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LIVING WITH DEATH

IN 1993, WHEN I WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives stormed Mount Carmel Center ranch. Located just outside Waco, Texas, the ranch was home to David Koresh and his Branch Davidian followers; the group believed that the second coming of Christ was imminent, and they’d begun to stockpile guns and ammunition against the coming chaos. Anthony Storr’s Feet of Clay, a book about gurus, compares Koresh’s “regime” on the ranch to Jonestown, the Guyana enclave where preacher Jim Jones psychologically and physically abused his followers, rationing their food and sleep and coercing more than 900 of them into drinking cyanide-laced Flavor Aid. The siege on Mount Carmel lasted fifty-one days. In late February, after a brutal and fiery standoff that resulted in ten deaths, Koresh allowed a group of children to leave the ranch when the ATF arrived—but kept back at least twenty-five kids, many of whom he’d fathered with women and girls in the group. In mid-April, the FBI and the ATF initiated a final raid on the ranch using the kind of weaponry usually reserved for war. Seventy-six of the eighty-five Branch Davidians left inside the compound died, either by fire—three fires erupted in different areas of the ranch as government agents attempted to penetrate the buildings—or by gunshot wounds from fellow believers.

Koresh, Storr writes, was obsessed with the Book of Revelation. Before he’d joined the Branch Davidians and become a leader within the group, he’d flitted from religion to religion before landing for a while—before he was ousted for harassing the pastor’s daughter—in a Seventh-day Adventist congregation. The founders of that church originally believed that Christ’s second coming would occur by October 22, 1844—a date based on the prophecy of an influential Baptist preacher called William Miller. After that day came and went, a group of Millerites formed the Seventh-day Adventist Church, so named because they considered the seventh day of the week (and therefore the Sabbath) to be Saturday, and because they believed the apocalypse, though it hadn’t occurred exactly as originally predicted, was nonetheless still coming soon.

My memory of watching the Waco siege on TV is very clear; I also remember learning about Jonestown, which was cited as the predecessor, at least spiritually, of many of the end-times cults that crescendoed in the nineties. Less well-known than Waco was the Order of the Solar Temple, a small but geographically dispersed cult active in France, Switzerland, and Canada, which believed that a great “transition” was imminent and Christ would soon come again as a solar god-king. The OST was responsible for a rash of dozens of murders and suicides in 1994 and 1997, all grouped around equinoxes and solstices; founders believed the group was linked to the Knights Templar, and one founder claimed to be the third reincarnation of Jesus Christ. And Heaven’s Gate was a group whose beliefs married Christianity with science fiction—that God was an elite extraterrestrial and heaven was a physical place, the next evolutionary step above humanity. Heaven’s Gate believed that a UFO, which they would board to participate in the rapture, was to arrive after the passing of the incredibly bright comet Hale–Bopp. To join the UFO, thirty-nine members opted to leave their bodies by suicide in late March 1997—a tactic, they reasoned, that had more or less worked for Jesus.

I remember news clips about the OST, and I remember the laughing disbelief most North Americans had for Heaven’s Gate. My first exposure to it wasn’t The Simpsons’ episode “The Joy of Sect,” which aired the year after the suicides—a cult comes to Springfield and promises spaceship transport to the planet Blisstonia—but I remember watching that, too.

PERHAPS IT WAS COMING OF AGE IN THE NINETIES, when much of this was happening—in real time, and then digestible again through documentaries on HBO and A&E—that first sparked my interest in millenarian beliefs. The idea that the end of the world will someday come via the arrival, or re-arrival, of Christ is common to several different belief systems, but the idea that it is coming soon is particular to fewer: Seventh-day Adventists, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, several non-denominational protestant sects, including Endtime Ministries (handle @EndtimeInc), whose Twitter tagline reads, “Preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom to every person on earth … Because the Endtime is Now!” (The existence of these groups explains, in part, why a segment of the Christian right in North America is so obsessed with Israel—most millenarian-focused Christian denominations believe that a series of end-times-related events will unfold in Israel before the advent of the rapture, and some groups believe this so fiercely that they are working to hasten those events.)

The first thing I remember watching on television as a child was not Sesame Street or The Raccoons or Barney & Friends. It was aerial footage of Mount Carmel burning, reconstructed footage of the Oklahoma City bombings, one-hour specials devoted to murder and embezzlement and hit men narrated by men with deep, gravelly voices, establishing the early norms of the burgeoning genre of true crime.

I stayed up late watching these shows with my father because I could not sleep; I could not sleep because, at the age of seven or eight, I’d begun to wrestle with the existential truth that I would someday die. That my consciousness would be extinguished and I would cease to exist. In the beginning, I stared out the window and let my consciousness float past the ravine I could see from my room, down the paths I knew crept through the conservation area by my house, beyond hills and valleys and towns and cities, and out into the deep, deeply alone space of the universe. When I couldn’t take this expansion, or the idea of nothingness, anymore, I went to the basement and watched TV.

Nothing particularly terrible or traumatizing took place in my childhood, at least related to death; I had six living grandparents, never witnessed a serious accident, lived in a suburb that experienced very little violent crime, never had to come to terms, even, with losing a pet. My brother wasn’t similarly obsessed, even though our father had given us both the same rational, calm, atheistic explanation of what would happen when we finally breathed our last breaths. But I thought about death and dying several times a day, and the fear culminated when the sun set, before I ceded my consciousness to sleep—a practice that inevitably felt like a test for a much longer and more permanent cessation.

Looking back, it’s possible that I was drawn to true crime because I was seeking an unseekable meaning, or narrative structure, in death. Perhaps I was drawn to end-times beliefs because the fears felt intuitively similar to my own but came ready-made with an idea of what happened after. Or maybe, initially, it was easier than that: I was drawn to watching dramas about dying because I was drawn to explore what terrified me, even if exploring what terrified me worsened the terror. I wanted to live forever; if I couldn’t, then I’d explore all the ways people believed things would end.

IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, our music teacher had a distinctive grey bob and played the acoustic guitar. She taught us morose songs about the environment (in addition to David Koresh, the world was also obsessed then with the depleting ozone layer). In fourth grade, we learned a song called “Driving Miss Lazy,” which included the lyrics, “You say you need a ride, but there’s a voice inside: ‘Put on those old walkin’ shoes!’ … If you must take a car, make sure it’s really far, and pick up some friends on the way! Cause drivin’ ‘Miss Lazy’ is sometimes just crazy. Stop drivin’ ‘Miss Lazy’ today!” Another song went, in part, “Every time you spray a can, toss a fridge, or charge a fan, CFCs and halon escape. They float up to the atmosphere, eating ozone and it’s clear—burning rays of sun seal our fate. We’re destroying a planet that we take for granted!”

I haven’t read any of the books or many of the articles about how the earth is dying, even though I had an early example in my maternal grandfather, the first person I was very close to who died, who began growing vegetables organically in his backyard after reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. (I’ve been given Silent Spring no fewer than three times and I haven’t read it once; when my grandfather died, I sobbed for a week straight and then didn’t cry again for the four following years.) I am growing a vegetable garden—tomatoes, squash, kale, potatoes, peppers, chard, melons, broccoli, peas, beans, herbs—but the part of me that worries about environmental apocalypse also wonders if I am really working on food security, or simply offering myself a way to feel closer to my grandfather, who is gone, and closer to the earth before it’s gone too, and I am gone with it.

I haven’t read any of the books about how the earth is dying because I don’t understand how I would eat breakfast or clean the cat’s litter box or go to work after reading even one of those books, and I need to eat breakfast and clean the cat’s litter box and go to work in order to keep a roof over my head in the here and now. It’s a pressing problem but one that isn’t fixable with any kind of personal consumer choice—it’s only fixable on the type of scale that seems politically impossible. Two years ago, for example, when Canada purchased the floundering Trans Mountain pipeline from Kinder Morgan for $4.5 billion, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau justified the decision by telling Bloomberg News, “in order to be able to protect our environment, we do need to be able to have a strong and growing economy.” It’s a phrase he said right after he’d said the inverse—“creating a strong growing economy for the long term also requires the environment”—which he sandwiched between a callback to the way he was raised and an exhortation not to embrace all-or-nothing thinking. I’m not sure what reading best-sellers about the climate apocalypse can do to rewire Western democracy; a 600-page tome about the icebergs melting may have less impact than 600 paper airplanes saying WE CAN’T EAT OR BREATHE OR DRINK MONEY sailing towards the stage where the Bloomberg reporter chuckles conspiratorially with our sleeves-rolled-up nonsense-talker of a prime minister.

When I was a child, all of the possible options presented for continuing existence post-death bumped up against the reality, driven home by my music teacher, that the earth itself would eventually become uninhabitable, and the universe itself would expire. Unfathomably terrifying. Necessarily incomprehensible. But it was only when I reached my mid-twenties that the seeds of climate fears planted in the nineties suddenly and finally germinated. I still wanted to personally live forever and bring everyone I cared about on a metaphorical life raft, but the life raft began to feel less and less metaphorical.

The first time my partner, Will, and I met, in a coffee shop on Main Street in Vancouver, he asked me if I felt like the world was getting irredeemably, unfixably worse. Donald Trump hadn’t yet been elected US president, but he would be within the next few years; the Western world seemed addicted to oil, and to outsourcing conflict in order to plunder necessary resources. Socially, some things seemed to be getting better—but what good was that if climate change would exacerbate the world’s unfairness, including the ways in which it doled out death and prolonged life? Will didn’t share my anxieties around his own mortality, but it seemed like we’d been thinking, or feeling, similar things. Then again, we both wondered if every generation had felt like this—an ego-driven worry that theirs would be the last generation, that the world was finally ending. Miller believed the apocalypse was nigh in 1844, and I remember standing on a frozen beach on December 31, 1999, skeptical but mildly afraid that the worst predictions about Y2K would come true. Was the worry reasonable, in 2012, a few steps closer than 1999 to climate disaster—and the year of the doomsday scare that arose from New Age misinterpretations of the Mayan calendar? Or was it just more of the same?

IN AN ESSAY FOR THE New York Times—a well-written essay featuring the kind of snark that leaves a metallic taste in your mouth—novelist Dara Horn skewers the tendency of Silicon Valley billionaires to want to “solv[e] ‘the problem of death.’” Women who work in this area, she writes, tend to focus on “curbing age-related pathology.” They wish for people to be less sick and in pain but take a more holistic view of the importance of aging and death to life. By contrast, men who fund and work in life extension studies are the type to decide they are going to live until they are hundreds of years old, melting time “into a vortex of solipsism.”

Raymond Kurzweil, for one, eats a specialized million-dollar-a-year diet and thinks we’ll soon do away with disease and aging and live forever by somehow uploading part of our consciousnesses to the cloud. The guy who popularized buttered coffee in North America had his bone marrow extracted so that his stem cells could be reinjected into his joints, spinal cord, cerebral fluid, scalp, face, and genitals; his goal is to live to 180. Peter Thiel, who has funded several life extension companies, is so uncomfortable with the idea of dying that he referred to it as “the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual” in an interview with the New Yorker.

Women, Horn writes, don’t have this kind of hubris because they are used to caring for the bodies and lives of others; women are daily immersed “in the fragility of human life and the endless effort required to sustain it” and are thus more accustomed to thinking about bodily vulnerability, including the ultimate vulnerability of death. The stunted-maturity men of Silicon Valley need to learn something caregivers know innately, she writes: “You are a body, only a body, and nothing more.”

It’s an argument that reminds me of something Julia Cooper writes in her book The Last Word: “Death is what gives life its impetus, its very breath.” But what do you do when you don’t feel that way? To borrow another metaphor from the book: What do you do when death feels less like the seasoning for life, and more like the main course? I have played the imaginative game of telescoping my life forward and forward and forward to try to induce some sense of sadness or selfishness for extending the telescope too far, but every time, I find myself utterly comfortable with the problems of living forever, more comfortable than I am with the idea of dying. And I am, every day, grateful to be alive even though I know, as Horn guesses the Silicon Valleyites don’t, all about bodily vulnerability. I know it’s selfish to want to not die; I know what it means to carry and care for another human being. I know all of this, yet I still feel the same way I did when I was eight and absolutely terrified of dying.

I find myself, sometimes, walking close to external walls, like a rat, to lessen the chance of something falling catastrophically on my head. I blanch every time I get into a car, because driving and suicide are the two ways someone my age, gender, race, and socioeconomic class are most likely to die. I cry every time I think of someone I love dying. I cry when people I don’t know die, particularly senselessly, because someone somewhere extinguished the only time that person got on earth. I feel the same way I did when I was eight, and it’s not just selfish.

When I google how to deal with a fear of death so bad that it takes away from daily life, what comes up are Psychology Today articles asserting that this fear often crops up as a major theme in middle age. The common wisdom is that fear of death exposes different, underlying fears, and the solution is to adjust your life so that it feels more meaningful. I have no other real fears, because I am willing to live through anything that isn’t dying. Maybe I laugh with Horn but land with Thiel for a gender-related reason. I’m not a man, but maybe I have the hubris of one.

ANTHONY STORR DEFINES THE GURUS he covers in Feet of Clay as inherently narcissistic. They become gurus, he writes, after experiencing a “dark night of the soul,” followed by an emerging dawn of insight. Storr argues that this process of chaos followed by insight is something shared by artists and creators. Many gurus, he writes, lead isolated childhoods with few friends—another commonality, besides an obsession with endings, that I share with them. The difference between gurus and artists, according to Storr, is that gurus find certainty and comfort in their insight, maintaining it through faith and delusion and by convincing others, while artists never reach that same level of internal or external certainty. So artists worry the world is getting worse and worse and maybe ending, and then we wonder if that fear is part of the human condition—or if it’s narcissistic, or a reasonable reaction to climate change, or an intense and dizzying mix of all of the above. The truth is that I fear death and endings, and I always will. I study believers, gurus, and religion because I’ll never be a believer myself. I crave certainty, but I’ll never find it; in a way that is more seeking and less Ozymandias, this fear will probably be the driving force behind much of my writing, and art, for the rest of my life.

The problem of death is a problem that feels both fundamental and unresolvable. Although I would be better off if the fear didn’t rule me, it most likely always will. The fear won’t save me from death, because death is inevitable. All I can hope is that I won’t die soon. All I can do is accept that I will sometimes be so afraid of dying that I take half an hour or an hour or a day off living, and then move on.