Dying to Be Happy

[Warning: the following should not be read by anyone who is afraid of flying. Likewise you probably don’t want to read this if you are superstitious or you somehow think you are going to live forever.]


Five days from now I will be on a 747 that will be bombed to bits over the Atlantic Ocean. My wife will be in the seat next to me and we will never make it to Paris to rediscover our love. The children we leave behind will become orphans. The possessions which created the outline of our living will get divided among our loved ones. What remains will be packed into boxes or given to others; we will have no need for these things now. Only the terrorist who took our lives and the lives of 419 others on the plane with us will not be surprised he was going to die. Likely he was the only one on the plane who was really willing to face death in the first place …

It’s astonishing what the news of a man boarding a plane on Christmas day with a bomb swaddled around him can cause me to fantasize about. One man and one plane out of the billions of men and millions of planes and suddenly my mind starts to circle the drain of eternity. I’m not saying that the recent news of a Nigerian terrorist slipping through a broken rat-trap of security to try and kill Americans over Detroit shouldn’t concern us. My wife and I are actually traveling to Paris in a few days and I for one don’t want to die with her and hundreds of others on the flight over there. But as I entertain the above daydream what I realize is how our aversion to death has made it such that the only time we tend to face it is in the form of some hideous cruelty. I mean, I don’t want to be the one to break the news, but – whether we die on an airplane or in a hospital bed - the odds are not in favor of any of us living forever.

Over the past century, we have slowly dialed up our fear of death until we’ve all but blotted out the idea that we are going to die. We consider it seriously only in the form of some accident that we weren’t planning on, and when we do think about it, we quickly find a way to pretend something can be done to prevent it. It’s a pact we make with those who govern and entertain us - those who sell to us and school us – they have all learned to misdirect us when it comes to death lest we not elect them or buy from them the next time around. Any other approach would be bad for business.

A terrorist gets on a plane with a bomb and our government and media gets busy brushing away our fear with the message that they’re not going to tolerate anything that could kill us. Meanwhile, millions of people are quietly dying each year from starvation, thousands are slipping away each week from cancer, and tens and hundreds are murdered every day in cities all over the world, all while we are blissfully texting each other on our cell phones and paying our endless mortgages. Even lightening kills more people every year than all the suicide bombings on all the continents – although we wouldn’t know this because we prefer to watch our bad weather on TV where it can’t hurt us.

It seems to me that as recently as 40 or 50 years ago, we had a much healthier attitude about dying. From what I saw, my grandparent’s generation lived much more intelligently then we do now, which is to say they lived like they were going to someday die. When death came to them they faced it as they had lived, with a practical attitude and a strong sense of humor. They lived as fully as possible to their very last day because they had lived every day as if it could be their last. About three weeks before my grandmother died I found her pulling weeds out of a garden with aching hands and lungs that were struggling for breath, and when I asked her why she thought she had to do this now she simply replied “because it has to be done.” For her, dying was like weeding a vegetable garden; you did it because it had to be done.

For those of you like me who find yourselves thinking about being killed in a mid air explosion and then desperately scrambling to replace that thought with some fluffy store-bought distraction or mindless piece of high-calorie entertainment, I have a suggestion that you might want to consider. Once a day, every day, think about dying. I don’t mean to say you should dwell on it, just realize that your days are numbered and then get on with what you can do about living more fully in the face of it. The truth is that our lives are only really made from the wispy illusions of the jobs and families and home that we create to convince ourselves that we are not alone, and what could possibly makes those things more immediate and more real than the reflection that some day they will all be gone.

On top of that, think of what not being afraid of death will do to the business of terrorism. Imagine if governments and the media kept reminding us that someday we would die, until we all finally accepted death and were no longer afraid of it. Nothing would stop terrorists from trying to kill us faster than knowing we were no longer afraid of dying. And then we would be in possession of the only thing terrorists really have that the rest of us don’t: the ability to accept and embrace our deaths.

When I get on that plane five days from now and it takes off into the sky, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to take my wife’s hand and look out the window and try to remind myself that the world below me is not really my home. I’ve only just been passing through and leaving it as we just have is not so bad after all. The soft clouds are supporting me and, no matter what, the loveliness of my wife’s hand in mine is going to be there until the end of time.