Tag: death

Categories
life

Sending The Old Man Home

Spider John is my name, friend,
I’m in between freights, and I sure would be obliged
If you’d share your company.”

– Jimmy Buffett, “The Ballad of Spider John”

I’m thirteen years old. My oldest brother has just come home from college for a break, bringing with him a lot of new music that he’d picked up from his new group of friends. I’m stepping out of the bathroom, and he calls out to me, “Kyle, come listen to this song.”

I enter his room. The curtains are drawn, and the ceiling light casts everything in an orange-ish glow. He hits play on the compact disc player, and the uptempo song starts with an explosive drum and keyboard combo that lasts for a measure and sets up the song’s melodic theme before quickly calming down and settling into the first verse. A man’s nasally half-twang begins to sing, using a playful-in-the-mouth phrase as an opening line, a sentence that bounces delightfully from consonant to consonant: “I tried to amend my carnivorous habits,”

My first thought is, “Well, that’s interesting.”

The song continues, each line a little masterpiece of ridiculousness, lines that don’t belong in a song unless you’re going for straight comedy in the vein of Weird Al Yankovic, and containing internal rhymes that add tempo and surprise to the lyrics: “Losing weight without speed, eating sunflower seeds” and “Not zucchini, fettuccini, or bulgur wheat,” until finally, the chorus, which reveals the subject of the singer’s longing: the American cheeseburger.

“I like mine with lettuce and tomato,” he explains, “Heinz 57 and French fried potatoes, a big kosher pickle, and a cold draft beer,” before exclaiming to the divine, “Good God Almighty, which way do I steer for my cheeseburger in paradise?”

I couldn’t believe it. At thirteen years old, I was in the throes of discovering my love for writing by doing as many do at thirteen years old, wiling away my evening hours composing terrible poems. I’d become fascinated with experimenting with rhyme schemes and searching for subjects outside of the norm (one of my favorites from those years: “An Ode to My Commode”).

And here was a professional singer/songwriter making a country-tinged pop hit with a song about his love for cheeseburgers.

My brother left the room to do who knows what, but I stayed behind and listened to the rest of the album, its title an admonition, warning me that I was already way behind where I was supposed to be in my knowledge of this artist: Songs You Know By Heart: Jimmy Buffett’s Greatest Hits.

I once knew a poet
who lived before his time.
He and his dog Spooner
would listen while he’d rhyme.
Words to make ya happy,
words to make you cry,
then one day the poet suddenly did die

– Jimmy Bufett, “The Death of an Unpopular Poet”

He wasn’t a great songwriter. Even as a dedicated thirteen-year-old poet, I already recognized his use of “did [present tense verb]” as a lazy rhymer’s cop-out, a grammatical construction that signaled the writer’s reluctance to work the lines until he put “the right word at the right time.”

I didn’t hold it against him, however. The lack of attempted perfection spoke to me, and it boosted the mythical character that his songs implied: a well-intentioned, romantic pirate/smuggler who laughed in the face of the squares’ demand for discipline.

The other tunes on Songs You Know By Heart revealed that Jimmy Buffett was not a wanna-be Weird Al. While his songs weren’t afraid to be funny or to relish in puns, they also explored more emotional themes.

  • “He Went to Paris” narrates the life story of a veteran of the Spanish Civil War whose biography involves the death of a wife and child and the loss of an eye
  • “Son of a Son of a Sailor” connects the singer’s lifestyle to his grandfather’s, an honorific of multigenerational inspiration
  • “A Pirate Looks At Forty” reflects on the loves and losses of an aging sailor, “an over-forty victim of fate, arriving too late” in world history for the life he desires to lead
  • “Come Monday” shares the singer’s pre-Labor Day pining for his darling as he nears the end of a long summer tour
  • “Pencil Thin Mustache” reminisces about the singer’s 1950s childhood, when he was “buck-toothed and skinny” and looking up to the star and starlets of the big screen

These empathetic songs were buttressed by humorous tunes, such as his beer-sodden proposal to a possible prostitute in the bar, “Why don’t we get drunk (and screw)?” or his 1979 calypso homage, “Volcano,” where the narrator wonders where he’ll go when the volcano blows, pleading to the gods not to end up on Three-Mile Island or anywhere near Iran’s newly empowered Ayatollah.

The album concluded, and I knew I needed more I dove into his oeuvre, scouring my local branch of Coconuts for tapes and CDs of his back catalog. I wanted to hear more stories of misfits living in the Florida Keys, the Caribbean islands, and the eastern shores of Central and South America.

His songs brought my imagination to a foreign land, and his values — fun, love, and lust, reflected on with sensitivity and humor — connected with my teenage brain in ways that other songwriters did not, and it was “the difference between lightning and a harmless lightning bug.“

We are the people they couldn’t figure out.
We are the people our parents warned us about.

– Jimmy Buffett, “We Are The People Our Parents Warned Us About”

I spent the end of every summer in the second half of the 1990s celebrating the music of Jimmy Buffett with my fellow New-England-based Parrot Heads at Great Woods Center for the Performing Arts, singing the songs that, by then, I truly knew by heart.

In those years, Jimmy and his Coral Reefer Band ended their summer tour at Great Woods, after which Jimmy would head down to Martha’s Vineyard for a few days before jumping in his plane and flying back south for the winter. We benefitted from the band’s celebration of the end of the tour. The band was always on fire — Fingers Taylor belting out on his harmonica, Mr. Utley pounding on the ivories, Robert showing us white folks what a pan drum sounds like in the hands of a bonafide master, and (over Jimmy’s career) nearly 70 other musicians, each of whom knew how to bring it.

My brother invited me and two of my friends to our first Buffett concert, where he met up with his college roommate and brought together friends from his high school. Several years younger than the rest of the crew, my friends and I wandered the parking lot, where we discovered a community of over ten thousand fun-loving, mostly middle-aged folks, each as welcoming as could be.

By the time I stopped going to Buffett shows in the early 2000s, they had become a massive affair. I’d have anywhere between three and ten friends with me, my oldest brother would have another dozen, and our middle brother would bring four or five. Our parents were there, as were our aunt and uncle and their three boys and their friends. Neighbors we’d known forever came with us as well. By the time all was said and done, we were throwing one of the largest parties in the parking lot, and just as I’d learned, we were as welcoming to strangers as could be.

Truly, some of my best family memories are set outside of a Jimmy Buffett concert.

All of the faces and all of the places
Wonderin’ where they all disappeared

– Jimmy Buffett, “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes”

Jimmy’s songs are pickled with nostalgia, so it makes sense for me to think back on those concerts with a mixture of fondness and sadness.

I can see the smiling faces of people I haven’t spoken to or laughed with for decades: Carolyn, Britte, Shea, Justin, Josh, Bill, Chris, Allen, Marty, and so many others. I follow some of their lives on Facebook, liking their posts and feeling proud of their children’s accomplishments, but some aren’t on social media, and so I’ve lost touch with them completely — people who were, in every sense of the phrase, my best friends.

I can also see my mother before Parkinson’s destroyed her ability to walk and talk and laugh with her whole body. I can see her singing along to the lyrics as she shimmies her butt, holding a mixed drink in a red cup, mixed for her by the Vin Man, one of her adopted children from the neighborhood and a trained mixologist. I can see my dad holding her hand as they dance, surrounded by their three boys and all of their friends, flirting with each other and as happy as can be.

I stopped attending Buffett shows when I moved to Vermont. Jimmy didn’t make it up to the mountains and Great Woods was too far away to drive. Plus, my college friends (all of whom were five to seven years younger than me) did not enjoy the “Gulf & Western” stylings of a baby boomer. As millennials to my Gen X, they found his lyrics and his music too corny for their Radiohead-tuned ears.

I didn’t let that stop me though. I played his songs at high volume in my dorm. I wore Hawaiian shirts when the mood struck me. And I proudly declared myself a Parrot Head (as well as a Dead Head and Phish Head — of course, the latter two fit more comfortably into the lifestyle of my new, marijuana-hazed college dorms).

The young ‘uns could chuckle all they wanted. I knew where I came from. Jimmy had given me memories of “good times that brought so much pleasure” and the cynicism of the millennials wouldn’t take them from me.

He died about a month ago,
while winter filled the air.
And though I cried, I was so proud
to love a man so rare.
He’s somewhere on the ocean now,
a place he ought to be.
With one hand on the starboard rail,
he’s waving back at me.

– Jimmy Buffett, “The Captain and the Kid”

Jimmy’s family announced his death this morning. They said he died surrounded by his family, friends, music, and dogs.

So thank you, Jimmy. You helped shape me into who I am. You gave me, my friends, and my family some of the best memories of our lives together. My heart is full, my eyes are crying, and I am so happy to have known you as the poet and artist you were.

Thank you, sir.

Categories
asides

Trump’s Killing Spree

From Trump’s Killing Spree:

After it was clear Trump would be leaving office in January, [Attorney General Barr] scheduled a string of back-to-back executions, to squeeze in as many as possible before Biden moved into the White House.

Categories
religion & atheism

Greet Death

I wonder if I think about death more than other people. I have an anxiety disorder, and I would suspect that all anxieties, if pursued to their origin, would eventually lead to an ultimate anxiousness about death, so yes, I suspect, with my disorder, I think about death more than other people.

Part of it is because I am a writer, and every story, eventually, must end — my own not least of all. Part of it is because I’ve now entered my forties, and what might once have gone away on its own is now more apt to linger. Part of it is because I have a family of my own now, and I worry about them in my absence. Part of it is because I spend much of my days and nights examining my relationship to the concept of God, and that examination naturally includes a lot of blindness when it comes to one’s death. Part of it is because I feel like at any moment I could receive news of my students’ deaths, self-inflicted, accidental, or victimized, two of which have occured during my current tenure as a teacher. Part of it is because I am the son of two 70+-year-old parents, and there’s no telling what might happen.

So yes, I think about death…perhaps a lot…but do I think about it more than the next person? Isn’t the next person’s life just as touched by death as my own?

Here’s the thing though: when I think about death, I’m not “worried” about it (not on a conscious level, anyway). It’ll be what it’ll be, after all, and nothing I say or do will change that.

Christianity would beg to differ, arguing that my faith and my works here on Earth will determine my placement in the Kingdom of Heaven. Though “the Kingdom of Heaven” can be interpreted to mean the current world — the *herenow* — it also means a world that exists *beyond* death and a judgement rendered as to whether those who live in the *herenow* will be able to immigrate into the land of *hereafter* — with specific criteria determining whether an applicant has merit, and if not, then to hell with ’em.

Like some interpretations of the Kingdom of Heaven, I also value the *herenow*, but I add to that, the *herethen*. In my attempt to live as a good Taoist, I seek to find the flow of the herenow, to recognize the difference between the various channels of possibility, and “work when it is time.” But I also value the herethen, the possibility that humanity will continue to exist long after I am gone.

The Christian concept of the Kingdom of Heaven cannot be squared with my values because, in the end, Christianity does not value the continued evolution of human existence. Its ultimate goal is to drive/draw the spirit *away* from the abundance of the Earth. It does not seek to recycle the spirit back into the ultimate good of *life*.

I, however, do seek life, and because of that, I do not worry (consciously) about death. I see it, ultimately, as a good thing (not dying, per se, but death) because I see it as nothing more or less than a transfer of energy, once concentrated, now dissipate, never to reform in the same concentration again. Just as I don’t worry about the loss of energy taking place in my brain right now — it leaps from synapse to synapse, splashing energy and information like a frog leaping from one lily pad to the next — I don’t worry about death.

There is a difference between worrying about it and thinking about it. I think about it, but I think about it in terms of the *herenow* and *herethen*. Is death herenow? No? Okay. Then what can I do to make the world better in the herethen? Because let’s do that.

Some day I will greet death. But until then, I want to keep working on the world I’ll leave behind.

Categories
education

My Current Problem with Death

I teach a class in the Philosophy of Death.

Let’s talk about the ridiculousness of that for a moment, shall we?

First, the details. This class meets twice a week for 45 minutes. I have four students in it — the youngest is fourteen; the next youngest is seventeen; and the last two are eighteen. All four of them are engaged participants in every single class. They take  diligent notes, and even discuss passionately with me the structure of those notes, wanting to make sure that what they’re writing down is what I’m trying to get across. I shit you not. The class ends at 12:00pm, lunch time, and every single class, at least two if not all four students choose to stay in their seats and continue our discussion (including a student whose hunger knows no bounds).

These incredible young students come to class every week and expect me — me! — to teach them about the Philosophy of Death.

That’s ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous.

What do I know of death?

I’ll tell you what I know of death. One of my students died this year. He was nineteen years old. The young man was no saint, and he died in the company of known criminals, of a gunshot wound, shot in the early hours of the morning in a parked car with his friends, on a dare, with a stolen gun, obtained from a house where the homeowner was assaulted during the robbery, by one of the kids sitting in the car, where my student dared his killer to shoot him, and the shooter did.

I was this boy’s teacher at the last school he attended before dropping out. I was his last formal advisor. He was going down this path before he met me. And he continued down it after me. If anything, I only stalled him for a while and tried to put a smile on his face. I’m not sure I should have tried anything more. I did of course, but not by the end. By the end I only wanted him to know that I still cared. But this isn’t about me. It’s about death.

My great-grandmother’s death is the first one I remember. I remember it in part because my mother often tells the story of how I behaved at the funeral, but it’s not just the story I remember; it’s a visual. We’re seated near the front of the chapel, the priest is just a few yards from us, on my right, and up high, and he’s saying something, and then my eyes go incredibly blurry and I turn my head to the left, looking down and away from the priest, and then my shoulders are shaking, and my breath is coming and going in sobs, and my mother puts her arm around my shoulder and squeezes me tight, except now I’m making such a commotion that she has to take me out the side door of the chapel while the service is still going. In the story, my mother asked me if I understood what the priest was saying, and then she says she could just tell: I understood every word. I was four or five years old.

I really only have one memory of my great-grandmother, but even this could be based on a photograph I’ve seen: she’s seated on a folding chair in the middle of a shaded, sloping lawn. We’re at my family’s summer cabin, and she’s sitting alone up on the grass. Her feet are crossed at the ankles. She’s wearing what appears to be a thin bathrobe over eighty-year-old raggedy bones, but she’s someone who is always nice to me, and her bones don’t scare me. I can feel myself approaching her from her right. I can’t see her face, but I can see that bathrobe and the bones in her arm, her hand lowering to the ground near my head, moving towards me, welcoming me in.

When I was in my twenties, my best friend’s mother died. My memories of her are as strong as my memories of my own mother. I’d known her almost as long, and felt from her almost as much love. She wasn’t a daily presence in my life, especially not by the time I was in my twenties and living in a completely different state, but her son was my best friend and my brother, and so I was in contact with the spirit of her on almost a daily basis. Her death changed him (and changed me) for the better. In her death, she offered with such grace and love her life’s final lesson: this is what courage and dignity looks like.

There have been other deaths in my life. Friends. Family members. Acquaintances. Celebrities. No more than most others, and significantly less than some.

So what do I know of death, and what qualifies me to teach philosophy on the subject? I mean, I’m using the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as my guide, for God’s sake! — and when I say “as my guide,” I should say that what I’m teaching my students is the Encyclopedia; I’m teaching them its entry.

I know, I know. Lame.

In a class on the Philosophy of Death, you don’t just want to look at one source, and if you do, you sure as hell don’t want it to be an encyclopedia. That’s a rookie move.

In a class on the Philosophy of Death, you want to check out all the weird shit from Asia and Africa and South America; and you want to see what the Egyptians had to say about it — after all, if anyone made an art form of death, it was the Egyptians, the first dead people anyone decides to teach us about, in the sense that elementary school teachers seem to not show us pictures of George Washington’s grave or discuss the Colonialists’ burial rituals; they do, however, show us the pyramids and tell us they’re built as monuments to death and filled with kings and queens who have been mummified by priests, a process which could be considered totally creepy (hence, the Mummy as a monster), but is discussed more for its novelty than its sense (or lack thereof) of humanity.

But you also want to make sure it’s a philosophy class, and not just a class for a multicultural tourist. True, it’s a high school class and not a college class, so you don’t have to get too deep on the philosophy side of things, but you ought to reveal some of the major questions around the topic.

Even more, you want to make sure it’s an engaging class. You want the kids to experience philosophy in action. You want them to criticize what you’re trying to teach them and doubt the ideas you put on the board. You want them to scrutinize the language you use and to document your logic while not accepting its dogma. You want them to point out your lesson’s flaws and double-check its facts, even the most basic ones, such as what philosopher said what when. You want them to disagree with each other, challenge each other to define their terms. You want them to discover moments of both clarity and confusion and feel a passionate compulsion to express any questions or doubts.

But you’ve only got so much time in the day. And you have other classes, and other responsibilities, not least of which are your responsibilities as both a father and husband. As a whole person, and not just a teacher, you can’t just be studying death all day. So as a teacher, you have to make choices.

As a teacher, I have to make choices. Should I choose to put my effort into engaging my students each week with 90 minutes of active philosophizing, or should I help them develop a slightly deeper understanding than they may already have about some of humanity’s most cherished ideas?

To do the latter would be to invest a lot of energy into my own education, and would become an almost all-consuming project. It wouldn’t take into account my need to teach a class on women’s studies, a class on academic writing, and a class in which I must lead four young adventurers on an original and yet more-than-improvised campaign of Dungeons & Dragons. It would also mean neglecting many of my responsibilities beyond the classroom.

To do the former, however, to provide my students with the experience of philosophy, all I have to do is spend at least one or two extra hours a week really studying the topic, and then just try to teach the students whatever I learned the week before. Because the information will be so new me, I won’t really know what I’m talking about, which might sound bad, but that will give my students ample opportunity to criticize and question, and then watch and listen as I wrestle out loud with their implications.

With two hours of studying outside of the classroom, I’ll  definitely know at least little more than they do. And of course, I’ll already possess an undergraduate background in Continental philosophy, which means not everything I read will be exactly new to me. That background should also allow me to put up reasonable (or at least time-wasting) defenses on any of the arguments I haven’t fully researched or understood, which again, sounds bad, but will force the students to penetrate to the heart of an idea from more than one angle.

Two hours a week studying the philosophy of death? I can do that in my sleep. Literally. I can lay down at the end of the day with any text even tangentially related to the topic and study it as I fall asleep. Right now, on my own time and out of my own sense of interest, I’m already reading the King James Version of the New Testament, the book most responsible for what America’s dominant culture thinks about death. If I can support that by also reading some more analytically sound thoughts on death, I should be fine.

But I don’t want to read a whole book on death, per se, so articles it’ll have to be. But how to distinguish a reputable article from another? How to find an article or series of articles that will give me enough scope of philosophy’s take on the subject while also making sure I don’t get bogged down in any academic squabbling about details?

The Stanford Encyclopedia. I’ll start there. But shit, have you ever tried to read that thing? They don’t just give you a short entry on something. They break that shit down, take on various theories, reveal various biases on the part of the authors, etc. I’ve only got one to two hours a week, man! I can’t just knock out the Stanford Encyclopedia and move on to the next article. If I’m going teach anything about it, I’ve got to think that shit over. I’ve got to read it slow and re-read certain sections, make sure I understand the logic.

So that’s what I’ve been doing.

Which means, for the past three weeks. I’ve been teaching my students what the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has to say about Death.

Unfortunately, I’m only about halfway through it, and it’s starting to get old. The entry basically explores the philosophy around two central questions: What is death, and does it harm us? While those questions are interesting (I guess), they’re also not very exciting — or at least, the way they’re discussed by an old white man is not exciting.

I want to show my students more than what an old white man seems to think.

For that, I’m going to need something that comes from the darker cultures (in every sense of that word), something I can pull up from the moist wet soil of the Earth, a cultural philosophy of death that was once buried and forgotten but has now been returned to us, alive and vital.

I don’t want to talk about the Egyptians, unless it’s the Egypt of the Muslim Brotherhood and the military junta, the deaths of people in the streets. Nor do I want to talk about the Indians, unless its the rituals of the telephone operators when they go home at night, contrasted with the rituals of the farmers in the south. I don’t want to talk about the west Africans, or the Aztecs, or the Incas; not the Navajo, those stand-ins for the peaceful Indians, nor the Apache, the Spartans of North America. The Inuit is a possibility; northeastern Russia as well. Japan and China would be little more than a cliche, a blind-eyed choice that excludes the Koreas, Vietnam, and all the other cultures to the south, each with their own rich heritage.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead, alone, could be its own nine-week class.

How to choose? And how to figure out the reasons to choose? I’ve only got one to two hours a week, one to two sleepy hours, and at least a portion of those two hours must remain committed to reading something analytical, if only to exercise the analytical skills I need to successfully teach the class for ninety minutes a week.

But wait a second! Don’t I work at a democratic school?! At a democratic school, the teacher doesn’t have to be the one who makes the choice. I only have to present the options as openly as possible to my students, and let them decide. I’m confident I’ll be able to take it from there.

But then it strikes me — What if I’m going about this all wrong? Shouldn’t a class on the Philosophy of Death consider more than just the human community?  Shouldn’t it embrace the entire community of life? It could explore if animals mourn, for example. Enough videos on YouTube prove that other species process the loss of loved ones, so why not use the class to explore that? Why not bring up some environmental and ecological questions about death? I could pose the question of death from the point of view of climate change and political terror, as the death of humanity as we know it, and the potential extinction of all life on Earth.

So many questions. So many possibilities. And only so much time to figure it all out. That’s my current problem with death.