Fear of Dying, Pt. II

Wrestling with what is or is not to come.

A still from Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016).

I recommend reciting Psalm 90 while visiting a graveyard
It reminds me how limited my days are
And yo, I need that, the clock’s ticking
It’s not fiction: the rot quickens as the plot thickens

Shai Linne, “Elder Statesman”

I reflected on dying in my first entry for The Attic Club this past April. That note was inspired, in part, by the news of a woman from my church who was sick with ALS and only three weeks later died, as well as other friends, not much older than I am, who were sick with cancer.

This week, someone I met at church and later emailed with when he was a newsman and I was working in PR at the university shared on LinkedIn that his wife had died. She couldn’t have been more than 50 years old. A month ago, my best friend, Jeremy, texted a group of close friends asking if we’d help care for his wife and kids if he were gone; his former boss, at 41, was dead, too. The man left behind two kids the same age as my little boys. He was killed by a cancer the doctors found on a fluke and were treating with optimism. Because of his own pre-existing condition, my friend does not qualify for life insurance. If he dies young, it really will be on us, as the kinds of Christians who actually believe the words of God, to care for his family and not pass it off to a corporation or the government.

Others, right here in this club, are struggling, too. One of my patrons is supporting his wife in her see-sawing battle with cancer and will spend most of Christmas week with her in the hospital. Another reader went to the hospital feeling unwell the week before Thanksgiving, wound up having emergency brain surgery, and is now alternating radiation treatment and rehabilitation.

The list of deaths and near-deaths is endless.

In journalism, “If it bleeds, it leads,” the saying goes. I have seen so much death online recently that I wonder if social media algorithms have caught on. The other day, LinkedIn showed me a post from a young dad I don’t follow who died after a three-year struggle with a cancer that doctors only found because he insisted they do extra testing after a dude on a healthcare board of directors he served on encouraged him to. When Haley told me to request Dr. French perform additional blood work to detect either colon or prostate cancer during my annual physical in September, he said it’d be like $200 bucks, and I declined. Doc said I wouldn’t need to worry about traditional male cancers until I hit my 40s, anyway. I’ve got four years of false reassurance left.

In the first death entry I wrote in April, I outlined the many ways I imagine going. I won’t revisit them because, like clover patches in my front yard, they are abundant (and invasive). I also talked about what my death might mean for my wife and children.

Because I wasn’t afflicted by long-term illness when Alba was born in 2020, I was convinced to buy life insurance from a friend who attends a mega church (i.e., a place where you’re unlikely to hear Jesus’s message about taking care of neighbors without insurance but you will see a great Christmas play). If I get run over by a Dodge Ram on a country road near home tonight, Haley will become a millionaire. But I reckon she’ll be sad to take up the entire bed alone and, worse, to explain to the children why God took Daddy before he was an old man. Alba is perceptive and has already listed out, by age, the order in which our family members are supposed to die, starting with Nono (87) and Nona (85).

Just as an early death may traumatize a spouse, a child, or a parent, and is, thus, a thing people like me get in trouble for talking about around Normals in our society, a terrible consequence of such a death is missing out on what might’ve been.

In my case, I hate imagining not seeing the dreams I have for my children be realized. These are not the dreams I speak about publicly to stimulate a better or, at least, more entertaining conversation—the dreams of professional soccer contracts, Olympic medals, artsy-fartsy private schools where they can study the humanities and not something boring like business or engineering. These are the ones in which the sacrifices Haley and I are making and the values we’re instilling reap children who love Jesus, love each other, do purposeful work in the world, are physically and emotionally and psychologically strong, and are been spared of some of the horrors we’ve seen, from early exposure to pornography and death videos online to families torn apart by selfishness and sin. (In this imagined future, they are also non-conformists who reject mainstream music, read paper books, and flip tables at the temple.)

But rather than taking that stream of thought much further, and seeing as this is a clubhouse for confession to my closest confidantes and supporters, I want to share some anecdotes from my past that you may not know.