(From 30,000 ft. and my notes app. Apologies in advance for the dark subject matter, and any and all clichés. Don’t continue if you think any of this might upset you.)
It’s a truism that death follows us all. But it does.
Everyone has different experiences, but for many, when you’re young, death is so distant that it barely exists except to others—if you’re lucky, it is far on the edges of your life.
As you get older and your bad habits catch up with you and you begin building a tangible future, maybe even starting a family, it can feel much closer, more tangible.
Many have a shock in their 40s when their doctor puts them on cholesterol drugs and starts asking pointed questions about how their heart feels inside their bodies. “Do you ever feel heartburn? What’s it feel like? Here’s some stuff to take for the rest of your life. You need to start checking your BP daily at home. If your BP goes over this line, you need to call me,” etc.
That’s how it went for me and several of my friends. Some of my friends made complete lifestyle reversals. Remarkable people! I’ve had a harder time, and so I’ve become a little more uncomfortable with my shadow.
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with biology and had a child’s natural history collection: a small menagerie of live reptiles, bones, rocks, field guides. I loved and still love and even still collect natural items and artifacts.
For some, when you’re older and have more money, you fill out your collections. It’s easy now to find everything you ever coveted in your younger years—when you were free of worry. It’s a cliché that many men buy the car they coveted, of course. But rounding out your collections is a way of chasing innocence, I think, and everyone gets to do it their own way.
In recent years, I have expanded my collections of rocks and fossils among other things (no more live reptiles). My parents, reading this, must wonder when I’ll merge what’s still at their house with my newer acquisitions. (The answer, Mom and Dad, is that I like everything right where it is 😁.)
This year, I resolved to do much less scrolling and posting online and focus more on concentrated writing; I consider myself about as good a writer as I am at my other creative endeavors, like playing music—which is to say I’m not all that good! But in college I was a writing major and Annie Dillard’s advice to “write as if you were dying” has stuck with me—even as she now considers her whole book to be cringe. (It’s a wonderful, beautiful, pretentious, privileged piece of writing.)Here’s the full quote from The Writing Life:
“Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?”
I never really felt serious about following through on Dillard’s mandate until a frightening experience late last year: an airplane I was on lost an engine and we had to divert to an unexpected city.
During the whole experience—the palpable fear of passengers; the cabin crew’s scrambling, assuring, and their thinly disguised worrying—I felt reasonably sure we were going to make it. I have great faith in engineers. But seeing sparks and flames coming from a jet engine 15 feet away, 30,000 feet in the air, followed by an immediate, observable descent, loss of internet, etc., is alarming to say the least.
It feels silly to admit, but this was one of the first real moments in my life where I had to confront being totally powerless in the question of whether I’d live or die. It made me think about what I had—the people whom I love, my partner, my son, my parents, my in-laws, my friends—certainly not my collections—and I clearly thought, “I do not want to die today.” Having to wait patiently while someone else decides that is… interesting.
I do not want my son to grow up without me. I do not want to be without him. I did not think to try to contact God on that flight, but the teenage boy next to me prayed. We landed safely, albeit white-knuckled. When we touched down, the woman on the window who had watched the engine burn up burst into tears.
Annie Dillard says that when writing, one should pick a simple theme—with the understanding that what you end with will be brittle, even hostile to you and the imposition you tried to place on it. Nothing is thankful to be wrestled into submission. She says in the end, your fragile, confusing work is likely to be alien to you and what you set out to do.
My simple theme, I decided, would be, “To my son in the event of my death.” My goal was to outline everything that he might ever want to know about me.
Quickly, the writing moved to death. It’s worth getting out of the way, I thought, and it seemed appropriate given the framing. Maybe it can be the necessary and most sentimental part of the work that Dillard says must be erased before the product can be completed.
I didn’t get super far because death is hard to write about with honesty, even when writing to an audience of one, or a few, or zero. So I walked away.
Then, the next day, I learned that my friend and close colleague David Chivers had died. He had killed himself in what must have been a moment of intense, deep, out-of-control crisis. Impossible. You wonder what could’ve been done in situations like these, but you know nothing could’ve been done.
Learning of my friend’s death made me audibly gasp—in part because he always seemed so happy, so future-oriented. We had made plans together—and I learned others had done the same with him. Of course we had.
I had assumed we’d meet again the same way I take for granted the air and sun and ground.
David Chivers will be remembered as a consummately loving person. Yes, we could have perhaps seen his bottomless, generous kindness as a sign. In my experience, these things in extreme can obscure that someone has all but given up on repairing themselves. But paradoxically, suspecting such a thing is the greatest insult you can make to someone of generous kindness.
We are living in an incredibly difficult time. I’m fearful for our country and for my son’s future. I’m working to raise someone who’s kind and I’m working to raise up others through kindness. I feel I’m succeeding in the face of it all.
I want to share in my son’s pure mirth and constant wonder, but I don’t want to be a consumer of it. I know this would harm him in the long run. But I need him desperately.
You can’t live on the kindness and successes you bestow on others. In the end, acting a happy life, no matter how well or how hard you do it, is not sufficient to live.
Many of us who see as part of our life’s mission to spread literal wealth and kindness and care saw something in David that made us better—even seemingly those who had just met him. David Chivers made many lives better. He could have made many more lives better. But he will not do this directly anymore.
Is kindness tenable? Does it matter? We remain, and that matters.
We have no choice but to do our best and to give away that which we’re free to give, and through this, may we save ourselves.
Be kind. Godspeed to all of you on your journeys, and especially to our friend David.