THE END OF PRETENDING: What? Me Afraid of Death?
by Harvey Lillywhite
There was a little turbulence, nothing out of the ordinary for someone who flies a lot. Then it got a little worse-a stomach-in-the-throat drop, swaying wings teeter-tottering along. If you had a drink on your tray table, it was sliding back and forth.
"Sorry for the turbulence, but there's no way around the storm," the pilot told us. "We should be out of this in a couple of minutes."
I was calm. Certainly more calm than most of the people on the plane. If this was my time to go, I thought, then so be it. I wasn't, I told myself, afraid of death.
I had recently witnessed both my step-father and my father die from cancer, the bedside vigil, the falling into a coma, the breathing more and more difficult, shallower and shallower. Then the nearly violent rasping near the end. Truly gruesome. At first it seemed tragic and horrible. But in both cases, I remember thinking that it was a miracle, like the labor of giving birth. (I'd seen my two sons born, saw how they grimaced at the miracle of popping into the world, coated in vernix, wet, and suddenly cold no doubt in the sterile delivery room with its awful chrome stirrups, cold white sheets, and glaring lights.)
Then it was over. The last breath. And the limp, heavy body somehow grown so much heavier, though they say we lose a tiny bit of weight at death-the spirit escaping? The end. I'd seen it. I was overcome with grief, but I was also strangely analytical, ever the scientist (or small child) fascinated by what is real. How was it possible? One moment alive, the next, nothing. Nothing at all.
What can I say except that having experienced these deaths, having held the hands of my fathers as they died, I thought I was ready for my own death. I thought I could deal with any death, my own included, without fear, accepting, a kind of ultimate surrender to the inevitable?
I remember sitting there in my window seat on that plane with no one beside me. I was looking at the bolts and nuts that attached the seat in front of me to the floor. I remember thinking that I wished I were a simple bolt, that after the crash, the bolt would survive unharmed. Maybe someone would pick it up someday and put it in his pocket. But all of us, soft machines, vulnerable to the violent forces that would…what? Vaporize us, burn us to death? It was gross to think about, but I can't say I was afraid. I had, I thought, come to terms with death.
Then the nose of the plane tilted suddenly down, almost straight down. And we dropped fast. It was the same feeling as the steepest roller coaster. It was at this moment that I lost it. Hey, everyone around me in the plane was losing it. Oxygen masks popped out. There was screaming. I dug my heels into the floor and pushed by feet into the little steel legs of the seat in front of me. My hands grabbed the end of the arm rests. My whole body was completely tense and shaking. It was the end. And I was scared out of my mind. I didn't want to die. It was a deep, primal, all-encompassing fear and I was crying, literally crying, "NO." Or rather, "NOOOOOOOOOO))))))))))))))))))))))!"
Three other times in my life I should have died.
The first time was right in front of a Mormon church when I was 8. I was riding bikes with a couple of friends on a two-lane country road. We were coming back from Smoot's Dairy where we'd ridden maybe two miles to buy a pint glass bottle of chocolate milk. We'd made it there with our dimes. We'd purchased the bottles. We undid the aluminum-foil top and pulled the flat little paper tab from the top of the bottle, which we'd shaken first to distribute the cream. We were sweating from our ride-it was a hot July morning. We stood by the open cooler where all the milk bottles were, feeling the nearly frozen air blowing on us, drinking the cold chocolate milk.
On the way back, I decided to cross to the other side of the road. Without looking at all, I veered into the road. I suddenly realized that there were two cars behind me and one on-coming. The first car behind me grazed my bike and made me wobble badly. I was about to fall in the middle of the road when the on-coming car nicked me miraculously back on course. I grasped the handle bars and felt them turning back and forth from right to left. I remember hearing honking horns and seeing behind me the last car that had swerved to miss me and was now fishtailing sideways toward me. It struck me a glancing blow that sent me crashing into the gravel on the other side of the road-right at the front walk of the Mormon church.
I wasn't a Mormon. But my two buddies who'd just witnessed my crash were. They insisted that God had just saved me. Here we were eight years old, and they insisted that there was no other explanation. They grabbed me bodily and hauled me, literally kicking and screaming, into their church. I remember it had a strange disinfectant smell. There was a man there who listened to my friends tell the story of my crash. He looked at me and said, "God has saved you for a higher purpose." I don't remember what I thought about that, but I do remember his words.
The second time I should have died wasn't as dramatic. Living in Utah right below Little Cottonwood Canyon on the way to the world-famous ski resorts Alta and Snow Bird, I spent lots of time in the mountains. The mountains in the canyon are sheer granite walls that shoot up dramatically from the little road that runs beside Little Cottonwood Creek, which, I suppose, had carved its dramatic V deep into these young and still rising rock faces over untold epochs of geological time. My friends and I used to watch climbers bore holes in those rocks to attach their ropes. We disdained them. We were fairly poor and certainly couldn't afford proper climbing gear. But we were climbers nevertheless. We made climbs, completely unaided by ropes, that, as I think back on it, were absolutely nuts. And I was not the best climber among my friends. I was a skinny kid. My upper-body strength was sadly lacking. I couldn't do a single chin up in gym class for god's sake and never did make it all the way up the rope on the rope climb. But I was cocky, and I hated to lose. So I climbed anyway.
Imagine yourself at the edge of a sheer wall of a concrete building maybe four storeys high. My friends had just gone around the corner to another face of the rock risking an extreme exposure with no footholds. You had to grab a small rock ledge and, as though on the monkey bars in the schoolyard, propel yourself sideways using only your hands for about six feet before you could rest your foot in a crack and continue the climb. I was already tired. I knew I couldn't do it. And going down-always harder-the way I'd come seemed impossible. I started to get what we called "sewing machine leg." My right leg was visibly going up and down, out of fear and exhaustion. I had no control over it. My friends were laughing at me, but I was silently panicking and had no control over my leg. Falling would have meant death for sure. Trying to cling to my hold on the sheer face of the rock, I was paralyzed, except for my leg that was bouncing uncontrollably. My friend, Mike, who was a great climber, came back for me. I suffered the humiliation of having him guide me down, actually taking my feet and placing them where they needed to go at every turn and pointing out exactly where I needed to wedge my hands. And I did get down.
But the most dramatic time of all when by all odds I should have died was probably the most common. On my way to the University of Iowa to begin the graduate program in writing, I picked up a hitch-hiker. We agreed to take turns driving through the night from Salt Lake City. He slept for what must have been four or five hours. It was around 3 in the morning and I couldn't go any further. I woke him up, and he agreed to take over. At some point, just at dawn, about a hundred miles west of Omaha, exactly in the middle of nowhere, I was awakened by the car careening off the road at 60 or 70 miles an hour. As the car flipped, I do remember thinking that I was a goner.
I regained consciousness on the side of the road. A trucker had stopped. The police were there. I was deeply in shock. I stood up and shook my legs and swung my arms around to see if anything was broken. Though I wasn't really numb, I couldn't feel my body, or at least any pain. My car was smashed. The roof was crunched flat against the seats. A wheel was off. A bumper was lying a few yards away. Someone was talking to me. I'd been unconscious for maybe a half hour they told me. The driver had already been taken away. An ambulance crew strapped me down to a board and whisked me to the Papillion, Nebraska hospital, where I spent the next three days with a broken hip and severe lacerations on my arms, back, and legs. I was lucky to be alive, they told me. The nurse said, "God must need you for a higher purpose."
There it was again. Maybe it was true? What higher purpose? Why me? What could I do for God?
In the emergency room, as the nurses and doctors cleaned the road grit out of my wounds, I had the oddest sensation, something like a near death experience maybe. I felt myself atomize into a million little twinkles of light-that's the best I can describe it. I didn't exactly leave my body, and I wasn't looking down on myself from above, nothing so dramatic. It's just that my awareness was incredibly expanded. Noises and sights, the acrid smells of the emergency room, the pain as the attendants scrubbed at me, all these were somehow airy (how to describe it?). They were both real and unreal at the same time. No doubt it was a phase of coming out of the shock I was in. I was, I guess, regaining my feeling. Being a fairly mystical kid, I thought I was experiencing some profound state of consciousness, the soul?
Now here I was on the plane, years and years later, having fulfilled no "higher purpose" that I could think of, nothing certainly more than any other average Pete. And I was above it all, I thought. But I wasn't. I was scared to death as the plane plunged through thin air. Absolutely terrified.
Then the plane leveled off. It was okay. People cried and laughed. People hugged each other. Someone called out, "Free drinks!"
I sat there incredibly surprised at myself for having been so afraid. I realized that I don't live in my true self, if there is such a thing. My true animal self, no doubt turning the cranks and manipulating the gears inside me at a deeply unconscious level, had come to the surface. I'm such an agreeable person (most of the time). I'm embarrassed by my moments of anger. It was, in a sense, the end of cool, calm, and collected. It was the end of pretending. A kind of shock therapy.
Since then, I've thought about the proposition of a "higher purpose." And I've tossed it away. Just lucky. That's all. Just incredibly lucky.
Since then I've been more aware of my feelings, especially my fears. I realize I'm fairly terrified to be alone-I'm talking about living alone for years, as my father did for the last 40 years of his life. Not afraid of spiders. But afraid of losing my hair, which I'm doing, afraid of having my body get old, which it is. Let me just say that this is a very mysterious life. I've figured out that we're all lucky to be alive.