Congrats on getting over your fear of death!
2022-04-28
Dear reader,
The last time I had a puppy in my life, I was in diapers.
Our neighbor Mary Lou Peck had a litter of corgis and gave us one. He was aggressive. He would go for my full diaper as a food source.
My parents gave him back to Mary Lou, and he was put down. All the puppies in that litter had to be killed, or so I was told.
Words are hard. It sounds harsh to say the puppies were killed. Put down is the colloquial farm expression to say they were euthanized. To bring a quick and humane end to another’s life.
But all words are euphemisms. Some more than others. A word like euthanization gives the human mind roaming area to think on the topic without feeling the emotion. The homespun, idiomatic verb to put down does the same job. Neither does anything for the puppy. Let’s hope he didn’t see what was coming, but either way, his reality was killed.
I haven’t been killed, yet, but I’ve come close a couple times. Perhaps many readers have, somehow.
Are you afraid of death?
Words don’t do much to express a fear of death. A 2021 poll of Brits asked, “Are you afraid of dying?” Averaging across ages and genders, 41% said, “I am.” Forty-three percent said, “I am not.” And 16% said, “Don’t know.”
I could answer any of the three depending on what thoughts or emotions I tune into. If I focus on how I’ve done my utmost in life, I feel ready for death when it comes. You can’t pick the time.
Or so I tell myself.
But that last part, the timing, stirs the fear up.
On April 5, 1987, Mary Lou’s life ended at 47, along with that of her daughter Kristen Jean Peck, 22. They were driving to a baby shower when they sped at New York State Thruway mileage over the roaring floodwaters of the Schoharie Creek on I-90. The creek was swollen with spring rain. It had scoured away at the concrete footings of the bridge. It gave out with the Pecks and eight other souls on board.
The rushing waters below did not give them a chance.
After the bridge had initially given way with the Pecks and others on it, a photographer in the area, Sid Brown, caught the subsequent collapse of an additional section.
The Pecks were our neighbors two doors down. The kids were older than me at 8 and I didn’t know the family that well, but I saw the kids around school and I could see it left a mark on them. As Mary Lou’s son Willard “Bill” Peck says in an excellent Gazette article retelling the bridge collapse story 30 years later, “Be thankful every day. You don’t know when it’s your day.”
I admire Bill’s gracious words. It might have taken me longer than 30 years to come up with them.
Talking about death is hard. A friend died last year of cancer in his 70s. I found myself feeling upset the other day when someone referred to his death as “unfortunate.”
I felt sad about his death. He and I had recently spoken about how healthy he felt, and how he was enjoying new projects. It feels like a good bet he wanted to live longer, and that his family wanted that too.
But when I die, and it doesn’t matter when, please don’t talk about it as “unfortunate.” I’m the luckiest son, father, and partner alive, and grateful for every day. Dayenu, as is sung on Passover. It is enough. Misfortune implies it could have been some other way. That’s a fantasy. I’ll die how I die, and when.
And furthermore, don’t wish me bad luck on my journey. I want to enjoy and experience as much as I can of the world consuming me.
Having a puppy now, for the first time in 40-something years, I’m fascinated by how organisms come into this world by eating it.
Ready for life, knock on rock.
Socks. Charging cubes. My sweater, bathrobe, or towel. Oliver wants to hold it in his mouth. And why shouldn’t he? A puppy’s mouth, like a toddler’s, is the critical interface with the world.
With “Leave it” we’ve trained Oliver enough that I can leave my socks on the ground and feel confident they’ll be in the same place tomorrow morning.
But then he found the compost. I could call till I’m blue in the face and his ears might as well be off.
Does the compost mind being eaten? I can’t imagine it. Its fate is sealed.
It’s that in-between area, when you feel you have more of the world to taste and you’re not ready to stop, where I meet resistance. That’s where my terror for death is strongest, but also where the words are easiest.
“No.”
“It’s over.”
These were three words that got me over my fear of death last week.
I almost drowned a long time ago. It was an age and place where I didn’t have words.
Words are hard. Today, on this art-project of a “blog,” I’m more comfortable writing “I almost drowned.” Is it truer to my body to write “I almost drowned?” I’ll only say that drowned men tell no tales. Almost-drowned men are a different kind of animal.
It didn’t leave a mark on my body, at least not one I can trace to the event. It did touch my mind and my heart. It left a fear of death.
I didn’t know it, though. At the time this happened, I had no control. I could have screamed, but I’d already learned that didn’t bring help.
I screamed on the inside, which isn’t the same. It was the start of a long history of pushing this entire series of events away. I pretended it hadn’t happened. I felt confused about why I felt so unsafe. Why did my body feel so tense all the time? As if braced to hold myself together in the vacuum of oblivion that could come anytime.
Since everything looked “normal” around me, as far as I knew, I blamed myself.
What happened to me made no sense, so to my rational mind it’s as if it didn’t happen. My body felt differently. As the book says “The body keeps the score.” It gave me clues all the time.
One way is through writing. I’m not writing today because I’m enjoying it. I’m writing because I need to. I write to discover. I’m willing to sit at a blank page and listen to stories my body wants to tell. Like I did with Genevieve Hansen, I offer myself as a witness. The thoughts that come next, are coming from things my body wants to tell me but that I haven’t listened to. I call this my emotional inbox.
Dissociating is a way to get through things. You turn off certain circuits so they don’t get fried. But those circuits don’t like to be shut down for long. They start shooting out distress signals, first whispering, then screaming.
Healing is not hard. We have so much more agency to heal than we realize. The choice to do so starts with listening to one thought from your body, and then the next. Some call it meditation. I call it emptying my inbox.
The more you listen, the more you learn. The more you learn, the more you want to listen.
Words are hard when circuits are shut down. The terror of the body as it screams louder and louder often doesn’t have words the rational mind can accept.
After a while of emptying my inbox, the right words are easy to find and feel true in my body. My body and mind are speaking at same speed and volume with each other.
What had felt like an impossible situation, not only fear of death, but fear of death as a tool that can be used against me, is over in three words.
“No.” It tells the assailant that the door is closed, the incident over.
“It’s over.” This tells yourself that you never have to live through this again.
Try it with someone in your life: “No.”
Try it with an event you keep reliving: “It’s over.”
***
Congrats!
That’s what this year’s dropped-from-the-sky mylar balloon says. It’s for you! (Last year’s was for Rick Holcomb.)
I see you,
Tristan
Quill Nook Farm