Choosing to Look Back

This morning, on my way to work, I contemplated the usual. I thought about being dead.

No, this has nothing to do with the recent Halloweening. Nothing to fear in death, as far as I'm concerned, so there's nothing to celebrate about it either, right? Besides, these days, Halloween has as much to do with the dead as Christmas does with Jeebus.

Are they selling Santa hats yet?

In any event, I choose to look back on death quite often. I began thinking about death on the train this morning as I remembered how I woke up next to my wonderful, beautiful girlfriend. For Pavlovian reasons I will describe below, warming, comforting feelings bring me to thoughts of death. Also, I am now writing this because the Happy Day's blog on the NY Times web site published an article by Clemson U's Todd May on the subject of death(http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/02/happy-ending/).

I reflected on this article, and I decided to present my own direction.

If there is some meaning for you to find in my oddly casual attitude about death, it would likely be found amidst my past struggles with the idea of dying. Therefore, for your sake, for the sake of my own evolving relationship with the thought of dying, and for the sake of honing my well established narcissism, I will elaborate on how I've adopted a routine of choosing to look back on death.

Because of the many physical and emotional scars I've been awarded through my lifelong, symbiotic relationship with a diverse range of medical conditions (most of them cardiovascular in nature), I've been in essence forced to consider my demise as a practical matter from very early on. I was therefore, in a sense, robbed of the potential to be naive about death.

While this unfortunate necessity combined with my intellectual greed to forever banish me from the tempting psychological confections displayed in the Pantheonic sweet shop of America's religious glut, it also allowed me to embark on a very painful yet infinitely rewarding process of understanding life as it was. That is to say, while I've come to understand almost nothing about living amongst you all, I've developed a cool, secularized perspective on the notion of leaving this forsaken place. I choose to look back on each new morning as if I've already passed.

Allow me to explain.

By age nine or so, memorable evenings and happy events involuntarily sparked some notion of my inevitable demise. I came to dread wonderful events like birthdays, the first day of summer, the first day of a vacation, or even Christmas morning. Warm happiness inevitably produced a sinking feeling, because I was always afraid I would not wake up to enjoy it again the next day. When I did awaken, I always feared how I would remember the day ahead. I feared that, in death, I would forget it all. And what’s the point in living if you will disregard it all in the end?

Say what you will of this thought process. But when doctors have been telling you that the simple act of running or walking might kill you since you were, uh... let's see... able to hear, the idea of dying from a heart attack at a young age is not so far fetched.

Nonetheless, I once agreed with many of you. I used to think that the above thought process meant I was crazy.

In many ways, I was. I began to overcompensate for my constant dread with a near constant desire for emotional evaporation. I wanted to be alive as a statue is when you look into its eyes, as gone yet as substantially present as when you look away.

To this end, I purposefully developed a hollow point in my psyche by repeating pointless activity. I would do basic things to foster the mutual understanding between myself and others that I was still alive, but at the same time, I avoided acting in ways that mandated feeling much of anything. There was no wrist cutting or pain infliction or anything of that nature, no call for help. As I understood my position, even if help came, the help would eventually die and I would die soon after.

Inevitable death meant that memories themselves brought pain. Why inflict mortal wounds to create painful memories? Why create more scars? Instead, I would stare at the grass outside from my dim living room or the rain from underneath the gutter outside my house. Occasionally I would stand in the rain, just because. I would sometimes open a book and pretend to read, but I would just stare at the pages as if they were white slabs. You see, I never wanted to experience the story. I just wanted to verify that there was still scenery. I wanted context as form, but I feared context as meaning.

From this approach to life, I eventually developed what I thought was an ability to excuse myself from the world. What I developed was a penchant for fantasizing about a world without death or material restraints. I wrote, produced, and directed a number of in-my-head "movies". I lay for hours at night, pretending to sleep while I dreamt of the life I wished would fill my undying days. I developed a means of rewarding myself for this behavior by fantasizing about possessing great powers. Chief among these was my fantasy of achieving immortality.

Of course, even with all this effort, I never really believed this. Living in your head is a generally poor strategy for avoiding painful memories. Certainly, pretending you can't die does not work very well, especially if you are genuinely interested in actually avoiding death. Therefore, in the name of maintaining a social economy through which I could procure sustenance, I would do a lot of overtly obnoxious things to remind myself and others that I was in fact alive, and to ensure that no one would catch on to my (psychotic) plan. I spoke out, I cried a lot, and I hit a girl or two. I had friends of course, but, as they may have been able to tell, I was rarely interacting with them so much as I was interacting with avatar personalities -- their social representatives as displayed by my fantasizing within the loosely controlled environment in my head. Thus, while I was able to interact with people on a relatively normal level, a level that allowed me to simply live, mine was still a world of incredible fantasy.

Looking back, I can see how this result came by design. I wanted to avoid sincere interaction so that I might avoid genuine memories. Again, true interaction scars you. Actual interaction creates actual memories, and the act of remembering reminds you of what has passed. Remembering genuine moments felt to me like death itself, so I avoided them at all costs.

But I did not stay this way. While I wanted to "go away", I wasn't truly interested in disappearing either. The idea of total disappearance was actually my greatest fear. So, by age twelve or thereabouts, I wanted to be counted, but I wanted nothing more than that.

Obviously I could not hope to kill myself. As I saw it, on one end, I could fail in my attempt and be remembered as a nut job or a looser. On the other hand, I might succeed in stellar fashion. Such success would have, in my mind, granted me a degree of fame. If you are alive, fame forces those vivid memories I was avoiding, so I nixed that idea. Then again, what fun is there in being famous while you are dead? Either way, killing yourself to avoid death is a rather stupid idea in the first place. Having realized all this in the span of my tween years, suicide seemed pointless as I entered high school.

So I decided I would try a little harder to live. Life became my new focus. Yet I viewed the future in terms of the inevitable future, death. So instead of living vividly, I remained gray. A stone edifice of my potential, I decided to let others color me as they saw fit.

But how? How does one live with the ever present fear of death and a prevailing absence of theological opiates? First, I tried to be "cool". I worked out a lot, which is fun and exhilarating. But old habits die hard, so I worked out with many fantasies in mind. I was doing something real, but I thought it best to measure my results in light of my perpetual fantasizing.

Oddly enough, it appeared that the physical fulfillment of my fantasies was not allowing any solitude. In high school, as you know, one is not so able to simply disappear, even if you feel like you have. Too many other people are searching to fit in with the scenery, and so the scenery is often the worst place to be when trying to “go away”. Most people are learning form in high school, so context as form becomes the context of meaning I had been trying so hard to avoid as a child.

When my own fantasies failed to achieve for me a state comfortably social anonymity, I compensated by haphazardly picking and choosing from the market place of self imagery. If you are a partially mature adult, you know how that goes. Overall, this method of coping with my life until its ultimate end doesn't work for me.

Next, after it became clear that I was not becoming what I was trying to purchase with barrels of money and hours at the gym, I turned to a few semi-genuine social activities. I say "semi-genuine", because these social experiences were heavily lubricated with substance abuse.

That is to say, I drank my ass off. It was fun! I also smoked my brain into oblivion quite regularly. That was even more fun!!!

We of course know what this type of "fun" can lead to. While I never truly devolved into a cock sucking crack addict, I've had some close calls as a result of my substance abuse. I’ve since resolved to mitigate my use of these substances, but I doubt I will ever completely abandon the use of substances for many, many reasons.

Did I mention it's really, really fun?

But seriously, while this method is a very attractive means of coping with a nihilistic worldview, a frail consciousness may become trapped in it, and the real issue is thus never solved. In examining this cliché, we could also say that the reasons such behavior does not solve the issues I had with death are also the very reasons engaging in it is so attractive: a) you can't remember moments of intense instances of abuse, and b) it stems from and engenders the death wish/immortal fantasy, depending upon which aspect you plan to emphasize while ingesting your substance of choice. Social substance abuse provides a standardized form of social formatting into which many of us may disappear without feeling like it; the drug itself forces a pleasant contextual meaning while "other people" provide context as form.

For a time, substance use proved the perfect salve. Then again, there is a difference between use and abuse. Use is one thing, but I argue that one is not really using a substance unless they are already capable of a more mature frame of mind than I was in. When using a substance, you are enhancing your enjoyment of life or perhaps simply unwinding so that you may work towards a greater goal when the opportunity presents itself. Substance use is a form of self management preformed by a mature human being. Even though I did not die from these drugs or loose a job or even go to jail, I still consider myself to have been abusing these substances. In abusing, one may also enjoy the pleasure of the high, the relaxing and such, but you accomplish nothing. You simply medicate yourself while you wait to die.

This is what I was doing. And so I drank beyond my limit to prove I was invincible, to feel immortal, but also to wallow in misery as I fell towards doom. I smoked to sink into my own body, to fly out of my mind, and thus become amorphous, timeless, immortal form for formless thought.

One particularly timeless moment occurred while I sat alone late at night in the hot tub at my parent's place. They had left town for the weekend, so I decided to unwind a bit. After a few beers and a light toke, I slipped into the soothing water and stared up at the crescent moon. It was wonderful. It was one of those moments I had avoided all of my life. The warm water and the shimmering stars presented a comforting, vivid memory, and nothing in me could stop it. Then I remembered death.

And so I sank into depression.

I asked myself, "Why? What is the point? It is clear that there is no God, no spirits as such, so what of it all? Why am I cursed with making these memories only to forget it all forever? Why must I live so much, only to die?"

The answer erupted from my then empty consciousness, "Because this is what you are doing, and that's because this is what there is for you to do."

"Besides, what else you got going on? You're here and that in and of itself is a reason to live... jackass."

Frank as I am with myself, this was not the end. Figuring out why it is OK to live is one thing. Figuring out what to do with your life is another, and what it all means to you is another thing on top of that.

On these questions, I've few means of advising anyone, at least not before I discuss religion, why it's silly, and what I've come to substitute it with. That's for another post.

But should my rather thin advice on how to treat the thought of your imminent death –- get over it -- cause any dire existential introspection, I've only this odd, similarly thin treatise to offer:


As we've nowhere to look from but the past and present -- the poor yet prolific predictors -- the future is always rich with the memory of fantastic histories.

Seen as the future, as a void of memory bursting with potential histories, living toward tomorrow offers no clear choices except how to die, if you choose to.

Yet, it was never your choice that you will meet death. Thus, death can be seen as the end of choice, the end of you.

You being a choice -- a will to live, to die, or how to go about either -- looking to the future as an ultimate end begets a best case scenario of living towards the given options for dying: to die as this or that, to die in this or that way, or in this or that state.

And yet, the future is arrived at as much from choice as it is from memory, for memories.

Your choices, you, are also memories. Death is then also the end of memories, and living is the process of their reproduction.

In context of form and meaning, choices are what form you, and your memory is your meaning.

Understanding well that you cannot reach the present except as choice and memory, you find that, even as you flail towards the future as choice and memory, you in fact are the past.

Knowing this, and knowing all we can choose of ourselves at present is how we think and feel about the past, look even farther back so that you may again see forward.

Thus, you may see from a point where the future is behind you. Once here, you may safely assume that you are already dead.

While you are not, while there is in fact still a potential for the reproduction of memories, you are now free to ignore your fear of the future as their end, a fear which only results in neglecting your attention to the past.

Understanding your new dominion over history, cultivate your past as you wish it to be remembered.


In all, have no fear of your history or your future. Recall your life as it is, cherish your past, and become its future author as you remember onward.