What it's Like to Die
I died and lived to tell about it. The circumstances leading me to death aren’t important. Here’s what I learned.
Slowly my identity began fading away. I went from understanding where I was located in space and time. Then one-by-one, those details faded, until even saying “I” wouldn’t have made sense.
Realization sets in. “I” didn’t exist anymore, and my spirit was floating away.
Deep despair begins to overtake me. There’s no self-pity. One question taunts me.
“Will everyone I left behind be OK?”
I thought of my family. Were they OK? Would they have enough money? What would they do?
I didn’t think about any of the supposedly “cool” stuff I did. Books, films, influence. Truly an Ecclesiastes 1 moment. “Vanity, all is vanity.” Success seems trifling when you’re leaving this world.
Once you begin losing what you have, you ask if you held onto some things when you should have let go to focus on more important matters.
Rich Elias and the Sully Water Landing.
Rich Elias was on the flight that was doomed to land in water. He took off, then found out he was going to die.
US Airways Flight 1549 was a regularly scheduled US Airways flight from New York City (LaGuardia Airport), to Charlotte and Seattle, in the United States. On January 15, 2009, the Airbus A320 serving the flight struck a flock of birds shortly after take-off from LaGuardia, losing all engine power. Given their position in relation to the available airports and their low altitude, pilots Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger and Jeffrey Skiles decided to glide the plane to ditching in the Hudson River off Midtown Manhattan. All 155 people on board were rescued by nearby boats, with only a few serious injuries. The time from the bird encounter to the ditching was less than four minutes.
When listening to his podcast on Peter Attia, I was glad to be walking alone on a hiking trail well away from others. I was weeping.
Elias mentioned that when he got on the flight, he saw an older woman walking past him. Elias had a first class seat and thought about giving it up to the woman. He could sit elsewhere. He felt immense guilt. “Why didn’t I let her have my seat?”
For a few minutes, death was a certainty. With hindsight, we can say he survived. No one thought that was possible. He was, for all relevant purposes, falling to his death.
He couldn’t shake the feeling of doubt, “Will everyone be OK?” His focus wasn’t on his own departure but on the trauma others would face.
You can listen to the story here.
Dying changes how you live.
We live in material bodies on a material planet and have to eat, make a living, and balance competing interests. Sometimes we neglect people close to us because we have to provide, because we must provide!
Dying forces us to confront how our own trauma shapes our parenting. I grew up poor and on some level still carry that with me. All I talk about to my wife is, “My kids will never be poor.” They have 529’s, trust accounts, and really won’t ever worry about money. She gets tired of hearing about it, and during a recent negotiation with someone, told me, “You’re letting your own fear of being poor lead you to take a bad deal.”
Before dying, I had viewed my work as being done. They won’t go through what I did. They won’t be poor. That’s all that matters, right?
What a fool!
In my own mind, it somehow wouldn’t be a big deal if something happened to me.
As if love and being present doesn’t matter more. As if little hearts wouldn’t be broken.
I made my issues their issues.
Spiritual beings, physical bodies.
It’s cliche to say, “Love is the answer.” While that’s true, it’s also true that in this world people are trying to crack your skull open. Business partners will rip you off. Evil doers will mug you. You can’t walk around like some brain-dead LSD person and last long in this life. Money is like oxygen, you need it to live. You need Ego to make it happen.
Where people shake on out these issues is the struggle. Elias had mentioned he traveled 200+ days a year for work. He had a successful job. Big business. He’s Very Important. Do you still get on a plane every week and remain away from home Monday through Friday? Maybe you have to, and maybe it’s the right choice.
I was at a delightful Armenian wedding where a wonderful father, deeply loved by his children, mentioned how often he traveled for work. His kids love him. They are a great family. No one is saying don’t work or don’t travel or don’t put those hours in.
What we don’t want to lose sight of is that life is about the love we bring into this world. Everything else is a supporting role.
Will they be OK? Am I even OK?
My own encounter with death changed my own behaviors and forced me to confront myself in a way I lived in denial of. “Real men don’t cry. Trauma is a fake therapeutic concept liberals invented to make men weak. Real men conquer!”
I realized that my issues with money were based on deeply-held childhood trauma. Yes, I still save money for my kids, but I won’t do anything for money that could jeopardize my family. That means by traveling too much for business, working too many hours, or making questionable ethical choices.
I have left a lot of money on the table and sometimes feel like a total chump. You wouldn’t believe some scummy stuff people have “gotten away with,” because it wasn’t worth my soul and inner peace for me to engage in warfare where the only prize was more zeros on some f-cking computer screen.
(Another lesson from dying is that we don’t get away with anything. That’s a talk for another day.)
“That house had everything you needed.”
Back to life. OK this is nice. Sike. You’re going back under.
I began having flashbacks to the house I grew up in. I hated that house. There were holes in the carpet. I didn’t want to bring friends over. It embarrassed me.
Then it showed me the love from my goofy Boomer dad and mom. She had bipolar depression growing up, and unfortunately is lost from this world now.
“Your mom will never meet her grandkids.” Oh man. This is hurting me worse than dying.
Then I hear, “You had everything you ever needed, you had all of the love in the world in that house that you hated so much.”
I’ll never wonder what it’s like to have my heart broken. All this time I worried about money, money, money, only because my life was filled with immense love from parents who did their best and didn’t know better. No drugs at home, no alcohol, no cigarettes. None of us ever wondered if dad would get home late on Friday after payday drunk and screaming at mom and the kids. Or worse.
My dad coached pee-wee league baseball. Too much Bible study, which was annoying. That’s my big complaint. We were broke and read the Bible too much. No one could ever wonder if I was loved, and I took that for granted.
I spent decades hating a house full of love.
How could I wonder if people would be Ok when it hit me. I’m not even OK.
This really brings to mind a favorite passage from John Riccardo’s “Rescued” - exactly the kind of passage people often tend to consider far too sentimental, unrealistic, even somehow “unmanly”:
“My maternal grandfather abandoned his family, causing terrible pain for my mother, her siblings, and my grandmother...When my parents married, my dad knew about the tremendous weight of pain Mom carried. He knew that she felt not only the pain of abandonment by her father but also the residual effects of such pain, such as feeling unlovable unlovable and rejected, even thinking she was perhaps the cause of the abandonment. My dad knew enough about marriage to understand that God had brought him into Mom’s life as a means by which that pain could be healed. And so my father, despite all his shortcomings, lived one of the most heroic lives I’ve ever seen. He was an extraordinarily successful businessman, but he always said that the priorities in life are simply these: God, family, work. Always in that order. At one point, my dad was in negotiations to save his company, and he had out-of-town meetings every day. It would have been easier for him to stay out of town, but he didn’t. Instead, every single night, Dad flew home after exhausting meetings, woke up early in the next morning, prayed, and then got on a plane to do it all over again. He did this for over a month, and he did it for one reason: to be with my mom every night so that her abandonment wounds wouldn’t be broken open again. I could say so many things about the extraordinary love that Dad had for Mom (and vice versa) but I could never put it better than my mother did. Dad passed away a few years before Mom did, and at his funeral, Mom said something I will never forget. Everyone had been seated, except Mom and me. She was in her wheelchair, looking at my dad’s casket, and she said, to no one but Dad, “Honey, because of you, I know who God is.” “
I could well be wrong, but I think kids can tell the difference between the dad who works long hours out of sacrificial love, to keep food in their mouths, and the workaholic dad who just isn’t present for his family. I’ve known so many adult friends awed by the sacrifices their dad made for their family (3 jobs to send them to a good school, etc). The only adults I’ve know to be mad at adult dads were from wealthy families where clearly the dad could have retired/cut back but frankly preferred the office to the home.
Anyway, thank you for the great reflection - your non political substacks are much appreciated! (Nothing wrong with the political ones, but this is what matters most)