SIX: I fear feath

Back to death. To think about death clearly, it makes sense to somehow get beyond the fear of death. On the one hand, the fear of death is an instinct handed to us genetically by the process of evolution. It is obviously in the interest of humans as a species to have a “healthy” fear of dying: this way, we will instinctively avoid it. On the other hand, the development of human consciousness has enabled us to rise above many of our instincts: we no longer have to fuck everything in sight (though we may still want to) or gouge out the eyes of our rivals at the shrinking waterhole. The development of rational thought, presumably within the last, what 10,000 years or so, trumps irrational fear.

All living things die. Death is a part of life. Get used to it. Everything has a season.

Yet the fear lingers. One manifestation of my own fear of death concerns how I will be disposed of once the heart-beat monitor flatlines. Despite my sense that consciousness ends once your neurons stop firing, I can’t be sure that sensation will cease right away. So I have an “irrational” fear of both being buried “alive” (or at least still sensate) and of being burned alive, as in cremated before all my sensation has ceased.

I know where these “irrational” fears come from. Like most of our irrational tendencies, they are anchored in early memories. My first experience of hearing about someone I knew dying involved a friend of the family who ran out of air while skin-diving in Florida. I obsessed over that piece of information to the point where I would panic whenever I felt deprived of air. Like when my friends in my all white school would call for a “nigger pile on Henry,” and would summarily jump me and pile on top of me, mimicking the social hierarchy. A few years ago, I watched one of those videos called “The Faces of Death,” real footage of people dying. One segment was of a couple who were underwater spelunking (exploring caves) with scuba gear. They got lost. I can fully relate to the panic they experienced as their air ran out.

During my years in alternative service as a conscientious objector, I worked at a psychiatric half-way house. Talk about unclear on the concept: they had an abandoned refrigerator on the back porch from which the door had not been removed. One night, one of our residents, a beautiful, depressed young girl of no more than 18, decided to climb in, shut the door, and check out. What if after a half hour or so holed up in there she changed her mind?

The burning alive fear comes from my house burning down when I was four. My sister, aged all of seven, and I were home alone with our caretaker Clifford (more of a drunk than a child development specialist). She noticed the smoke coming out of the shingles. We went to find Clifford, who was down the road in the tool shed. He tried to call the fire department using the new-fangled dial phone, but ended up having to go next door to get his brother-in-law, the neighbor’s caretaker, to help. Many of my toys that didn’t get fully burned up retained that inimitable smell of the fire for years. The fire was allegedly started by a squirrel short-circuiting the knob-and-tube wiring, and this story has been immortalized in my novel/story collection called “Squirrels in the Walls.”

Another story in that same collection is called “Death Masks,” wherein yet another incarnation of Barney Blatz inadvertently burns down a storage shack in the woods and subsequently discovers in the ruins a box of masks made by his grandfather, an amateur sculptor, of his medical colleagues upon their demise as templates for making a bust of their heads. But the eyes of the masks radiate with black smudges from the smoke and strike Barney with so much terror that he will fear ghosts forever, regardless of whether he believes in them or not.

To be clear here, to separate reality from fiction: There was a fire; the shack did burn down. I didn’t start it. I did discover the smoke-smudged death masks afterwards.