How to Die. Ray Robertson
own eclipse as well). Favourite restaurants and bars and businesses, too, begin to disappear with regularity, along with things less brick-and-mortar tangible but no less significant. When I moved to Toronto thirty-five years ago (35? No, it can’t be, do the math again—wow, yeah, 35), Toronto meant Queen Street West second-hand book buying and dive-bar slumming and Citytv; it meant Maple Leaf Gardens and the Brunswick House; it meant seven (count ’em, seven) repertory theatres. Now, what used to be Queen Street Cool is chiefly a shopping destination for 905ers visiting the city for the afternoon, Citytv is a media conglomerate’s neutered facsimile of what it once proudly, independently was, Maple Leaf Gardens is a Loblaws, and the adored Brunny—scene of so many Bacchanalian stunts and shenanigans—is a Rexall, and most people I know (myself included) get their movies on Netflix or via other streaming services, eliminating the need to ever leave the house. No doubt there are new second-hand bookstores and charmingly sleazy bars, new ways the city is electronically connected and sees itself, new ways of being what it means to be a Torontonian, but it’s unlikely I would know about them. Why would I? It’s not really my city anymore. One generation passeth away, another generation cometh, and ain’t that a drag.
The question isn’t, then, why think or write about extinction (our own and everyone and everything else’s), but—pardon the pun—why not? Not that my every thought on the subject will prove agreeable or even appear entirely convincing to everyone. (As Montaigne reminded himself—and us—“What do I know?”) And that’s a good thing. If I’m not making some people angry, I’m probably not doing my job. And if it’s true that we’re disposed to like people who like us, writers don’t—or shouldn’t—like readers who agree with everything they write. A book—particularly a book such as this—is a conversation, first between the author and him or herself, then between the writer and the reader. And when people converse, sometimes they disagree. And sometimes it’s out of such disagreements that we come to a better, clearer understanding of what we actually do believe. So, for instance, although atheism is to me only slightly less illogical than theism (and organized religion itself, as Mary McCarthy argued, is only “good for good people” because, for the rest, “it is too great a temptation—a temptation to the deadly sins of pride and anger, chiefly, but one might also add sloth”), and agnosticism the only rational response to a multitude of important metaphysical questions, I wouldn’t have come to these admittedly debatable beliefs without the aid of the work of a wealth of wise theologians. My undergraduate degree was a double major (philosophy and religious studies), and Christian existentialists such as Gabriel Marcel and Nicholas Berdyaev and Sam Keen and Harvey Cox (as well as the aforementioned Weil and Buber) were almost as important to my intellectual development (if far less aesthetically satisfying) as the titanic Nietzsche (who, by the way, was the son and grandson of Lutheran pastors). “Do I contradict myself?” Whitman asked in “Song of Myself.” Of course I do. And you know what? Again, like Whitman, that’s okay: “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
I also have a tattoo of a skull and roses on my right forearm. I got it because I’m a (Grateful) Deadhead, but also because it’s such an apposite image for existence. Encircling the outline of the skull with black holes for eyes is a garland of fresh red roses. Death in life. Life in death. If there’s a thesis to How to Die: A Book About Being Alive it’s that, if we gain a better understanding of what death is, we’ll also know more of what life consists. Montaigne claimed that “My trade and my art is living.” Nice work if you can get it. May we all be so profitably occupied.
PART ONE
No one forgets their first time. It’s the other first time—the one that darkens the mind rather than delights the body—that isn’t always as instantly memorable. But it’s there—somewhere—along with the initial recognition that our parents aren’t the wisest, most powerful people in the world who will always be there to protect us, that people don’t have to love us back just because we want them to, and that the game of life doesn’t come with a set of inviolable rules that everyone is obliged to follow in the interest of fair play. Not that it’s difficult to understand why we don’t always remember the precise time and place when we first became aware, however dimly, of death. That everyone is going to die. That I’m going to die. Human beings tend to hide from what hurts. Or at least attempt to. But Grandma’s funeral or the family pet’s last visit to the veterinarian or a flattened frog in the middle of the street remind us of what we try to forget but never entirely can.
Novelists aren’t good at much. Busy describing how the world lives, there isn’t much time or inclination left over to do much worldly living oneself. But remembering things—in particular, the seemingly inconsequential but singularly significant minutiae of daily existence—is an occupational necessity. I remember my first whiff of nothingness. Wrote about it in my novel What Happened Later:
Let’s go around, I said.
An August afternoon Sunday when I was five, an idling ’69 Buick Skylark with power windows but no air conditioning, a train that wouldn’t end like Christmas will never come and summer vacation will go on forever. I was hot and bored and thirsty and there was cold pop at home on the bottom shelf of the bar fridge in the basement.
We can’t go around, my dad said.
Why not?
Because they’ll put you in a box and put you in the ground and they won’t let you out.
I thought about what he said. It didn’t make sense. I said the only sensible thing I could think of.
But you’d let me out, I said.
My father leaned against the steering wheel and craned his neck left, looked as far down the railroad track as he could. Sweat rivered down the back of his neck. He looked in the rear-view mirror to make sure there was no one behind us; put the car in reverse and gave the steering wheel a sharp tug to the right. We weren’t going to wait around anymore. Finally, we were moving. Looking in the mirror again, this time at me in the back seat:
I don’t want to see you fooling around when there’s a train coming, he said.
I won’t.
You either stand back and wait for it to go by, or you walk around to where it isn’t, you hear me?
I know.
Hey?
I’ll wait for it or walk around.
My mother sucked a last suck from her Player’s Light and pulled the ashtray out of the dash, crushed out her cigarette on the metal lip. It was full of mashed cigarette butts crowned with red lipstick kisses.
Because when they put you in that box in the ground, boy, that’s it, nobody can help you.
But, I wanted to say.
But I didn’t say anything. And my dad—I waited—he didn’t say anything either.
Not that I consider myself as having been particularly thanatosophically precocious; death-consciousness simply comes to some early, while others don’t attend their first class in Introduction to Eventual Personal Extinction (a.k.a. Death 101) until they’re well on their way to graduating from life. When I asked a friend of mine from high school, now a successful dentist in his mid-fifties with a much younger wife and three small children and a vacation home in Arizona neighbouring a private golf course, if he ever thought about his eventual non-existence, he answered, “I’m too busy to think about death.” His response might seem glib, even for a dentist with a three handicap, but it’s typical of most people’s attitude if asked the same question.
And why shouldn’t it be? Not just because there are other things more pleasant to contemplate or because considered rumination isn’t as common a human activity as, say, envying, lying, or over-eating, but because, as Freud argued, it’s virtually impossible for human beings to imagine their own deaths. “Whenever we attempt to do so,” he claimed, “we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators