Workin' in a Coal Mine

What is it that we don't know?

There's this old story that may or may not be true about an old woman who lived in the same house all her life, opting not to leave it at all for the last decade. Oddly enough, she lived to be 103, so the local newspaper would send reporters to her to get quotes and ask about how to live that long. She became a fluff piece, a feel good news story or blurb that comes at the tail end of a nightly broadcast. What was the secret of her longevity? Of course she didn't know. She just lived healthy and smiled a lot. But among the horde of local reporters that came to see her over the few years she lived pass 100, one finally asked her if there was anything she regretted.

She said that she'd never been sailing.

I always thought the answer was sort of mysterious and romantic. Mostly because as the reported delved on, it was revealed that she hadn't really done anything in her life at all. She'd never really left her city, never moved, stuck to a fairly regular routine and knew very little about the outside world or its consequences. That she would pick sailing as a dream seemed naive and genius at the same time.

As I was thinking about this story yesterday, it dawned on me that the woman represents two fears in life. She represents the unknown - being unaware of a large amount of what life has to offer, it was unclear as to why she had never experienced simple things like sailing or what it might have been like for her to do so. She represents death - as much as reporters tried to paint her as a picture of solid living and health, the truth was that she was a morbid curiosity. People were fascinated less in that she'd lived that long, and more with the fact that she hadn't died. When framed that way, it becomes clear that the focus was on her old age as an anomaly, reminding us that we're not going to make it nearly as far as she did.

Death is the ultimate unknown. We are afraid of it because it means non-existence. And all we've ever known is existence. We're not sure how to not exist.

But ultimately, death is a necessary thing, a part of life, and it's easy to celebrate the concept in the macro. But when it applies to us or our friends, it's desperately depressing. We try to deny that it will happen to us, we look beyond death for some kind of solace, or we accept it as a fact and try to find some humanity in it.

I tend to find it life affirming. What better proof of there that we are actually alive then the existence of an opposite state? "I think therefore I am" should be replaced by "I die therefore I am". It guarantees that we exist.

Nothing affects us so deeply that we know nothing about. It's about loss, peace, pain, disappearance, forgiveness, release, memory, family, friends, anger, laughter, despair.

It is all these things - a funeral is as much about a mother laying flowers on a child's casket as it is about a friend smiling through tears as he remembers the time his friend did a back flip off a balcony in front of the whole school. It's as much about pain as it is not feeling anymore pain. It's as much a part of life as life itself.

Some cultures celebrate death and revere it. Some religions worship it.

The most frequent question I get involving atheism is whether I am afraid of death. I can't say that I am. I don't understand death, and it's certainly been unkind to me so far, but I believe people mean my own death. Although I fear losing the people I love, I don't mind the idea of death for me because I see it as an ending. I also realize there was a time that I existed where I had no consciousness and that there was a time before I existed that I have know experience with.

In that sense, I'm no more afraid of death than I am of the 1960s.

I know that life is to be feared more than death. I fear ending up like that old woman who has never sailed (and never got to) more than I do not existing. Life, after all, is the longest thing I'll ever do.