"Nothing quite brings out the zest for life in a person like the thought of their impending death." Jhonen Vasquez
This morning when the man said it, it struck me as very odd coming from him. Looking back on the occasion, it strikes me as even more odd. I was at a ribbon cutting for a new hospice facility in our community. The executive director was addressing the crowd who had come to celebrate their grand opening. As he was thanking everyone for coming and then telling us about his facility, he said "And then the family has to face the unfortunate event of death." "Unfortunate?" Death is "unfortunate?" Death is inevitable, but it's certainly not "unfortunate." How "unfortunate" would it be if human beings didn't die? People would be walking over each other several miles high. And even if you fell to the ground from the top of the heap, you wouldn't die. And would we grow thousands of years old? Death is "unfortunate?"
My wife and I live in Georgia and our son and daughter-in-law live in California. Because of this distance when we go to visit them, we choose to fly. I don't know if all airlines offer this feature, but Delta makes Flight Tracker available for its passengers. Even while watching a movie or listening to music, I consult Flight Tracker quite often. There are several fields to tracker. One of them displays the image of a plane traveling on an arc across the United States. This plane indicates where we are relative to the ground. The map below the plane includes the names of significant cities along the way. But the field I view most often is the one that gives all the statistics of the flight. This information includes Time at Origin and Time at Destination. It includes Tailwind and Ground Speed. There I find the Altitude and Outside Temperature. Flight tracker offers other information, but the information that means the most to me is Time to Arrival.
This week I was looking at the Time to Arrival and I thought, "If there was a way for me to know the date of my death, would I find out?" In some ways I think it would be good to know. We all know of people approaching death who talk about how vivid everything has become. How they hear everything and see everything in a whole new light. They talk about how they treasure every second of the life they have left to live. We could all learn from these people.
And is death a time of arrival or is it a time of departure? None of us knows. In the Bible Belt where I live, millions of people are quite sure that there is a literal, physical Heaven and a literal, physical hell. And that one or the other is our eternal destiny. Is this true? I don't know for sure. Although people have claimed to have come back from the dead in near-death experiences and report finding Heaven, that's their experience and not mine. I've never died. I watched a YouTube video a while back on the concept of total annihilation at death. This concept espouses that when we die we are dead as a door nail. That life does not survive death in any form. As horrible as that thought was to me, she said something about annihilation that has stuck with me. After introducing the viewer to the concept that everything goes totally dark at death, she said, "Don't you find that freeing?" And as much as I don't like the idea of never seeing the people I love in the hereafter, I think I understand what she's saying. Do any of us really want to spend all eternity in a perpetual family reunion? Many verses in the Bible suggest an eternal Heaven. The Apostle Paul in particular talks of such a place. As "freeing" is the thought of annihilation, the thought of eternal bliss seems much more appealing to me.
I've thought about it. Even if I had the option of finding out, I don't want to know the time of my death. I've decided that just the awareness of the possibility of death, the inevitability of death, is good enough for me. And about that Flight Tracker, at 30,000 feet the outside temperature was minus 38 degrees Fahrenheit. I hope that the "Altitude" and "Outside Temperature" are flight statistics I never need to use.
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