Now or Later
One of my pet peeves is when people say, “You aren’t going to die.”
It mostly comes up in TV shows or movies. For example, I recently had a Netflix marathon of watching “House”, a TV show about a genius diagnostician who saves lives with his team of doctors. Over and over, I watched sick people being told by their friends and family, “You aren’t going to die.”
I’m sure what they meant to say is, “You aren’t going to die right now, or soon.” Except for those particular stories on TV dealing with immortal beings, everybody dies. Even vampires and zombies die, though they continue to exist in an animated undead state. Hearing the phrase over and over in pop culture, “You aren’t going to die,” indicates to me quite a bit of denial around the whole death issue.
Sure, some would argue that we don’t die, because they believe that whatever consciousness makes me ‘me’ continues after I slough off my mortal coil. Even if that’s true though, the death of the body is going to happen, and with it a huge transition for everyone involved. I’m not so clear how my death will affect me, yet I am clear I will be affected, along with a lot of other people in my life (assuming I don’t die last of all my friends and family).
I have noticed a cultural bias towards not speaking about death. Adult children sometimes don’t want to discuss their parents’ death even decades before it will happen because the idea makes them uncomfortable. It’s as though they think talking about their parents’ deaths will make them happen more quickly than not talking about them. Sometimes we sugarcoat death with phrases like “gone on to a better place”; some children may not even understand that someone has left their body when they hear a phrase like that. Sometimes when I say good-bye to people, I tell them I’ll see them again, then remember to add “Barring death, of course,” and some people actually feel uncomfortable that I would bring up death as a possible future outcome.
I’ve come up with the theory that people in the U.S. are repressed about death. I lived in Japan, where the strict standards of culturally acceptable behavior went hand-in-hand with a level of sexual kinkiness (as evidenced, for example, by vending machines for underwear that was advertised as having been worn by schoolgirls) that expressed itself more vigorously than it does in the U.S. I wonder if the same thing has happened in the U.S. with death as happened in Japan with sexuality — on the surface, death is rarely spoken of except to be denied, yet violence becomes almost a fetish, played out in video games, TV shows, and movies. The violence in the videos expresses our fascination with death while also denying dying itself — the video game character comes back to life, the action hero character saves the person they love from the jaws of death, and even those people who do die were just actors who get to play a different role in a different show next week.
I am going to die someday, though, unless they figure out how to download my consciousness into a machine before my body craps out, or medical science figures out how to turn the aging process off. Death doesn’t seem real to me. As far as I can remember, I’ve always been alive! If life is like a roller coaster ride, does it improve the ride to deny that it will end? I suspect that no matter how much I remind myself that I’m going to die someday, my natural amnesia will kick in and I’ll spend whole swathes of time feeling immortal. Perhaps that’s the issue — it’s hard for death to feel real when consciousness exists in the eternal now. I’ll keep trying, though; I reckon I’ll enjoy life the most if I remember it could end anytime. So every time I hear the phrase, “You aren’t going to die,” my brain will say, “Yes I am. We all die someday.”
