Bullshit, I say. Tell that to the “collateral damage” of the war in Iraq, the children caught in the crossfire. Shit happens. Accidents happen. Chance is a real thing, and sometimes things do happen for no reason. Recently a friend of mine, Brandi, died from complications of elective, cosmetic surgery. Ever since I met her 15 years ago, she had to struggle to make the rent every month. In the last six months of her life, she “inherited” a church and was on her way to becoming a significant figure in the spiritual life of San Francisco. For the first time in her life (she was in her early 50s), she had enough money. She even bought a house. But then the pain medicine they gave her after her operation interfered with the beta blockers she was taking for high blood pressure, and her heart stopped, just like that. It was not her time.

In one of my periodic efforts to get beyond my atheism, I once started an on-line religion called the Church of the Cosmic Wink. It had one doctrine: “It seems like there might be something....” I’ve advanced a baby step since then. The new doctrine I would propose is: “It seems like there might be something, and whatever the hell it is, we’re going to go for it.”

So, I don’t want to be buried or cremated. I want to drop dead wherever I am and let nature take its course, just as it does with every other of the billions of species. I even have the means to carry this out: a plot of land in the remote Santa Cruz mountains. When I get near to actually dying, I intend to go there and die there like that, like the deer, the squirrels, the bluejays, and the banana slugs.

At one time I thought I would die elsewhere and have my children cart me to this place in the mountains we call Deer Creek. When I mention this, they go “Ew!” It does seem to be asking a lot of my family, though I feel less conflicted about it since “Little Miss Sunshine,” the hilarious movie where the family shoves the dead grandpa in the trunk in order to make it to the beauty contest on time.

Still, it will be easier on everyone if I can just arrange to die there. As we will see in the chapter on different cultural approaches to death, there have been people who have been able to consciously arrange their deaths. This strikes me as a worthy goal. To take charge of our deaths not in a suicidal way but in a conscious way. It seems to me if we stop denying death, it might well be possible to consciously track its progress, to make a date with it and meet it perhaps not with open arms, but at least with confident poignancy. One thing I have no interest I doing is getting beyond tragedy. Tragedy is a beautiful part of the human condition. One of the more compelling aspects of the Christian metaphor is its recognition of tragedy. If anything, I want to get back to an appreciation of tragedy from the post-World War II slide into existential meaninglessness. As Stalin once might have said, the death of an individual is a tragedy; the death of a million individuals is a statistic. In our time where genocide has become as ordinary as toothpaste, it would help for us to get back to where we can appreciate that every single one of those million deaths is a tragedy. No matter if it “their time” or not. No matter if their souls are going on to a “better place” or not. Maybe there’s only one place.