One of my favorite memories of Michele is when she knocked on my window one very early morning, just around dawn. It was raining hard. She had had a bad night with a troubled boyfriend. She was also having some problems at home. So she came into my room and we lay in my bed and listened to “The Castle” by Love, over and over, on my record player; I had to keep picking up the needle and replacing it back at the start of the song. Even now, every single time that I hear that song I remember that rainy morning.
After high school, Michele went up to Santa Barbara to attend college. I visited her twice during her first year there—I remember going with her to her “movement” class, where we stretched, twisted, and then learned how to relax and waggle our tongues. I so enjoyed hanging out with her and her friends in their funky house in the student ghetto of Isla Vista. Her boyfriend at the time was really into Donovan, and I remember her dancing on the sidewalk with undergraduate abandon, singing “Wear Your Love Like Heaven” for his and my amusement.
And then about a month later I got a call from another friend, Claudine. She was crying. She told me that the car Michele had been in had gone over a cliff. The first words out of my mouth were, “Which hospital is she at? Let’s get going.” No, that wasn’t possible, Claudine explained, because Michele was dead. It was difficult for me to understand what Claudine was saying. I can remember my mind not functioning properly, not being able to fit Claudine’s words into the proper filing cabinet in my brain’s organizational system. The words that Claudine’s voice pushed through the phone resembled something close to this: the night before, Michele and several of her friends from Santa Barbara had driven down to Los Angeles to see U2. After the concert, they had headed back home, taking Highway 1, the scenic Pacific Coast Highway. Midway between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, their car careered off the road and landed in the dark sea below. They all died. No one knows if the driver fell asleep at the wheel, or if they were run off the road by a drunk driver, or what. Nobody knows. But the car was found by fishermen the next morning, bobbing upside down in the ocean, Michele’s body still buckled in the backseat.
In the days and weeks after Michele’s death, I was devastated. Not only was she an irreplaceable friend whom I loved and who I felt loved me, but she was just such an exuberant light—such a ball of creativity, energy, laughter. She emanated so much life. How could someone so full of existence and kindness and eccentricity and joy be extinguished like that, in her teens?
The constriction of sadness knotted in my throat took a long time to dissipate. Michele’s boyfriend, the Donovan fan, was gutted. So too was Michele’s family; her younger siblings were crushed. I can’t fathom what her mother went through. Michele had so many friends, and the sorrow we all felt brought us very close together. Groups of us gathered at one another’s homes, talking, crying, despairing.
One afternoon, I drove with Anna—one of Michele’s other close friends—up the Pacific Coast Highway, to the spot where the car had careened off the road. We sat on some large rocks and stared out at the water. We tried to say things that were meaningful, poignant, or soulful—tried to hold our own little ceremony of sorts. But our sentiments fell flat. We were simply sad and depressed. Later that night, while sitting around the dinner table with Anna’s mother, we tried to find or construct some sort of silver lining. Maybe Michele is up in heaven right now, we mused, watching us with loving eyes. Maybe we will be able to contact her with a Ouija board. Maybe the instant she died, she was reincarnated into some different living thing, something even more beautiful, more sublime. Maybe we will meet her again someday, in another life, in another plane of existence. On and on we pondered, trying our hardest to at least invent some spiritual hope of sorts to ease the sorrow.
And that’s when Anna’s mom, a school psychologist by trade, chimed in. Her words were frank and sobering. She said to us, “Listen. The possibilities you are wondering about may or may not be true. Maybe Michele has been reincarnated. Maybe not. Maybe she is up in heaven right now, looking down at us. Maybe not. Maybe you will be with her again one day in some spiritual realm. Maybe not. We don’t know about these things. We have no evidence about such things. But what we do know, and what I can tell you with certainty, is this: Michele is gone to us now. She will never come traipsing into this house again, singing and laughing. She will never again try to balance an apple on her nose. She will never call you up on the phone again. She will never come knocking on your window late at night or early in the morning. She is dead. And it is so, so sad. This is the time to grieve, to mourn. But, hopefully, if you can try to live your lives as exuberantly and freely as she did, then she will live on, in a way, at least in the lasting effect she has had on you both, as well as in the memories you have of her.” When Anna’s mom said these words, I knew that she was right. And that was my first personal experience with a secular approach to death.
Greatest Generation
Since Michele’s death, I’ve gained an ever deeper understanding of the secular approach to death, not only because more of my own friends and family have died over the years, but because of the many people I have interviewed in my professional work, people from all different kinds of backgrounds, who have experienced death intimately, or who work with or near the dying, or are simply near death themselves.
Consider Walter Pines, age ninety-three. If anyone is contemplating, coping with, and unavoidably facing his own mortality, it is Walter. When I spoke with him, he looked downright wretched: much of his face had been eaten away by an aggressive form of skin cancer, and the deep crevices on his cheeks were full of rotting scabs. He’s completely bald, and the splotchy skin on his head is in bad shape. He’s hunched. His arthritis is advanced. His hearing is fading. And aside from the vigorous smile in his ice blue eyes, you’d think he wasn’t going to last much more than a week or two. But it’s hard to tell. On the one hand, his body is clearly ravaged. But then you start talking to him, and you look into those very vibrant eyes, and you come to realize that his mind is perfectly sharp, his wit intact, and his personality still very youthful. So you start to think, “Heck—maybe he’s got another ten years?” But either way—whether he’s got one day left or five thousand—he’s not worried. He’s not troubled by his impending end. He doesn’t want to die, but he doesn’t obsess about it either. Not in the least.
Walter doesn’t consider himself an “atheist.” He doesn’t like that word. He’s simply not interested in God. And he is quick to point out that he has nothing against religion. “But it just never really took, you know what I mean?”
Walter was born in 1919 in eastern Ohio. His father worked in the local steel mill and his mother stayed at home, tending to him and his seven siblings. Walter grew up working in coal mines and cornfields, and then he was drafted, serving as a rifleman in an infantry division during World War II. He saw a lot of action, especially at the battle of Caumont Hill, in the immediate wake of D-Day.
He can talk at length about those combat experiences. There was one day in particular when he and his unit were driving the Germans back through the countryside in France. A river had to be crossed. They found three rowboats, and his platoon got in. As they were crossing, a German machine gunner on the other side of the river opened fire—two of the American rowboats were “taken out.” But not Walter’s. He and his remaining men managed to reach the other side and subsequently “take out” the German machine gunner. However, the fighting was intense, and Walter took a bullet in his neck. Miraculously, it did little harm, missing his jugular vein by half a hair’s breadth, according to the medic. He was back on the battlefield the next day, and for many days and weeks and months after that.
And throughout it all, he never turned to God. He never prayed for deliverance, even when under heavy fire. “So there are atheists in foxholes?” I asked. He laughs hard. “Oh, sure there are. Sure there are. You bet. Look—in those situations, you just have to do what you have to do. You rely on yourself and your friends and your fel
low soldiers. That’s all you’ve got. You’re there. It is kill or be killed. That’s that. I never even thought to pray in those times. I just did what I had to do.”
After the war, Walter got married and earned a degree in accounting. He raised two children, eventually became a vice president of finance at a successful company, bought himself a very nice house in a very nice neighborhood, helped his wife cope with manic depression, and always kept in touch with his army buddies—most of whom are now dead. And now, at ninety-three, Walter is clearly near the end of his life. I asked him if he considered the possibility of there being a heaven or hell. “No, no. As I always say, heaven is here, right now. Heaven is my everyday life. Heaven and hell exist for people while they are here on earth. This is it.”
Walter’s approach to life, especially as its end draws ever nearer, can be summed up in one word: appreciation. He is simply grateful for every day. He enjoys his breakfast, especially the fresh fruit. He likes to sit in his backyard on summer days and watch the neighborhood kids splash in his pool. He still corresponds with an old friend in Guam. He loves his children and grandchildren dearly, and relishes hearing about their lives—what they are doing at school, how things are going at work. He is grateful for the help he gets from his live-in nurse. He likes watching the History Channel. Sure, the pains of his failing body are no fun. But they don’t diminish his spirit of appreciation. As he repeated, “I just enjoy every day. I just enjoy every day.”
Walter’s appreciative attitude evidences a core secular virtue, what I would refer to as a profound embracing of the “here and now.” Rather than looking forward to or pining for an imagined afterlife, Walter has always relished what is right before him, in the here and now. Life is to be appreciated and cherished. Walter’s lifelong lack of belief in God or an afterlife has never resulted in despondency, depression, or apathy. Just the opposite: it has undergirded his valuing and loving of his days. Yes, they are numbered. But that makes them all the more precious.
I asked Walter if he was afraid to die. “No, no. I’m not afraid to die. I’ve seen so much death in my life—I know it is inevitable. I don’t worry about it. Never have. And anyway, there’s nothing you can do about it. So why worry? When it comes, it comes.”
Resurrected Atheist
While Walter is facing his impending death without fear, Mildred Wilcox has already been there and done that. Her lack of fear couldn’t be more pronounced—or more fully based in personal, firsthand experience. After all, Mildred died about a year before I interviewed her in her pleasantly nondescript hometown in Nebraska.
There aren’t many atheists in this town of forty-six thousand inhabitants. But there is a handful. And about four years ago, thanks to the Internet, they got in touch with one another and decided to start a group. They began meeting one night a month in a small community room at a mall to talk about atheism, secularism, religion, and various issues pertaining to the separation of church and state. At one of these meetings, in March 2011, Mildred came early. She had baked a batch of oatmeal-raisin cookies and wanted to set them out before the meeting began. Once the cookies were in order, she started to make some coffee. Another member of the group arrived: Sheila. They said hello, and then, as Sheila was arranging the folding chairs into a circle, she saw that Mildred was in trouble. Mildred, who was eighty-six at the time, was dying.
As Sheila explained, “I saw Mildred kind of crumple—she had her head on her arms down on the counter. I said, ‘Mildred, are you all right?’ And I ran over to her and her eyes were starting to roll over and we laid her on the floor and she was starting to turn blue. Her eyes started to dilate. I knew that she was in serious trouble. So I started doing CPR. But there was no response. She had no pulse and no breath. So I called 911 and got them on the line and they gave me the rhythm to do the compressions—they sent the squad on the way—but we were in a sort of small, out-of-the-way corner room in the mall and the squad had a really hard time finding us. But I kept up the CPR until the squad finally got there and then they took over and they took her to the hospital. We were sure that she was dead. Or I was sure that she was going to die that night. In fact, she did die—her heart had completely stopped for fourteen minutes. We know because she had a pacemaker in from before, and the pacemaker recorded the data of what was going on during the heart attack and the doctor later told us that her heart had stopped for a full fourteen minutes. He also said that given her age and the location where it happened—he said that she had had a less than 1 percent chance of surviving this whole circumstance. And yet, here she is—alive and well! Same old Mildred—talking a mile a minute!”
A miracle? Not to Mildred. She is still as firm an atheist as they come—has been virtually all her long life—and her death and resurrection did nothing to change that orientation or alter her secular perspective on life and death.
Mildred, now eighty-seven, was born and grew up in Springfield, Missouri. Her mother, who was from “Oklahoma territory,” was a housewife and writer of children’s stories, and her father was a refrigerator engineer and bona fide “hillbilly”—he had been born in the Ozarks, to a fifteen-year-old girl, in a log cabin with a dirt floor. Although raised a churchgoing Christian, Mildred lost her faith by the time she was nineteen. What happened? “Simple. I went to college and got educated.” And then she met her husband, a scientist and an atheist; his atheism only confirmed and deepened her own.
And if anything might have challenged her atheism—if ever she might have turned to the solace of religious faith—it certainly would have been when her second child, Billy, was diagnosed with leukemia at age three. He died at age four. It was the worst experience of Mildred’s life, and yet her atheism remained intact. “I remember, just after Billy died, when the first person said to me something like, ‘Well, you know, the Lord has called Billy home—it was just Billy’s time.’ I said to him, ‘No—don’t you tell me it was “Billy’s time.” I won’t hear it.’ That made me mad.”
So how did she cope with the death of her son? “Shit happens. Well, we didn’t know that phrase back then—but that’s about it. That’s life. There are no guarantees. That’s what life is like. Children die. No god was making me suffer because it wanted me to suffer. No god was taking Billy away because he wanted to take him away. It just happened. Not that I wasn’t unhappy. Because I was. But his death certainly didn’t make me want to become religious. No. Instead, we had another child.”
What about her own death—or near-death—experience? Did her heart attack of the previous year have any effect? “No.” Did she have any sort of spiritual or mystical experience while her heart was no longer pumping? “No.” Did she see any white light? “No.” Did she experience any feelings of peace or tranquillity? “No.” How about pain, regret, longing, or doom? “No. Look—I didn’t feel anything and I don’t remember a thing. Nothing. That’s it.”
Although the phenomenon is most likely explained as being the result of oxygen deprivation, much has been made of near-death experiences. Many people have spoken of and written about seeing white lights at the end of tunnels, or floating over their own bodies and observing themselves, or seeing previously deceased relatives, or of feeling the presence of God. Many people who have such experiences, or hear about them, find these accounts to be pretty good evidence for life after death. Not Mildred. She doesn’t believe them to be scientifically verifiable, she thinks they certainly have naturalistic explanations (psychological or neurological), and she herself didn’t experience any such stuff. Mildred’s fourteen minutes without a heartbeat did not produce any spiritual visions or experiences, and the whole trauma didn’t cause her to think about God, to question her atheism, or to seek religion.
And while her reluctance to embrace religion after experiencing a traumatic heart attack may strike some as unusual, it actually isn’t. In a study of nearly 350 men who had recently had a heart attack, researchers Sydney Croog and Sol Levine found that the experience caused no changes in the me
n’s worldviews, beliefs, or orientations: those who were religious before the heart attack stayed religious afterward, and those who were secular before the heart attack stayed secular. And related studies indicate that many seriously ill individuals—people similar to Mildred—as well as many doctors who come into direct contact with death on a regular basis, do not believe in life after death and maintain a secular orientation to their own mortality.
I wondered if the whole heart attack experience scared Mildred. “No. Not at all. I have always been totally and completely unafraid of dying. Still am. What’s there to be afraid of?”
—
MANY PEOPLE ASSUME that a deep, existential fear of death is an unavoidable aspect of the human condition. No one wants to die, we are all afraid to die, and thus—voilà—you get religion. As psychologists Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi and Michael Argyle have observed, “Death is the most universal, and most negative, aspect of the human condition, and dealing with it is at the heart of all religions.” There is no question that the vast majority of the world’s religions construct some version of life going on after death in their cosmology, a promise of immortality or nirvana that many people find comforting.
Living the Secular Life_New Answers to Old Questions Page 18
