There comes a time in a man’s life when he must think about the inevitable. When I turned a leaf in 2023, I went online to check the list of notables who died at that age. The list includes George Washington, Leonardo da Vinci, Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman, and Ava Gardner. I started thinking about how my achievements, if any, are pale in comparison with theirs and felt a little blue. Like everybody, I sometimes wonder what will happen to me after I die, and I can’t stop my mind from wandering these days when my birthday comes up or somebody famous dies. But those feelings do pass.
Has it ever been said better than Seneca, who, in his essay, “On the Shortness of Life,” states:
The present time is extremely short, so much so that some people are unaware of it. For it is always on the move, flowing on in a rush; it ceases before it has come, and does not suffer long delay any more than the firmament of the stars, whose unceasing movement never pauses in the same place. And so the preoccupied are concerned only with the present, and it is so short that it cannot be grasped, and even this is stolen from them while they are involved in their many distractions.
Perhaps when reaching the precipice, it is best not to dwell too much on fame or the opinions of others, as Arthur Schopenhauer explained by quoting Thomas Hobbes toward the end of his concise, seminal work The Wisdom of Life: “Mental pleasure, and ecstasy of any kind, arise when, on comparing ourselves with others, we come to the conclusion that we may think well of ourselves.”
When I read obituaries in The New York Times, I always start to perspire when somebody famous around my age dies, and the closer the decedent to my age or younger, the denser my perspiration. Ever since I retired from a rather prosaic and undistinguished career as a lawyer, I can recall bidding farewell to some shining stars of my generation as I perused the paper: Garry Shandling, David Bowie, Robin Williams, Tom Petty, Norm MacDonald, Gilbert Gottfried, Ray Liotta, William Hurt, John Heard, and Bill Paxton (or was it Bill Pullman?). (Sorry, Bill. That was low.)
When they’re younger than me, such as James Gandolfini, Prince, or Philip Seymour Hoffman, I feel something even odder. It’s a mixture of “So suddenly?” and “Oh my.” But of course, if it’s a member of the old guard such as Carl Reiner, Don Rickles, Jerry Lewis, Sidney Poitier, John Hurt, Rip Torn, Peter Fonda, Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, George Segal, Mort Sahl, Stephen Sondheim, James Caan, Danny Aiello, Paul Sorvino, and especially centenarians such as Kirk Douglas and Olivia de Havilland, my feelings are less agitated. Carl Reiner’s death actually brought a smile, not only because I could recall his stellar career but also the unforgettable interview that he gave about perusing the obituary page every morning before breakfast. If he wasn’t in it, he’d tuck in and eat.
The mystery and immanence of death has held multitudes in thrall of religion for millennia. Now, with advances in the social sciences, civilization can finally break free from these chains with some reason and clarity. When Voltaire said that if God did not exist, mankind would have to invent him, he might have anticipated by a few centuries such books as Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer. Fear of what’s beyond still grips most folks, and that’s reflected in the currently mutating package of right-wing politics’ fusion with newly emerging Christian nationalism ardently on display in the public arena and outside of traditional houses of worship. The movement is more easily understood than digested by would-be hipsters and free thinkers such as your aging narrator.
On the heel of my retirement, still reeling from dealing with this frayed world, I came under the sway of the four horsemen of the new atheist movement: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel C. Dennett, and, last but not least, the late Christopher Hitchens. (Not only was Hitchens a great writer, but he was also a moral thinker, a world traveler, and journalist. Wrong about Iraq though, as things turned out. What the heck! Nobody bats a 1.000.) They sealed my atheism (with a 10 percent margin for error as Dawkins carves out in The God Delusion), but occasionally I still contemplate what’s beyond and what comes next after disembarking from this mortal coil.
By definition, death must be a cessation of life, so I imagine it is like a void. Pure nothingness. Like a dreamless, deep dark sleep. Of course, nobody really knows what happens afterward. Harry Houdini spent his off-hours exploring the phenomenon but came up blank. Forgive the unintentional play on words. Houdini’s pal, Arthur Conan Doyle, adhered to spiritualism for the remainder of his life. You would think that Doyle would be more like his creation, the deductive and reasoning Sherlock Holmes, but when it came to the contemplation of infinity and the cosmos, he preferred the occult-like mysticism of spiritualism. But let’s face it: nobody ever came back to tell us what comes next.
These days my mind wanders when I watch old movies on Turner Classic Movies. Lately I’ve taken to studying those pictures released in the year 1953, the year just before my birth, especially those shot on location in New York City and, to a lesser extent, Los Angeles. I groove on the way people dressed, the cars, the buildings and landmarks, and even the lampposts and street signs. I focus on the men’s haircuts and women’s coiffures, the ubiquitous hats for both sexes, their attitudes and the way they spoke to each other, and the outdated slang. If the movie lags, I can’t help daydreaming: back then I did not even exist; I wasn’t even conceived until early 1954. Yecch, what a thought. But seriously, I did not exist, and it did not matter to anyone or anything, including to myself. Nothingness can be nice.
So, I presume, that in the year after my death, when cars, fashion, music, movies, buildings, speech patterns, lampposts, and street signs slowly start changing (yes, Kurt Anderson, it must happen somehow) anew, I will be as equally oblivious as I was in 1953 before I existed. Or is it actually possible for a person to cogitate or experience change on Earth after they’re dead? It must seem so to the faithful and religious, as it once did to me.
My funeral plot has been paid for in advance, and I will be buried not too far from (and not too close to) my parents. Yes, Mom and Dad (don’t call him “Pop,” or he’ll pop you one), I’ll soon be moving back in. But don’t hold your breath. (Sorry, these jokes just write themselves.)
I have left instructions with my testamentary papers for a secular funeral without a vestige of religion, and I have relieved my son, the aspiring mathematician, Bart, from any religious obligations. I confided in him that my agita centers on the funeral industry in Brooklyn, which has long been controlled by the Italians (that means, with no disrespect, Italian Americans). The thing is that as soon as one of these funeral directors finds out that the stiff is Jewish, for example, they will automatically designate a Jewish funeral with all the trimmings. This includes dressing the departed in a shroud that looks something like a Hazmat suit. I don’t want that. I want to be buried in a business suit with a shirt and a tie, with underwear on, socks, and a tied pair of polished shoes. If I meet God, I want my phantom to be dressed properly as if I were going to court. (And who can blame Bela Lugosi for insisting on being buried in his Dracula cape, but I digress.) After all, using Dawkins’s 10 percent margin for error, the possibility exists that I will have to defend myself in a trial or something like in Albert Brooks’s 1991 movie Defending Your Life.
After my coffin is buried in the earth and my corpse starts desiccating slowly into a skeleton, it shouldn’t be too bad because I don’t expect to be feeling any pain of any sort. No pleasure either of course, but, more importantly, no pain and no more regrets, anxieties, suffering, sorrow, etc. And though it seems from my current perspective somewhat suffocating in that box, I have convinced myself to stop worrying about it the way Ray Milland fretted in Roger Corman’s Technicolor baroque movie rendition of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Premature Burial (1962).
But, again, I digress. What about my spirit or soul? Or, as I prefer to think about it now, my psyche, personality, and/or intellect? Complete with memories and cognitions. I don’t really expect that my spirit will be floating around like a phantom waiting to be judged like my parents believed, no more than I believe, with a 10 percent margin for error, that my psyche will evolve into a spirit or a ghost.
While contemplating eternity, Norman Mailer, in one of his later books, On God, imagined or perhaps hoped that it would be something akin to Hindu reincarnation.
His image of God was of some overworked data analyst who just can’t deal with mass human exits such as Auschwitz or Hiroshima. It seems odd that an intellectual such as Mailer was not agnostic but apparently his sensibilities preferred a more romantic or mystical explanation. He could not be said to be, by any stretch of the imagination, religious though.
Ancient minds such as Seneca and Marcus Aurelius seem, even today, more practical when contemplating the inevitable. After all, our shared fate is downright commonplace. Certain gothic notions of death as depicted in the paintings of Francisco Goya and Hieronymus Bosch have captured the popular imagination for centuries and still prompt the faithful toward prayer in the hope of redemption, salvation, or grace. French polymath Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) wrote that nonbelievers had nothing to lose by at least paying lip service to religion. His thinking is premised on the possibility that if the afterlife really does exist and God is real, a little prayer would be a great hedge on your bet.
Personally, I feel like I have fulfilled Pascal’s wager in full. I have had enough seders and siddurs, enough yizkor, yarmulkes, and yahrzeit, enough kiddishes and kaddishes to last me a lifetime. Nay, an eternity. Not enough knishes though, still great with mustard and now I can add karachi and kimchi.
As for the Mourner’s Kaddish, which is chanted in Aramaic, an appropriately dead language (unless you happen to be Mel Gibson adding verisimilitude to your screen saga), let me say that even if I now still believed 100 percent in God, I would hesitate before engaging in this form of ancestral worship of my undeniably toxic and abusive parents. I prefer to think, however, that my decision to curtail all religious activities was made on intellectual and not personal grounds. But as Lou Jacobi said at the end of Billy Wilder’s 1963 sex romp Irma la Douce, “That’s another story!”
Two of the biggest takeaways for me from Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion are 1) there is a 10 percent chance that something like a living god is a possibility and that his existence can’t be completely disproved; and 2) religion itself is a form of child abuse. Winston Churchill’s biographers note that toward the end of his life, he stopped going to church completely. But he pointedly observed that if the religion franchise turns out to be real, he wanted credit for all the time he was forced to go to chapel. Likewise, I have long ago put a final amen to my prayers. But should I face judgment in some celestial court for my lapses, I think I can put up some kind of a defense. The liturgy of the High Holy days (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur) is replete with judgments and appeals.
Playwright and screenwriter David Mamet has chimed in, castigating departing members of the flock like me in his The Wicked Son. I couldn’t help reproaching myself a bit after reading Mamet’s book. Am I wicked because I stopped believing, because I stopped praying? Or is that reaction a result of the way I was programmed as a child when religion was veritably shoved down my throat? Very well then, I am wicked.
If it is wicked to question and probe, if it is wicked to criticize and parody, then so be it. If it is wicked to read Christopher Hitchens or Bertrand Russell, then I am wicked and damned. Sometimes when I am watching one of those old movies and I fall into a deep sleep without dreams, something in the back of my mind, in some deep dark corner wonders if this is it. (Paging Redd Foxx, “This is the big one, Elizabeth!”) I guess I’ll find out soon enough what it’s like. But you’ll have to wait a little while longer, Mom and Pop. I plan to be out and on my own for a while. And like the good knight (Max von Sydow) playing chess with Death (Bengt Ekerot) in Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film The Seventh Seal, I take my sweet time between moves.
There comes a time in a man’s life when he must think about the inevitable. When I turned a leaf in 2023, I went online to check the list of notables who died at that age. The list includes George Washington, Leonardo da Vinci, Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman, and Ava Gardner. I started thinking about …