A Few Thoughts on Death

     In his 2005 commencement speech to the graduating class at Stanford, Steve Jobs said, “No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there.”   There is a chance he realized later that this is not true, for in 2010 a handful of the one million people successfully committing suicide each year were doing so by jumping out of the windows of iPad manufacturing factories in southern China. 

     According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 55 million people die annually.  That's roughly 150,000 people every day; 20,000 of whom are apparently children under five years-old who die in and as a result severe poverty (hunger, poor sanitation, disease, polluted water, or a combination thereof). 

      We’re all going to die, and as far as we know there’s nothing waiting for our souls on the other side.  Not only will we each die as individuals, but it’s highly likely that the human species will one day go extinct, thus following in the footsteps of 99.9% of all the species to have ever lived on Earth.  Therefore, it’s vital for one to both seize the day and live in moderation.  It’s likely that the majority of people alive today endure harsh economic and physical conditions that inhibit them from being free and living up to their full (or near-full) potential. This disparity among humanity makes it even more imperative for those who can help to step up and do so.  This same principle of lending a hand to the less fortunate also applies to the natural world – which, barring the occasional natural disaster, plague, or animal attack, has proven to be largely defenseless in the face of decimation by humankind – that we depend on for survival, and should largely be respected as equally as other humans.  And, assuming life matters, this ultimately becomes one of the most pressing questions related to the existence of our species, which has been endowed by evolution with intelligent minds capable of contemplating our consciousness and altering the environment to our preferences: Are we going to kill each other and ourselves directly (nuclear holocaust) or indirectly (resource depletion; burning holes in the atmosphere, poisoning the land and water, etc.), or are we going to get our shit together in time to avoid self-destruction, which would leave open the fashionable possibility of being destroyed by an alien race.

      Yet it is hard to help others unless you can and have helped yourself, and even then your sphere of influence may be limited to a small field.  That's okay, do what you can.

      One more point on dying.  Let’s say I live to be one-hundred years old (I think this is a fair age to presume a healthily individual will live to, unless he or she dies of an unnatural cause or kills themselves).  That means that I have lived nearly 30% of my life.  My “life battery” is around 70% and is steadily declining. In my view, the last 30% doesn’t count because after seventy everything moves in slow-motion and you forget everything anyway, so you’re pretty much done by then.

      Here are two mortality-related excerpts.   The first is written by Edward Abbey and comes from an awesome book published by the Sierra Club Paperback Library called The Best of Edward Abbey.  Edward Abbey edited the book and I highly recommend picking up a copy.  This is from an excerpt called Cowboys:

      Roy is a leather-hided, long-connected, sober-sided old man with gray hair, red nose and yellow teeth; he is kind, gentle, well-meaning, but worries too much, take things too seriously.  For instance, he’s afraid of having a heart attack, falling off the horse, dying there on the sand, under the sun, among the flies and weeds and indifferent cattle.  I’m not inferring this – he told me so.
      What could I say?  I was still young myself, or thought I was, enjoying good health, not yet quite to the beginning of the middle of the journey.  I listened gravely as he spoke of death, nodding in an agreement I did not feel.  His long yellow fingers, holding a cigarette, trembled.
      Roy’s not Mormon and not much of a Christian, and does not honestly believe in an afterlife.  Yet the manner of death he fears does not sound bad to me; to me it seems like a decent, clean way of taking off, surely better than the slow rot in a hospital oxygen tent with rubber tubes stuck up your bodily orifices, with blood transfusions and intravenous feeding, bedsores and bedpans and bad-tempered nurses’ aides – the whole nasty routine to which most dying men, in our time, are condemned.

            And what follows is the cool forward to Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001, A Space Odyssey:

      Behind every man alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth.
      Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local Universe, the Milky Way. So for every man and woman who has ever lived, in this Universe there shines a star.
      But every one of those stars is a sun, often far more brilliant and glorious than the small, nearby star we call the Sun. And many - perhaps most - of those alien suns have planets circling them. So almost certainly there is enough land in the sky to give every member of the human species, back to the first apeman, his own private world- sized heaven - or hell.
      How many of those potential heavens and hells are inhabited, and by what manner of creatures, we have no way of guessing; the very nearest of them is a million times further away than Mars and Venus, those still remote goals of the next generation. But the barriers of distance are crumbling - one day we shall meet our equals, or our masters, among the stars.
      Men have been slow to face this prospect. Increasing numbers, however, are asking: "Why have such meetings not occurred already, since we ourselves are about to venture into space?
    Why not, indeed? Here is one possible answer to this very reasonable question. But please remember: this is only a work of fiction.
      The truth, as always, will be far stranger.

            If you’re interested in reading more articles about death, I’d recommend you track down a copy of the New Scientist magazine special report on death.  Also, check out the tracks “Willing to Die,” and “A Happy Death” in the World as Emptiness Part 2 section of the Alan Watts lecture series Out of Your Mind, as well as "A Natural Satori," part of The Inevitable Ecstacy Part 1 lecture. 

Here are some pictures taken by Vince and Logan of our midnight excursion to the Calvary Cemetary in Bodega.

Lastly, this seems like as good a time as ever to insert a poem:

Heavy waves of emptiness
Crash upon thy heart
They erode the soul
They leave you cold
And naked in the dark

Waves of fear and suicide
Waves of deep unknown
Will strike you down
And you will drown
In the ocean blue alone 

The salt of tears
The promised years
The world at the shore
All fade away
Like sunny days
As you sink to the seafloor 

What is in the waves, you ask
That bears such heavy weight?
‘Tis shattered dreams
‘Tis sights unseen
And the risks you failed to take.

-Walter Lloyd Waterson