New Book News! In recent months, I’ve been writing a memoir… and I’ve now completed a first draft.
Tentatively titled “Seven Deaths,” the story interweaves my own near-death experiences over the years with my stumbling, staggering, up-and-down spiritual journey. It’s a surprising adventure that explores a variety of backcountry exploits — from grizzly bear encounters to summiting high peaks to sliding on ice and falling down volcanoes. In the meantime, I also touch on all sorts of spiritual and faith based topics from an evangelical childhood to early atheism and Buddhist leanings to Gregorian chant and numinous experiences in dark chapels.
The book isn’t published yet (it’s not ready for publication), but I’ve been gratified to have early readers like essayist Katrina Hayes MFA and creative nonfiction luminary Brenda Miller say nice things about the work-in-progress.
If you’re interested, here’s a preview of the opening prologue for the book. As always, you can subscribe to receive early notification when this next book is published!
SEVEN DEATHS:
A Meditation on Mortality, Faith & the Afterlife
Your body knows you are going to die before you do. Your pulse speeds up, your face flushes, your spine becomes a dense column harder than concrete, your muscles solidify with the tensile strength of steel; everything tenses as you prepare to plunge into the void. Stress hormones flood your flesh. Your blood changes so it clots faster. Your eyes dilate. You can’t feel pain. Your skin trembles as you feel the wings of death sweep towards you.
In this final battle, you will leave nothing behind. Some creatures shed pigment, eyelashes, hair and skin. Others let go of tails, their inner organs, their colons and digestive tracts. Even limbs are lost in a last thrashing agony.
Everything comes out at the end. You shriek, urinate, defecate. You lose salt by the bucket before you die. You leak fluid from your pores. Perspiration slicks your skin. Tears pour out. Jesus sweats blood.
I’ve been in that place of imminent collapse. I’ve felt my body flinch and shudder, shrink and recoil, tremble and weep.
Last year, I found myself violently sliding down the side of a volcano. I didn’t plan to fall. It was a terrible accident, an uncontrolled tumble with no protection – no ice axe, no spikes, nothing to catch me from vaulting over a three-thousand-foot cliff far below. As I plunged wildly down that mountainside, I found myself wondering what was next.
I have long lived my life along the vectors of two extremes: Physical challenge and introspection. I enjoy profound confrontations with nature; I often push up against the limits of biological endurance and the laws of physics and gravity. I stretch my body into situations where my well-being hangs in the balance. If I don’t force my way up immense heights or immerse myself in deep waters from time to time, I feel I might have already expired. My life seems to have more purpose in those moments of peril.
I prove I am alive by confronting death. I am always, like Walt Whitman, giving a “barbaric yawp” in the face of fear. I call out: I was here in your far country, Oh Death. I planted a flag from the land of the living! And then I take back with me a sign that I momentarily stepped across the border into Death’s domain. In fact, I carry back with me too many mementos– a scar, a broken bone, a limp, a twisted muscle, a twitch of pain that never quite disappears. My body is a map of where I’ve been. Sometimes, all I bring back from those dark encounters are stories like this one – haunted memories – from the verge of the land of Death.
If I were to die by falling off an icy cliff, then part of me feels that might be even better. As Thomas Babington Macaulay said over a hundred years ago: “how can a man die better / than facing fearful odds.” Every explorer knows the passion that propels them towards ultimate challenge. I want to die striving, not capitulating to fate. Skirting close to the edge has always made me feel vibrantly alive. After all, only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
I want to feel that my death was hard won: that I left this world in the very act of striving forward, doing something worth the fight. Who wants to slip comfortably away to death while lying comatose in bed? My ceaseless striving has long been a young man’s barbaric yawp, an immature desire for drama and passion. A fatalistic urge and defiant shriek to end all shrieks. I admit it. It is my own grasping attempt to stake a claim to immortality. And this powerful urge has repeatedly landed me in moments like this one: my body spinning uncontrollably on an ice sheet, my torso twisted in desperate knots as I anticipate the end.
What do I think of in those last moments? The cliché is that your entire life flashes before your eyes. Some contemplate mistakes made, opportunities lost. Regrets. People experience time slowing down: they remember every moment, every heartbeat. Others don’t remember anything after coming near death: transient amnesia blocks the terror. I have a different experience. Every time I plunge down, my head accelerating toward the distant rocks of my doom, I don’t see any moments of my life flash before my eyes. Instead, time always slows just enough to allow the eternal questions to unfold in my mind: Where will my soul go? Do I even have a soul? After death, will anything persist? What will remain?
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche asked: “How can man know himself? It is a dark, mysterious business… a man may skin himself… seven times without being able to say, ‘Now that is truly you.’ It is an agonizing, hazardous undertaking thus to dig into oneself, to climb down toughly and directly into the tunnels of one’s being.” It may be hard, it may be hazardous, yet this is the adventure I have set for myself. I quest for meaning with every breath, in every second. For me to be alive is an endless puzzlement, a maze of marveling at my own existence, plumbing deeply into my own heart, not just a blind striving against the fabric of the world.
Introspection is the other extreme vector in which I thrive. I seem to never stop thinking, never stop pondering, analyzing, weighing the intent and import of events. I can never stop extracting meaning. I am constantly circumnavigating my own heart, struggling to uncover my true motivations, and plumb my ground of being. I am always curious. I wonder constantly, extravagantly and imprudently, by instinct and by nature. And each moment of near-death awakens a profound impulse of self-reflection.
When you’re sliding down a mountain with thousands of feet of open air below you, it’s hard to avoid the imminent reality of your demise. Your body tells you that you are about to die, and you believe it. Death is present in that moment not as a mountain to summit or a wave to surf. In that moment, you know the truth – death is a relentless tide that will surely take away everything you care about. It is the ocean of our lives, the tidal surge under every motivation. And I was caught in its current.
That day on the mountain, I had no helmet on my head, no protection, no safeguard. In that place of imminent collapse, I was desperate to escape my fate. My body knew violent death was approaching – I was quivering, tensed, violently afraid, desperate to avoid the cliff’s edge, my face streaked with terrified tears as I plummeted down.
The big dangerous question filled my head: What happens after? The true answer, of course, is the only one that frustrates everyone: we don’t know. We don’t have any credible reports from the other side. Hamlet calls death “the undiscovered country… from which no traveler returns.” No one comes back to tell us what’s over there. The poet Mark Strand aptly describes our passage on earth as bookended by blanks: “we live between two great darks, the first / With an ending / the second without one.”
Throughout history, people have filled that dark blank with a variety of possible answers. Religion, in its various guises, has long given us stories of comfort about the end, and explain what happens after death. There are many comforting myths of a better world after this one. Stories of reconciliation, redemption, hope and forgiveness for all the flaws and errors of this life. There are stories of being gathered into the arms of a loving parent – Father, Mother, God – and held and loved for eternity. It is a child-like story of comfort and peace after a lifetime of struggle. Many in the modern era embrace such a peaceful spiritual endpoint. With the advent of “singularity” thinking and post-human futurism, modern technologists have also come to embrace the denial of death, entering into vast immortality projects that purport to sustain human ambition into a virtual realm.
There are other stories of the afterlife, of course. Ones that are less commonly told now. Legends from the ancient Egyptians, the Mayans, tribal European cultures, and Asian folklore – stories of vengeance wrought upon one’s enemies in the afterlife, and of the heroes upheld in the halls of glory. Stories of ceaseless sacrifice, tormenting torture and slavish labor.
Stories of endless glorious battle for warriors in Valhalla and of dark doom for cowards. Stories of precise doling out of gifts and sweets and comfort based on your behavior here in the land of the living. Stories of living in splendor and joy praising God forever, of glory and riches for true believers. And for heathen unbelievers, a sundering lake of fire that renders flesh and bone and spirit into melting agony. Forever.
There are also stories of continuous re-birth, of re-learning lessons and learning new ones. Of ascending the ladder of enlightenment, until finally, one escapes that endless cycle.
And today, we have stories of absolute nothingness and annihilation for ardent atheists.
Imagine for a moment that each of our dreams of the afterlife will, in fact, become real after the moment of our deaths. In the modern era of quantum physics, it’s not hard to imagine that our ideas can influence the fabric of space-time: we know now that the observed particle acts quite differently than an unobserved one. Our attention can truly warp reality. So what if our ideas of what comes next gives substance to that possibility? What if our imagination is what comes true?
If you think angel wings will carry you away, they will. If you fear you’ll awake surrounded by the flames of hell, then you will get that instead. If you think you’ll be reincarnated, you will indeed wake in a new life. Yet if you believe your life blinks out when you’re done, then that’s all you will ever get. It’s done. You’re over.
What if each of these stories is right – for the person who believes those stories? If that’s the case, then what you are thinking about the afterlife at the moment of death might have eternal consequences. Maybe that’s why I cared so much. Because as I plunged down that terrible mountainside, I tried desperately to grasp my beliefs – what did I believe about what would happen next? What does it all mean? Where do I go now?
Of course, this possibility of a self-created afterlife may also not be the truth. On this side of the great divide, we shall never know for certain. We can have faith, certainly. A sense of assurance from those who purport to know. Hope, always. But in the end, when we look within, we always see a mirror. As Thomas Merton writes: “Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.” Our own image looks back at us when we strive to understand the divine.
As I hurtled toward certain death, my need to understand my own answer was dreadfully important: What did I see in the dark mirror? Just as my hands grasped desperately at the snow and ice for a foothold, so my mind also grasped desperately, striving to know for certain what I believed. Right now, in that moment. I needed to hold onto eternity.
It felt like hours later – days even – when I finally slowed my fatal slide on that vast sheet of ice. I unexpectedly discovered a way to arrest my fall, using only my bleeding hands and my numb feet, dug deep into the snow and ice. Gradually, my body slid to a halt.
An abyss of ice stretched out ahead, the void gaped below. I gasped in the sudden frigid air. All was silent.
As I rested there, caught on the edge of a vast icy precipice, shuddering with the after-shocks of fear and adrenaline, I found the sensation familiar. Even as I collapsed in the inevitable aftermath – flinching and shuddering, trembling and weeping – I knew it well. I’d been here before.
I’d last been in this quivering fearful place nearly ten years before, and twenty years before that. I’d come close to the edge time and time again. Yet now I had different answers to the eternal question. My mirror showed a different face this time around. My sense of what will happen after death takes me has shifted radically over the years. Death always teaches me new dance steps.
In fact, most of us have answers to the eternal questions that diverge over time; the individual changes to our sense of meaning often depend on the season of life and the wisdom we have acquired. Our idea of the afterlife takes on the flavor of the seas in which we are currently sailing. Our answer can shift from certainty to uncertainty and back again. I know my own beliefs have executed a long and glorious philosophical pirouette.
Each moment I’ve come close to death is engraved like an anchor point bored into the solid rock of my being. I am still determined to turn my face, every single time, towards the dark mirror. I force myself to look within, and mine the depths of my belief, to know my own heart. Afterwards, I come back with a renewed sense that I have supped from the endless well of possibility found in life. I have more insight after dancing with death. On each occasion, I tie my identity to that anchor point, as if this time it might be solid, as if my hopes will not ever shift again, as if I will not fall from faith.
Apparently, some people do lock down their beliefs. Their ideas become immovable. My father’s beliefs never faltered: he had one clear answer during his life. He believed in the literal words of the Christian Bible, and he clung to his idea of salvation and heaven. He died joyfully, still unwavering in his “hope of glory.” Alternatively, my mentor – a militant atheist – believed the opposite. He was of the opinion that there is nothing beyond this mortal plane. That we fade into the quantum foam, returning our energy back to the void from whence we came.
Different answers. Yet both believed fervently in their reality. Both were good men, and these answers did, indeed, give me a window into the soul of each man. I’ve believed alternatively in each of their answers. Early in my life, I had a fixed assurance of immortality and a heavenly afterlife. I was so very certain that story was true. Later, I was convinced that nothingness awaited us.
As I stared out at the vast field of ice and snow in which I would have died, I imagined myself fading into that white expanse. I knew if I died that day, I no longer had faith in either of those definitive and emphatic answers. What I’d seen in the mirror on this day was different than what I’d seen years before. My certain belief had been replaced by something else entirely. Something more ambiguous and more fulfilling. The threads had come together. I felt less certain, yet more alive. More open to hope.
When I dance with her, death keeps changing my perspective. I change. Each time I’ve seen a different facet of the truth she knows. And so, now I will tell you what I heard each time she came near to me
Seven times. Seven deaths.
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