Death Is Always Fatal
By Harry Calhoun
The sublime pissing contest of adversarial nuclear bomb tests. Bizarre, random
murders, some all too close to home. Your friend's aunt or your cousin's cousin develops cancer.
There are any number of banner headlines in the news, or alarming tragedies in everyday life. Most, like meteorites or comets passing Earth, miss us. And however narrowly that miss may have been, we pat ourselves on the back and say, "There, there, it's not us, we'll live forever, and happily." Like soldiers marching into battle, we remain firmly convinced that it's the person next to us who'll get the bullet.
Well, surprise. Given what happens when nations declare their sovereignty with a show of force; given that random violence is a growing trend; given that one in three of us develops cancer, it is likely that something bad will happen to you. Yes, my comfortable, kicked-back reader. And me, your very concerned but no less vulnerable writer.
But this essay is not about our general lack of awareness of mortality. It's about middle ground. America talks about her teenage shootings, her detected near-miss meteorites, her AIDs and cancer victims, every day, in the workplace, in the streets, in the cafes. And she talks them to death, talks about them with headshakes and condemnations, as if it could never happen in her backyard. Yet it keeps happening in backyards interchageable with her own.
All right. Where's the middle ground I'm talking about? Well, on one hand, we have the "it can't happen here" mentality of which I've been speaking. We know where that comes from: It's driven by fear, the urge to be secure, the denial of death that Ernest Becker wrote so eloquently and starkly about.
On the other hand, while we deny our fears, we swing the other way and invent a cult of immortality. You see it every day: This drug will lower your blood pressure and help you live longer. If you eat this herb daily, you will have less chance of developing colon cancer. Exercise in exactly this fashion will help you live to be 90 or beyond. The list goes on and on. Sunshine will kill you if you sit in it too long.
So in a world that gets constantly scarier — or does it? Read the ancient Romans and see how they saw their world as falling apart — we tell ourselves that we can stay alive longer and be healthier. It seems a cruel joke, the equivalent of Woody Allen's assessment of a restaurant: "The food is bad and the portions are small." Only here, we want larger portions of the life we perceive as frightening.
I see people buying magazines with articles about how to live longer. The self-absorption this promotes does nothing to stop Pakistan or Libya from testing more atomic weapons, does nothing to stop kids from getting hold of weapons. Again I turn to Becker's magnificent The Denial of Death. And reach his simple but eloquent conclusion: We can totally reject the idea, and we do, but we're going to die.
So, to pass time on the way to death, we embrace these magazine articles and news items, as Philip Levine said, "like a housewife discovering television." Chunky women and portly men bow to the low-fat diet as their savior. Someone told them that low fat is good. But theoretically, if you eat enough heads of that low-fat lettuce, or eat enough cans of that low-fat tuna, you'll gain weight. It's calories, not fat, that makes the difference. A 175-pound person will gain weight on a low-fat diet of 4,000 calories
If you eat grapefruit at every meal you will lose weight. If you use this exercise plan, you will live longer and be healthier. Here's a plan to help you stop drinking. Here's another to help you stop smoking.
People around me keep talking about diets, about passenger and side airbags, about home security systems. They talk as if they can live forever. Then they fret and worry about the bombs, or and more often and worse they don't worry. And I don't get it.
I'm the soldier marching into battle who gets the bullet. I don't like the fact of death, but I believe this life is going to kill me. Still, for the cult of healthiness, for those who don't go out in the sun, who won't drink or smoke, who will do nothing because it's fatal: Wake up and live
Use your death as an excuse to live. Live with death firmly in your mind, and understand what a gift this fleeting life is. Something's going to kill you. That's certain, and don't let it bother you. Just get on with this as best as you can, and as lovingly. If love is the key, and I believe it is, serendipity is the melody. My step-grandfather wasn't exactly a role model as a human being. People kept telling him, "Stop that drinking, Roy. It'll kill you." Finally, at 89, cirrhosis finally did his old liver in. Well, I guess that was a warning from God that drinking and living till 90 were mutually exclusive.
And when I mentioned to someone the irony that the great American writer Charles Bukowski had died at 72 — after a notorious lifetime of heavy drinking — from leukemia, that person didn't understand that it was a disease that, unlike cirrhosis, had nothing to do with alcohol. "Just goes to show," she said.
Yeah, just goes to show. We continue believing that cause-and-effect governs all of our actions. If we drink, we die. If we smoke, we die. If we are loners, we kill innocent people. If we don't have the 2.4 kids and two cars and garage, well, we need to get a life.
And in the meantime the bombs are exploding and the murderers are loose and we treat it as if it is someone else's problem.
What a cruel joke if we learn to prolong our silly lives to150 years and well beyond, and then blow ourselves out of existence. The very self-absorption that got us there may, when we look up, be the reason we see the killing blast that is our last vision.
BACK