Friday, April 12, 2019, Delray Beach, Florida


Notes From My Journal

Thoughts on Jefe’s Death

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I wrote about the death of our dog Jefe (left) last week. I said that he gave us so many gifts – so many moments of laughter and love – during his lifetime. Thinking about it since then, it occurred to me that pets like Jefe provide us with another sort of gift, an existential gift.

Dogs have a relatively short lifespan – typically 8 to 15 years. That’s enough time for us to see them grow from puppies into adults and then into those frail years. It’s also enough time for us to learn to love them. Sometimes very deeply. But then they die and we have to deal with the grief of losing them. It’s painful, but we go through it and we move on.

We’re likely to experience the death of half a dozen pets before we are middle-aged. That’s half a dozen opportunities that our beloved pets give us to practice the grieving and recovery process – to prepare us for what we will one day have to go through with the humans we love and have loved for the longer length of human life.

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From My Work-in-Progress Basket

Intimations of Mortality

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Saturday, December 1, 2018

Delray Beach, Florida.- My friend Alec sent this brief note to me this morning:

“A light went out in our bathroom.  I remember that I changed it 14 years ago.  I showed my son how to do it, thinking surely it is the last time that I’ll change it.”

It reminded me of something Gary North, who was in his mid-sixties at the time, wrote about a dozen years ago. It went something like this:

“Just bought a suit. It’s inexpensive but well made, a nondescript charcoal gray that I can wear for almost any occasion. A good investment, considering the likelihood that this may be the last suit I ever buy.”

It stunned – and spooked – me.

Now I’m doing the same thing. All the time.

Should I get a new car? I don’t see why. I have more cars than I need right now. The car I drive is an Audi S5 coupe. I bought it slightly used five years ago. It’s fantastic – reliable and fun.

The other two, a 27-year-old Acura NSX and a 13-year-old BMW 850, are rarely used. Should I sell them? No. They cost almost nothing to maintain. And they will likely hold their value. Someone will figure out what to do with them when I die.

The last suit I bought – for Patrick’s wedding five years ago… was that my last? Yes, I think it was. I have a half-dozen perfectly good suits in my closet. I might wear each of them once a year.

Sometimes these intimations of mortality prompt me to spend more.

“A six-foot tree would be one-quarter the price,” Paul Craft, my palm tree consultant, tells me. “And it will be 30 feet tall in only 15 or 20 years.”

“Only 15 or 20 years?” I say, laughing and shaking my head. “No. Order the biggest one you can find.”

We joke about death, but only to trivialize it, to temporarily diminish the dread.

At my book club meeting last night, we talked about the fear of death. (We were reviewing two books: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari and The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant.) About half of the group (four) admitted to that fear. The other half said they didn’t. I said that the only way one can be fearless about one’s death is to deny it. I said something like, “If you really contemplate your own death, the utter extinction of your personal self, you cannot feel anything but terror.”

I did not persuade them.

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From My Work-in-Progress Basket

What Happens When We Die?*

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Everything in the universe exists in a continuous state of fluctuation, from extremely contracted to extremely expansive. Planets. Rocks. Galaxies. Humans too – our bodies and our minds.

I once heard a fascinating lecture by a neurobiologist who had suffered a stroke that left her temporarily unable to process visual and aural information rationally. She said it was like being on LSD. She talked about looking at her hand and not being able to distinguish between the fingers and the space between them. She said the experience helped her understand that the material world was an energy field where there are no rigid distinctions between observed phenomenon, between flesh and air, for example. She also said that it was not scary. It was, in fact, the opposite of scary. She said she felt an amazing calmness and openness as if her body were melting into the universe.

I remember thinking that this was an example of consciousness expanding beyond the normal bounds of experience. And that although her sensations could be dismissed as hallucinatory, they could also be seen as truer in some way than the “normal” experience of the world. After all, from an atomic (sub-atomic) perspective, the human body is not separate from its environment but connected to it, both in terms of proximity and composition. In other words, our bodies and the invisible space around us are essentially electronic impulses.

It could be argued that her experience was one in which the essential condition of existence was finally visible because her awareness of existential information was highlighted, while the screening process that rationalizes sensory input was diminished.

Of course, I could not help but relate it to the idea we are discussing here, the fundamental nature of everything as fluctuations between contraction/tightness and expansion/relaxation.

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Miscellaneous Essays

Giving Thanks

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I woke up this morning in pain again. I injured my shoulder wrestling a few weeks ago, and it doesn’t seem to be healing. Certainly not as fast as it would have healed when I was in my 30s.

This is one of the many execrable things that happen to you when you reach 60. But it’s hardly the worst. The worst is that you can’t avoid thinking about death. People you know — colleagues, friends, and family members — are seriously sick or dying.

Right now, I see death as a hateful thief — ready to rob me of the time I need to accomplish the goals I have yet to accomplish.

There is so much still to do: books to write, movies to make, business to conduct, and places to see. But most of all there are relationships I owe time to.

A reader recently wrote asking me why, when discussing how I spend my day, I don’t talk about the time I spend with my family and friends. The main reason is that I don’t feel I should be dragging them into public view without their permission. But another reason is that I write mostly about what I’ve learned… and I haven’t learned how to do a very good job of spending time with them.

When I think about making good use of the time I have left, it’s clear to me that working on my personal relationships should be my top priority.

So why don’t I do that now?

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