For the past few weeks, I have been pondering my mortality. I know. It’s not a very comfortable topic for many of us. I mean it’s one of those things that we only get to do once; so, I feel like there’s some performance anxiety surrounding it. Where will it happen? When? Who will I be with? How will I appear in death? If I were able to see myself in death, would I be proud of what I see? Will I be ashamed? Oddly, while death is the one experience that our lives guarantee us to have, and, yet, it is the one experience that we work the hardest to avoid or, for many of us, to avoid even the very thought of.
In this present moment, as I write this, I am 41 years old. In a few days, my body's odometer will turn over to mark the end of my 42nd year and the beginning of my 43rd. I’m in my 40’s. How did I get here? It seems like a few weeks ago that I started counting down the days until my 16th birthday and then, shortly after, began marking the time until my high school graduation. It seems like we are constantly marking the time until the next milestone or looking back with longing at those which have already passed. As I have been making the conscious effort to be mindful of my own mortality and the importance of living in the the now, one of the things that I have done is that I have taken the step to download an app to my phone called ‘WeCroak.’ For some of you this might not be a helpful tool, but it has been enormously helpful for me. Each day, it sends me 5 random reminders that I am going to die. These reminders come in the form of quotes. The one that is sticking in my mind right now is from the American psychiatrist, Irvin Yalom, a name familiar to most people who have ever taken a class on the dynamics of group therapy, but he also did substantive work in the area of the fear that human beings exhibit towards our own mortality. The quote is as follows…”Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.”
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| Quote from 'WeCroak' App |
Today I find myself particularly conscious of this spark, mainly inspired by the lives of two accomplished women. The first is former First Lady Barbara Bush who died just a couple of days ago on April 17th. Having lived so much of her life in the public sphere, she left behind a legacy of unyielding firmness in her beliefs while doing so within a composed and dignified personage. Whether you or I agreed fully with either her or her family’s political views, she lived her life in such a way that showed that she was unequivocally comfortable with being herself in all contexts. From all accounts, in the days and hours prior to her death, Barbara Bush had made a conscious decision that she was ready to die, and it seems that she was at peace with both that decision and the life that she had lived.
The second woman that I find myself thinking about is Southwest pilot Tammie Jo Shults who, on the same morning, made an emergency landing of a Boeing 737 in Philadelphia after losing one engine as well as hydraulics, savings lives of all onboard, except for one, Jennifer Riordan, a Wells Fargo executive who was nearly blow out of the aircraft after a window was shattered by engine debris at 32,500 feet. In those moments, facing what must have felt like her own impending death, adrenaline and years of flight experience both as one of the United States’ first female naval fighter pilots and as a commercial airline pilot kicked in for Shults. Her words from the cockpit recordings reveal a calm and measured tone as she detailed what was occurring to the aircraft and those aboard to air traffic control. Acts of heroism and desperation were also occurring back in the cabin as passengers worked to keep Jennifer Riordan from being fully pulled from the plane and to block the window to keep others from being blown out. Others worked frantically to purchase internet access so that they could send final messages to their loved ones, fighting to hold onto and enter their credit card numbers as the aircraft rapidly descended over 20,000 feet in approximately five minutes time.
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| Barbara Bush |
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| Tammie Jo Shults |
Based on these two women and the events that surrounded them in the moments that had to seem likely to result in death for both of them, I am struck by the calm that seemed to inhabit each of them. Both were able to draw from a lifetime of experience and accomplishment from their own history-making contexts. While only one of them ultimately died, both faced death, and it appears to me, as a distant observer, that both were the calm in the midst of their individual contexts, providing anchors of stability for those around them. That is the kind of calm acceptance that I hope that I exhibit when faced with my own impending death. In order to get there, I think that the powerful reminder that both of these stories present is that, until that moment comes, all that I have this immediate, ever fleeting and ever arriving moment, now.
~Culbs
joshua.culbertson@gmail.com
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