Deathwish 028: Mark
“Somewhere along the line, I lost my immortality device”
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Oh, yes. I think most people are afraid to talk about death. That’s why we came up with religion, pyramids, and video game high scores, right? Immortality devices. As a boy, I had an immortality device called Born-Again Christianity. It was great. Didn’t make me any less scared of dying, but it did distract me from my impending mortality long enough to get some model airplanes built.
Somewhere along the line, I lost my immortality device. I simply didn’t believe in it anymore. Maybe I never did. I really wanted it to be true, which is not the same thing as believing. I think most people don’t believe so much as they want to believe, which is why non-believers make them nervous. Your disbelief reminds them of their own. I not only lost my immortality device, but many of the people in my life, particularly those who had organized their friends and families around the mutually held illusion that they weren’t really going to die.
In college, I read some Hume. David Hume didn’t believe in an afterlife. He said that didn’t trouble him, though, because the world had been around for eons before he was born, and he didn’t regret missing out on that time, so why should it bother him that it would carry on after he was gone? I took some solace in that thought, but in the end, it’s just a thought. Thoughts are just ghosts to our feelings; they can look but never touch. So feeling-wise, I’m still afraid of death. I think what disturbs me the most about death is what I hate most about life -- the distance and alienation I feel from other people. Death just makes it permanent.
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To read the previous installment, "Deathwish 027: Liz," go here. To participate in Deathwish, find details here.
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Mark was born in Springfield, Oregon and currently lives in Portland, OR.