Death, the Final Emotion

I read this last night at the Kwantlen Writers' Guild annual reading.

You can also read the full version here.

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Dying. Death. Deceased.

These words hold a dark, indefinable weight. What will that last heartbeat feel like? My final gasp of air? These thoughts lurk like a wolf spider in my subconscious, a furry shadow I can’t quite see. Organ failure terrifies me, but not as much as the subsequent loss of conscious thought. One day, knowledge and memory will disappear like city lights winking out one by one. Some might remain on file or paper. Others to be recalled by family or friend. But all of my emotional vitality and fastidious reflections will be buried with me.

And I don’t want to lose that. I have spent far too long in rumination, ponderance and soul spelunking. Like a cow with its cud, I have chewed over every aspect of life—ethics, spirit, philosophy, creativity, relationship and happiness to list some of the highlights—until there is nothing left to digest. Then I take a bite of something new. I want to keep the essence of me alive. Sure, we’re all connected and one day everything will pass. Yet as much as I appreciate community, ecology and the universal thread that holds it all together, I still very much like the notion of I.

I am Lee Michael Beavington. I was born into Arkell, Ontario on May 18th in the year 1977. I like to eat chocolate and watch National Geographic specials on cheetahs. And I will someday die.

There, I said it. I will one day cease to exist. There will be no thought process, no brain activity, no ability to analyse situations to determine the pros and cons. After I die, I won’t be able to look back and think: Hey, this isn’t so bad. I can jump from Earth to Mars to Jupiter! My body only got in the way before...

I wonder, is it my brain that I fret over? My soul is reasonably safe. I’m vegetarian. I never kill spiders in the bathtub. I’m an all-around nice guy. When I die my soul—in whatever shape it so decides—will live on. But my mind, the 100 billion neurons that have wired themselves based on the specific choices I have made these past 32 years, will not make that final transition. Think of all the books I have read! What about my biology degree, all those facts and figures? Cheetahs can run 110 kilometers per hour! One blood cell carries a billion oxygen atoms! Sclerenchyma cell walls possess lignin! If I could only be a head in a jar. I wouldn’t take up much space. Just give me a shelf somewhere in a university library. I could read a new book or journal every day, and help direct students to the New Scientist.

I have trouble, in particular, with the notion that death is forever. The fact that life is finite would not be so hard to swallow if everything that came after wasn’t so long. That isn’t fair. In fact, it violates the code of my moral handbook. If life is short, death should be too. The universe is 12 billion years old. If I’m lucky, I’ll be a centenarian. So that means every second I breathe, comparatively speaking, is nearly four years for the universe. What kind of Divine Being determined that to be okay?

The answer to that question I will likely never know. At least not until I die. And I’m a curious person. I’m a scientist. I like to know how things work. Perhaps God will oblige me in testing some hypotheses. Yet my logical, rational intellect will literally die with me. What if I forget to include a control in my divine experiments? I imagine God is a busy person, and won’t be my personal guinea pig for long, if She agrees to that in the first place. (I use the word She here because, let’s face it, birth is a woman’s domain, and creating the universe would have been one helluva labour, and credit is due where credit is due.)

Of course, death can be devastating. Sudden, violent, and unforgiving in its cold and rigid grip. Lives end—permanently—while others are forever changed. You often can’t predict death. (Though sometimes you can, the great curse of self-awareness.)

But I’m stuck in my head again. Is that the problem? When you get down to it, death is an emotion. That’s right. A feeling. Humans are emotional beings. We feel, we laugh, we hate, we grieve. As much as scientists—men in particular—want to believe otherwise, it is our emotions that define us. Our bursting passions, our darkest fears, our greatest joys. The events, jobs, people, creations and adventures in our lives—the experiences we recall most vividly—are built on feeling. In Star Trek, Spock’s most pivotal moments are when he loses control, when emotion enters the picture.

So death is our final emotion. And that is a scary thought.

My own experience with death is limited to a trip to Disneyland when I was six years old. At the hotel pool, playing tag with my cousins in the deep end—they could swim, I could not—I lost my grip on the concrete lip and fell under. I fought to find air. But no matter how hard I screamed on the inside and flailed on the outside, I could not escape. My cousin Sam pulled me out. I still remember the dark spectre trying to drag me down. Is that what death feels like? Submersed in fluid, caged in the amnion, powerless to escape from the reaper’s womb? Dylan Thomas would have us pledge: “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Yet when my time comes, is it not an exercise in futility to rage against the dying of the light?

Then again, maybe it’s best not to dwell on one’s own mortality. Which means I have stewed long enough over this murky pot. At the very least, when I’m dead I won’t have to think about being dead. And if I can, what a pleasant surprise that will be.