Death… It's A Living

When I was a freshman in college, my roommate and I had a magic 8 ball. I’m not sure where it came from or why either of us, both science majors, would have owned it. I do know, however, that it was always right.

Neither of us were inclined to be superstitious—at least not about what a $9.99 toy might “predict”. Mostly, we both enjoyed the harmless fun of asking it about the futures of our friends when it came to whether they should study or go out or whether they should pursue girls who have given them no indication of reciprocal affection (this was common). But on the occasion when the 8 ball was posed with a verifiable outcome (i.e., “Will the next person who walks by out dorm room have a shirt on?”), it was always right. Always. I’m sure the 8 ball’s proclivity to predict the future was a combination of luck and confirmation bias, but it was nevertheless spooky because it also never contradicted itself. Once the 8 ball provided an unambiguous response, it never provided anything else.

At some point during that first semester in college, my roommate learned that I was a nervous flier. I would not label myself (at least at that point in my life) as “afraid to fly” because I never considered cancelling or changing travel plans due to fear, but I certainly don’t care for mid-air turbulence. George, my roommate, thought it would be “funny” to ask the 8 ball whether I would die in a fiery plane crash on the way home to Alaska for the holiday break (he always used that language: fiery plane crash). I would nervously laugh or roll my eyes. But I also didn’t feel any better when the 8 ball refused to provide any unambiguous answer. Nine times out of ten, the ball responded, “Outlook hazy try again later”. Once, I think it replied “Outlook good”… but what did that mean? Good because I’d live through a crash or good in the sense that it was simply answering in the affirmative? “Yes, he will die in a fiery plane crash.” No matter what the result, George would laugh (and hard) as he watched me squirm increasingly.

Come mid-December, I found myself flying home on the Alaska Airlines flight from Seattle to Anchorage. I had successfully completed my first semester in college, my only disappointing grade a B in biology. Perhaps that’s what I deserved in a life science course for believing that a die floating in a piece of plastic could tell the future. That’s what I was thinking mid-flight when the turbulence started.

Growing up in Alaska, I was no stranger to airplanes. If anyone I knew wanted to go anyplace interesting not involving nature, they had to board a plane. I had been on dozens of commercial flights at this point in my life. Still, it was the first (and one of the only) times when the pilot told the cabin that the turbulence would be bad enough to endanger the crew if they continued the complimentary beverage service. I can still see in my mind’s eye the flight attendants kicking up the locks on the beverage cart’s wheels and booking it with a speed at which I had not seen them move previously.

I could have been imagining it. I was probably projecting it. But I swear they looked scared.

About 30 seconds later, the plane started shaking violently and occasionally dropping altitude quickly enough to make the contents of my stomach re-enter my esophagus. I’m not sure how long it lasted (probably no more than 5 minutes?), but I had time to have two, crystal clear thoughts:

1. Why didn’t the 8 ball just say ‘yes’ or ‘no’? If it had said ‘yes’, then I wouldn’t have believed it, and I still would have flown, but at least I would have been properly warned. If it had said ‘no’, George would have been disappointed, and we both would have forgotten about it. But it kept being ambiguous. I was getting angry. Especially because the last time George asked, just hours before he dropped me off at the airport, it said “Better not tell you now.” Why the fuck not?? What did this piece-of-shit party favor for 4^th grade girls want from me???
2. I am going to die.

Spoiler alert: I didn’t die. After some more-or-less violent shaking, the rest of the flight was peaceful. I tried to enjoy my thanks-for-flying-Alaska 8-oz ginger ale. But I had been sure I was going to die. Really and truly sure. And it terrified me.

Fear and Belief

I still hate flying. The night before a flight I can’t sleep. The airlines haven’t made it any easier. My wife and I are convinced they are purposely trying to stop the middle-class from coming on board at all. Most recently, I flew a British Airways flight from London to Seattle where my knees touched the back of the seat in front of me. I am not even 5’9”.

But I can handle enclosed spaces. Once I’m in my seat, I usually start to breathe a little easier. I know that a safety belt will do nothing to save my life if the worst happens, but it calms my most irrational of fears. I remind myself that turbulence is not life threatening… planes wouldn’t fly if it were. I tell myself that “Airplane Mode” does nothing. No one can use a mobile phone to disrupt flight instrumentation enough for it to be hazardous… if that were true, phones would not be allowed in the skies. And yet, I always turn my phone off completely, just in case. And I always grab hold of arm rests during choppy air as if the sheer force of my squeezing them will help power the jet through the air. But most of the time, I soldier through, raw-dogging my way toward the edge of my sanity.

My belief—if you can call it that—keeps me from experiencing what I felt when I was a freshman. During those 5 minutes, I believed in nothing but the absolute certainty that I would die. My life didn’t flash before my eyes. I didn’t think of all the things that I would never do because I was only 19 years old. I just thought, I don’t want to die. I couldn’t help it. I was panic-stricken. It was out of my control.

That’s the closest as I have been in my life to feeling how a sick zebra must feel when it realizes that this is the time it won’t be someone else in the herd. This time, the lion is getting me. There is no nuance to that sort of terror. It’s all animalistic emotion, signals from our midbrain screaming “danger!” Our species has been lucky enough to evolve a large prefrontal cortex (PFC) that can predict the future. Not in the same way that a magic 8 ball predicts the future, of course. But the PFC allows us to plan. It knows that our death waits like a bible truth, but it can be pushed off if we behave ourselves and watch what we eat. Most importantly, it creates beliefs that protect us from having to know terror or panic. Those beliefs vary in their specificity, but they all boil down to this: I matter.

Death is always on the horizon, but we allow it to hide in plain sight. Some one very close to me was recently diagnosed with cancer. The initial prognosis was positive, though with cancer, everything is relative; chemotherapy was deemed unnecessary, but surgery, radiation, and heavy medication for 5 years would still be necessary. A few days ago, a scan revealed a new abnormality in a new location. It is too early to know whether it is cancer. And far too early to know if it is a new cancer (scary) or the return of the old cancer (even scarier).

Right now, it all seems like a dream. The old bad news had been recast as a best-case possible under the circumstances. Now, it feels, if not a worst-case scenario, like we’ve been cheated. Our old beliefs—that everything would be okay—are gone. In their place are mostly silent fears about what happens next.

Cancer is much more of a threat than turbulence. Nearly 10 million people will die of cancer this year. It’s possible that not a single person will die on a major commercial flight; as of this writing, it hasn’t happened in nearly 2 years, and not in 15 years in the USA. Statistically speaking, it’s far more likely I’ll die of cancer (even though I don’t have it or much of a family history) than on a flight. And while the thought of people very close to me dying fills me with a great deal of sadness, I haven’t come close to feeling anything like the terror I felt when I believed my death was minutes away.

Death someday is not same emotional experience as death now. The differences between these emotional experiences are likely in large part due to the different areas of the brain involved. If the PFC allows for the planning and understanding of death, then it must consider death when it is distant. Scary, sure. Sad, definitely. But ultimately, unpreventable. The terror evoked by a more proximal death, death happening right now, probably has little to do with the PFC. Rather, it’s all ancient midbrain emotion: fight or flight. Make the wrong move and you’re dead. Being able to think about death turns the idea into an abstract concept, and it is difficult to be truly terrorized by the abstract.

There is a real benefit to compartmentalizing death. I was thinking about this today as I dropped my dog off at the groomer. By 9 am, the place was already filled with nervous dogs getting shampooed, their nails clipped, or in line waiting to be checked in. Almost all the dogs showed a sort of nervous energy. My dog started shivering uncontrollably even after I picked her up to try to console her. She wasn’t in a panic per se, but she did not want to be there. Although I have a clever dog (too clever, to be honest), she’s still just a dog. And all she knew was that she wanted to leave. She had no ability to think ahead to how much cleaner and less matted her fur would be or to think back to how many pets and treats she received last time she was groomed. She was stuck in the terror of the present moment. Humans can think backwards and forwards, however. As a result, I’ll get on another plane. I won’t like it, but my life will be smaller if I don’t. And what’s the point of living a small life if you only get one?   

-The Plague Doctor