NON-MORBID THOUGHTS ON DEATH AND DYING

Death: Why Must We Be Wallflowers at the End-Time-Paradigm Hop?

Our admission is prepaid. So … why do we decline the offer to dance?

Yeah the women tear their blouses off and the men they dance on the polka-dots and it’s partner found, it’s partner lost and it’s hell to pay when the fiddler stops: it’s CLOSING TIME— Closing time, by Leonard Cohen¹

Kaiser Permanente left me another voice mail today. They were reminding me I hadn’t returned the pre-planning form with my selection of who I want to flip the switch on the day my lips and voice box aren’t working right. The message between the lines fairly hummed: It’s the sensible, mature thing to do.

I option-7'd it. I don’t entirely know why.

I think all medical plans send them out now. Some go by the name of “A Living Will.” Kaiser pirouettes around the word “Will,” but the net intention is the same.

And it is the sensible, mature thing to do: each of us courageously facing his/her/their End-Time Scenario. So …

Are you ready for yours?

The end-time scenario

From what I’ve seen in my brief tenure on this planet, you are ALL gonna face your End-Time Scenario. I’ve observed the death-pattern often in my own life. Loved ones have conformed to it, albeit wistfully, some in a state of baffled surrender. The same for strangers and acquaintances alike. The too young. The very old.

I can’t imagine the outstretch of your life concluding any differently from the rest of them.

Say what?

Oh, sorry … but the jury is still out regarding my own.

I know. It may sound like whimsy, but it’s not.

It’s fact.

Selling mortality is a fickle thing

Back in my life insurance selling years, I frequently found myself needing to rattle the complacency of a young husband and father who just couldn’t see himself ripped out of his family’s picture. When I ran across one of these, I locked him in my steely gaze, and this is what I said:

“John, I know death only happens to the other person. But you know something? To me, you are the other person.”

If he turned the tables on me, I’d have had to tell him, “I don’t fit that paradigm, John, but you certainly do, and to hide from that fact will only make your family suffer.”

Happily, no tables were thus turned, and the combination of my unblinking stare and my disquieting conclusions combined to sell lots of life insurance.

But did it mean I’d brought about in him a flash of enlightenment? That he’d recognized and accepted the End-Life paradigm in himself? Hardly. I think it was more that he buckled under the pressure of expectation.

Death and the vast, black reaches of space

A half-dozen years ago, I recorded the following in my journal:

Saturday, Cinco de Mayo, May 5th, 2018. Still another missile was launched today from Vandenberg Air Force base.

We used to call them rockets when I was a kid. And now America — as she’s starting to rekindle some of her enthusiasm over planting another American flag in space — is calling them rockets again. Just as a kid would.

This Missile’s going to Mars. It’ll take six months to get there.

The quarterback and the mathematician

Six months! And to think it was all worked out ahead of time by a team of mathematicians and physicists.

Consider the physics of this: When the Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes tosses the pigskin, he leads Travis Kelce in such a way that — racing full-speed — Kelce will run under the ball, catching it.

Similarly, the skilled physicists and mathematicians lead the rocket so it will arrive just as Mars runs under it.

Don’t tell me that’s anything but awesome! It boggles the mind.

I need to take it a step further, though.

I’m no mathematician; I’m no scientist. But I was a quarterback. I, and all kids who were sandlot quarterbacks, have shared the same phenomenon with Patrick Mahomes. There is a feeling, somewhere between the gut and up under the rib cage, that knows (and knows that it knows) at the exact moment the ball leaves the fingertips that it will soar to its precise, prefigured apogee before beginning its descent into the waiting fingertips of the receiver. It’s as though the kid, or the seasoned NFL quarterback, perceived the trajectory in that one split second the ball was launched.

Science tells us how the mere cocking of that football behind the ear can trigger the brain’s hypothalamic bartender to shake up a precise chemical cocktail. Damn, he’s fast! And before you can say blitz, it’s on the hostess’s tray, delivered, gulped down and instantly registered as a mathematically exacting guidance-twinge in Mahome’s gut. Not a micro-second too soon, either, as Mahome’s arm thrusts forward and the ball is released.

Doesn’t all this spark a spiritual nerve in you? It does me. It is allowing a part of me that is not intellect to embrace an enormous subject my mind can’t wrap itself around but glories nevertheless in its magnificence.

Sometimes when words fail, “Hallelujah” is sufficient.

Space and time. Footballs and rockets.

Hallelujah.

How vast is vast?

That rocket’s target is only six months and 140 million miles from Earth. And the target’s in our galaxy, of course. But what of the other galaxies? Astronomers tell us millions of galaxies exist beyond our Earth’s. And as we speak, rockets are en route to puncture the outer reaches of our galaxy and enter one of theirs.

And just as our minds balk at accepting our own End-Time Scenarios, and thus are oddly uncomfortable with Time’s vastness, we are equally uncomfortable not dealing with End-Place Scenarios.

Where does “the end” take place?

What I’m struggling so massively to say is that our minds need to attach an end to things. Am I right? Isn’t that how you feel? Will anything less than screwing a cap on outer space satisfy your mind? Isn’t it like, after traveling 100 million, quadrillion, zinka-freakin’-zillion miles, past one galaxy, into another and out, in and out, in and out, till it gets to the end of the last galaxy, our rocket just has to go *ponk* into the skin of an end-point?

Is there an outer limit to space?

Huh? Like, this whole time we were inside this ginormous ball which contained all the galaxies and we just now reached the limit of it.

The end-place.

The rocket’s Heaven.

Don’t you feel better already?

And as the doddering old astronaut (a thirty-five-year-old when he left), climbs out of the rocket and raps his ancient knuckles against the skin of the wall, he recalls, as I’m sure you do, that, according to the theory of particle physics, that wall is composed of nothing more than electromagnetic forces to give the skin of the inner ball a semblance of solidity.

Oh, my God! There is something beyond!

At the end of the vastness of space, we find ourselves within the equally vast world of the minuscule — molecules of electrons and protons and neutrons now so far apart we could — if we were tiny like them — walk past one of them and it would be years, centuries, eons maybe, before we’d encounter the next.

Even the physicist has to feel uncomfortable dealing with end-places.

Inner space: how tiny is tiny?

On page 114 of her book, Switch On Your Brain,² Dr. Carolyn Leaf, one of the pioneers in neuro-science, says, “We have gone from molecules to atoms to quarks, leptons, and bosons; and now physicists are proposing an even smaller concept called preons as minuscule particles that make up quarks. They are also proposing a string theory, which says that the ultimate building blocks of matter are tiny vibrating strings, which are even smaller than preons.”

Because the reasoning mind is not constructed to be able to contemplate not reasoning, faith seems to always reside at the far end of the extremities of physical reality!

And then there is the end-time scenario

Death is one of those areas that belies reason. Follow me on this.

Observation shows us — yours and mine — that everyone who has ever lived is either still living or has died. That seems an obvious and safe place to start.

Yet as long as you and I have breath, we have to accept that statement only on faith. Why? Because, we — you and ol’ Jay — have no certainty we will die. None. As with space and time, we have reached one of those extremities of things where faith resides.

And we’re not alone. Every living being on this planet of ours reasons thus: “I don’t care what’s happened in the past; you may be dropping like flies around me, but I’m not one of you.” And you must think that way until the last breath leaves you and you may or may not be left, at last, finally, with the absolute knowing that is beyond faith.

Or not.

Not to know the end-places and end-times of things is damned uncomfortable. It is not a happy place or a happy time to be holding hands with only reason.

Reason is isolating and lonely.

And our faith will always be there to put a cap on such mental uncertainty.

Beyond the final frontier?

There are outer-space distances beyond which the mind cannot stretch. But Astro-Science’s faith tells us there are farther vistas.

There is an inner-space smallness to things, smaller than the mind can penetrate, but quantum-physics and math, holding hands with Science’s faith, pushes us ever toward the infinite.

Is there a place where Space and Time combine? Dr. Carolyn Leaf³ also points out, “One scientist even describes preons as twisted braids of space-time. If preons exist (I think they do), they are unimaginably tiny and would have to fit inside a quark, which is currently the smallest known particle of matter, having a size of zero, and the strings are even smaller.”

Suppose science does prove that preons — those twisted braids of space-time — exist in the smallest of micro-matter. Are we then likely to encounter corresponding galactic space-time-braids in the vastest, deepest of space?

Sleep as a micro end-time scenario

We have faith enough to sleep at night, don’t we? With the assurance that morning will follow. It’s doubtful we would be able to sleep at all without that fundamental faith.

It’s impossible to envision our own death. But we all look forward to a good night’s sleep.

There.

So…

NOTES:

¹ Closing Time, by Leonard Cohen.

² Switch On Your Brain: The Key to Peak Happiness, Thinking, and Health (Kindle Edition), by Dr. Caroline Leaf. P. 112

³ Ibid, P. 115

I have also borrowed flagrantly and unashamedly from the DVD the Quantum Edition of What the Bleep!? Down the Rabbit Hole, but in such a general way that it’s impossible to cite what came from it and what came from my own mental meanderings as a result of watching it.