The Book of Immortality Read online

  The modern attitude toward death has been described as “a hedonistic avoidance of the issue.” In the past, we dealt with it socially. Wakes, cremation ceremonies, and other burial rites entailed community participation. Today, being bereaved is often seen as interfering with productivity, a sign of weakness, an unpleasantry best done in private. Should we tweet about it? Do we press like when someone else does? Doctors dole out dolorifuging pills. Even in death we pump ourselves full of chemicals to fit in, with morticians embalming bodies to give them a waxy semblance of life. But no matter how much a cadaver appears like a napping person, the irrevocable can’t be airbrushed away. Everyone ends up sleeping the same sleep.

  * * *

  My friend Elena was in the hospital with her comatose mother. In the middle of the night, her mother started shaking violently. She appeared to be trying to pull her clothes off. Elena, realizing she couldn’t calm her unconscious mother, decided to help her undress. Once naked, she quieted down. The following day, she passed on in peaceful repose. Elena felt sure her mother wanted to exit life the way she had entered it. “There was something greater than us in the hospital room that night,” she concluded.

  When someone close to us dies, we escape into beliefs. It’s not unusual to find religion in loss. At the age of twenty-five, another friend of mine lost her best friend and her cousin within a few weeks of each other. The grief was so all-consuming, she told me, that “the only way I could stay alive was by starting to believe in the afterlife.”

  Our mind ceaselessly churns out plausible interpretations of unexplainables in attempting to reconcile itself to death’s implications. The idea of “person permanence”—that our dead relatives, or parts of them, such as a soul, are still floating around somewhere—is a venerable way of negotiating the question. The recovering brain prefers to imagine them continuing to exist in some undetermined afterlife. Social psychologists involved in a discipline called terror-management theory explain that envisaging others’ postmortem continuance has an added benefit: if their spirits are kicking around the starry skies, it follows that we’ll join them out there, too, when our time comes. In this ostensibly mythless age, person permanence remains the mind’s preferred means of handling the destabilizing possibility of its own demise. Such illusions can be survival mechanisms. At least until we die.

  If dealing with the deaths of others is so hard, then mustn’t actually dying be brutal agony? Not necessarily, it turns out. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who famously developed the theory that grief passes through five distinct stages, from denial to acceptance, found that those on the brink of dying often experience feelings of peaceful contentment. Peter Pan was right: “To die will be an awfully big adventure.” It’ll also be different from what anyone supposes—and luckier—wrote Walt Whitman. As survivors of life-threatening injuries attest, the anticipatory worry is far worse than the actuality. Gallup polls of patients who’ve experienced clinical death and were then revived show that “confronting and undergoing death frequently seems more pleasant than life itself.”

  Our neuroprocessors may prevent consciousness from actually experiencing its own annihilation. On death’s doorstep, the mind produces narcotic tranquilizers to protect itself. In his 1892 study of mountain-climbing accidents, Remarks on Fatal Falls, Albert von St. Gallen Heim interviewed people who’d fallen from Alpine heights (and lived to tell the tale). Many reported feeling a calm lucidity as they drifted through the sky. They plummeted not in stabbing terror, but rather like lemon pips sinking into tea.

  Of course, death can also be painful or violent, but for the most part, we’re pretty out of the loop as far as the whole “dying experience” is concerned. Because the brain naturally suppresses thoughts of its eventual extinction, much of our thinking about death takes place on an inaccessible, subconscious level. Modern neuroscience has demonstrated that the mind consists of multiple layers of cerebral functioning. Within the vast interlocking choreography of transmitters, axons, peptides, circuits, and spanned gaps, many processes that resemble conscious activity are actually performed entirely without our rational mind realizing it. We can be totally unaware of our feelings about death—until we lose someone, triggering a realization of our own mortality.

  A part of us accepts that we will eventually disintegrate; other neural subdivisions harbor furtive aspirations. Rationally, we know the end will come. Irrationally, we hope to get around it somehow. As we face finality, complicated feelings arise, as do hopes of evading the unavoidable. Inexorable though the situation may appear, we are infinitely creative when it comes to concocting alternative scenarios. We convince ourselves that if we search long enough, we just might stumble upon a loophole, a VIP pass, a get-out-of-jail-free card. Imagination is an essential existential consolation.

  Ernest Becker’s 1973 book, The Denial of Death, argued that undertaking heroic acts is a way of challenging the loamy unknowability of death. We use our imaginative powers to concoct “immortality projects” that will allow our name to outlive our mortal transience. Many creative types are fueled by this instinct, but so are people in every other walk of life. Donors to public institutions receive commemorative plaques in their honor. “Achieve Immortality! (We’re not kidding)” is the tagline for advertisements by the New York Community Trust that encourage benefactors “to leave a charitable legacy that will make gifts in your name forever.” Scientists hope that their life’s work, while it may not ever explain the mystery of mysteries, will grant them a kind of immortality after their passing. Einstein, after all, is remembered as much as van Gogh. Our pursuit of impressive acts or deeds is known as “achievement immortality.”

  During an 1841 breakdown, Abraham Lincoln confided to a friend that he had “done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived.” He found the idea of dying intolerable, yet started seriously considering killing himself. His only solace, he explained to his friend, was the idea of surviving in others’ memories. What kept him alive was the ambition that, by accomplishing deeds that would link his name to monumental exploits, he would attain immortality. And, in a way, he did.

  The phenomenon of occupying memories after we die is called social or vicarious immortality. Even though we may lose people, they exist in our minds when we imagine them. A person’s sense of identity depends on the knowledge that he or she is in others’ thoughts. This is a normal strangeness that can become warped under duress. Suicide cases may start to reason (unconsciously) that by becoming dead, they, too, will posthumously inhabit others’ minds, therefore becoming immortal. And those who’ve been kidnapped, or imprisoned in solitary confinement, or who’ve faced an extended period of almost-certain death, can find themselves starting to write down the names of every person who loved them, everyone who will remember them. It’s a curious thing to do, and it’s a form of consolatory immortality. Nobody wants to be forgotten.

  After we die, our corporeal remains can be cremated, carried off by carrion eaters, or chewed upon by worms and microorganisms. My friend Melanie, vice president of horticulture at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, doesn’t believe in linear religions. Based on her work with plants, she prefers the idea of the nutrient cycle. “When I’m buried, my corpse will gradually be dismantled and embodied by millions of bacteria, roots, bugs, amoebae, fungi. There’s a massive congregation of life-forms in the soil. Whenever something dies, countless lives are enriched. Why would it be any different for us? If you’re buried properly—not in some impenetrable coffin that prevents nature from its due—you’ll get to escape your body, to go out there into all those new organisms.” As right as she is, Mel is also talking about continuity, about escaping the body, about parts of us becoming something else. We all have semantic approaches to death’s incommensurability. Mel’s version fits into a category called cosmic immortality, the nontheistic notion of a person coming from the elements and returning back to them.

  Intimations of immortality surround us. Molecules in the dead animal we eat become pa
rt of our cellular makeup. When a pollinated flower wilts, it becomes a fruit that dies into ripeness, containing within its spent flesh a seed that becomes a tree. Quantum Immortality (or QI, for those who frequent speculative-physics chat rooms) holds that there are many universes in which each of us lives parallel lives, and even if we die in this world, we’ll survive in faraway galaxies forever. This is about as verifiable as the precise geographical coordinates of nirvana, but it’s an interesting, if excessively technical, example of scientific religiosity.

  Heredity, that stream of acquired traits, is a more generally accepted form of immortality. Linking eons, DNA is a means of encoding and preserving information that is transferred from generation to generation. Posterity immortality is the phenomenon of genes living on through one’s children. “What is mortal tries, to the best of its ability, to be everlasting and immortal,” wrote Plato. The most obvious way of doing this, he added, is by making babies—by leaving behind replicas. The notion of trumping death through having progeny also got the biblical stamp of approval. The Old Testament isn’t concerned with the afterlife as much as it is obsessed with generations of descendants. Having kids who then have their own children is the path. Parents may die, but parts of them persist. The selfish-gene theory suggests that we value our offspring because we’re in them. They are made from us, just as we consist of those who came earlier. We all wear the faces of our dead ancestors. The desire to bring life into the world is an attempt to leave something behind that will outlast us, that will overcome our demise. As the Hindu Dharmasutra of Āpastamba tells us, “You beget children, and that’s your immortality, O mortal.”

  Some scientists consider DNA “immortal” in the sense that it flows on even though we die. But if the entire species gets wiped out, then the DNA also dies out. And if the planet explodes—all its gene pools will disappear along with it. DNA, alas, is not really immortal. But neither is anything else, unless—as Auntie Tiny’s funeral notice stated—we believe.

  * * *

  My parents weren’t religious, and neither were my two brothers and I. We were baptized but never went to church. My paternal ancestors were Hungarian Protestants, but my father—nonpracticing yet still a spiritual man—raised us without imposing any organized religion on us.

  My mother’s family had an even more tenuous relationship to faith. Her father had been an Irish Communist. He later renounced his membership, becoming an executive for a multinational pharmaceutical company and an atheist. He died when I was eight years old. My mother and I flew to London for the funeral. While there, trying to make sense of my relatives’ mourning, I started writing notes about “piles of people in their naked emotions.” Two decades later, in the same city, I dreamed of the fountain.

  As kids, the closest my brothers and I came to some higher level of reality was when our parents opened junk mail on Sunday mornings and pretended to read messages between the lines. These transmissions were written in invisible ink, they said, and had been sent from outer space. The arrival of bills fluttering through our suburban mail slot caused giddy delight.

  Throughout childhood, most of my life revolved around one block. I trained each morning at dawn in hopes of becoming an Olympic swimmer. School was across the street from the pool, which was connected by a walkway to the library I studied at when classes ended. The first stoplight around the corner overlooked a flat cemetery. Twice a day, the bus paused there, and gazing out onto the tombstones, I’d imagine all the rib cages, tibiae, and vertebrae prostrated in the frosty soil below. The vision was both unsettling and comforting; whatever life holds in store, there’s one certainty awaiting us. The light changed, we rolled forward, crystals glittered in their sunlit blanket of snow.

  Water, books, and buried bones were the holy trinity of my formative years. After high school, I’d spend days off in graveyards, reading or taking photos of the headstones. My favorite one simply said HURRY on it. Friends occasionally joined me; some were more uptight than others. Fear of mortality is forever, one of them told me. She put it on her grad school application under “motivations.” To her, death was a perpetually present shadow, an inchoate horror residing in the mind. Rather than scared, I felt curious. Perhaps the anxiety was buried so deeply in my subconscious I wasn’t even aware of it.

  Despite being raised irreligious, I spent much of my twenties studying both mythology and the sciences. I learned to view all theologies with equal fascination and detachment. The particularities of doctrinaire activity interested me less than the overarching fact that our minds utilize belief. Every religious text, every idea relating to immortality, every fountain-of-youth saga, I came to believe, is interesting and valid—whether as a window into the inexplicable or a way of understanding ourselves.

  Those ideas came flooding back to me as I read Auntie Tiny’s funeral notice. The image of a spring welling up to eternal life recalled that dream I’d had in London. A fountain bursting from the sea of infinity. What did it mean? Why do religions link immortality to water? I needed to speak with someone who knew.

  2

  Journey into Remoteness

  With mountain winds, and babbling springs,

  And moonlight seas, that are the voice

  Of these inexplicable things,

  Thou didst hold commune, and rejoice

  When they did answer thee

  —Percy Bysshe Shelley, “To Coleridge”

  There is another world, but it is in this one.

  —Paul Éluard (attributed)

  THE FIRST priest I tried was Father Emmett Johns. Known locally as Pops, he’d founded a charitable organization that dispenses food, shelter, and aid to homeless kids. I’d interviewed him before, around the time a newspaper voted him “Montrealer closest to sainthood.” We hadn’t probed any metaphysical topics during our first conversation, but he had a straight-ahead, no-nonsense demeanor, and I knew he would tell me what he could. I left a message for him at the Chez Pops day center and headed out for a coffee.

  Among the newspapers at Café Souvenir, I came across a brochure for a conference examining the human psyche’s posthumous survival. According to the organizers, we are all immortal sparks who, after dying, end up in “the invisible portion of the cosmic sea of the great Uncreated Light.” Many of the talks focused on communicating with spirits floating out there in the invisible sea.

  One of the workshops featured Raymond Moody, the American scholar who coined the term near-death experiences, or NDEs. He’d spent decades documenting and investigating case studies of people pronounced dead and subsequently resuscitated. His 1975 bestseller, Life After Life, explored the uncanny commonalities in NDEs, such as a sensation of floating above one’s own body, traveling down a tunnel toward a brilliant light, or being reunited with long-deceased relatives. Skeptics considered his research unscientific, while others interpreted the testimonials collected by Moody as confirming the existence of life after death. He endorsed neither side. Even if his findings suggested something more to death than impenetrable darkness, he didn’t consider his data capable of proving anything. Moreover, he gravitated toward the consolatory nature of his findings. He’d gone on to become a grief counselor and had written extensively about mourning and how the wish to reconnect with those we’ve lost is among the most universal and deep-seated of human desires.

  As I looked over the program guide, I received a call from an administrative manager at Pops’s charity. Unfortunately Father John wouldn’t be available for an interview. “He just doesn’t have the energy to do it anymore,” she apologized. “The last time I brought someone to him was six months ago. He can’t do publicity anymore. He received a major award last week and decided not to attend the ceremony. He normally loves an audience, and the fact that he didn’t come says a lot about where he’s at these days. He’s had several bypasses and needs a lot of rest. I’m sorry.”

  Minutes after thanking her for the call, I’d already signed up for the all-day session with Raymond Moody, “exp
ert on the unknown.”

  * * *

  Around fifty people sat rapt in a ballroom beneath the Delta Hotel in Old Montreal as a short, elderly woman with dyed-red hair and wraparound sunglasses stood at the podium introducing the event. I recognized her as Marilyn Rossner, a local medium who’d been a television personality during my childhood. She often appeared on a CBC program called Beyond Reason, a kind of psychic game show with a panel of intuitives sitting in soundproof parallelograms trying to guess the identity of a mystery guest.

  She had a power far greater than her four feet nine inches would suggest. In her usual thrift-store ball gown, pink knee-high socks, and sixties bangs, Rossner looked like an ancient child. But unlike Auntie Tiny with her unwavering kindliness, Rossner seemed equally in touch with the light and dark. She belonged to another time. Her actual age didn’t matter. If someone inquired, she’d say she is “as young as a blade of grass and as old as eternity.”

  At her international appearances, she’s billed as one of the world’s most gifted sensitives (una psíquica canadiense considerada como la mejor medium del mundo). Here at home, she runs the Spiritual Science Fellowship, a center for learning about channeling. Onstage, she told the audience that our speaker today, Raymond Moody, would be covering a variety of apparitional experiences that prove dying isn’t the end. She firmly believed in spiritual immortality. Her conference had one supreme aim: to spread the truth of spiritual life after death.