From Innocence to Global Crisis — Part I
How the Fear of Death Helped to Identify the Most Important Question of My Life
When I was a toddler, if I had only known what was going on thousands of miles away, I would have cried with horror. The Cuban Missile Crisis was escalating.
After the U.S. military failed to overthrow Cuban President Fidel Castro, Soviet Premier Khrushchev reached an agreement with Castro to place Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. In response, US President John F. Kennedy issued a warning against the build-up.
Plans for US invasion of Cuba jacked up. Despite this warning, as Soviet ships approached Cuba, U.S. flights indicated Soviet-sponsored missile sites were nearing completion.
Only five years later, I watched TV news reports showing the same sad fate befall JFK’s brother and US Senator Bobby Kennedy in 1968. Civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King was killed that same year.
No doubt, these events predisposed me to an intense fear of dying. Drifting off to sleep, I jarred myself awake, afraid falling asleep meant the certain horror of death.
Two decades later, when I was studying neuroscience, the lateralized tension between countries reminded me of epilepsy patients whose largest nerve bundle in the brain had been split. This so-called split-brain surgery was done in an attempt to limit the intensity and extent of seizures to one side of the brain.
But the surgery had a side effect. It left the patient with oppositional messaging. The work of the left-hand to button up a coat was immediately undone by the right-hand. Its neural director separated into two halves, the body opposed itself.
“Half-brain thinking, whichever half it might be, is still a disaster waiting to happen.”
Well before I knew about our two-sided brains, half-brain thinking infected me. I despaired at how poorly political leaders too often failed to consider the repercussions of their fixation to myopic ideologies. A consequence of self-destructive tendencies I observed in cross-cultural conflict, I imagined the death of all I loved resulting from a nuclear war that would take my hometown off the map.
Sixty years post-Cuban missile crisis, we witness half-brain thinking once again. In the present crisis in the Ukraine, as in any war, lives are lost unnecessarily. But unnecessary to one always seems imperative to another, and too often no matter the cost.
Half-brain thinking suggests no final truth other than doing the best we can. Inevitably, followed by the tragic loss at the end of life. But day after day, I kept waking up from the dreaded descent into dreamland. I learned it wouldn’t kill me, but only temporarily eliminated my daytime ego.
Some would argue that we do not really die, but the ultimate transformation of this touchable, biological body is so radical that it is no longer recognizable as an utterly unique identity. This bodily life is one that ends.
After so much wishing this would not happen, this eventually became — in my teenage mind — not only inevitable but the one way I would prefer to die. I wished to have not one moment of knowledge. To be thoroughly blown away, without even feeling my cells disintegrating.
I didn’t put it in this way back then, but now, I ask — Where’s the solace?
With or without nuclear or climate crises, we must undergo the radical transformation through death. As I begin to give way to the long sleep, a fear of death claws me out of slumber and I find myself obsessing on where to find solace. To go on in this body every day, I seek ever more capacity to tolerate needless suffering. I try to convince myself to accept it, but it remains an act of tolerance. I cannot accept the utter destruction of lives filled with hope, dreams, and love.
Now I ask the most important question of my life. Where do I find comfort in the midst of the haunting reminder of death each night as I drop off to sleep? And when I hear once again a litany of tragedies on the morning news as I awaken? Does such consolation even exist? Where is this coveted source of relief?
For some answers to these questions, stay tuned for the article: From Innocence to Global Crisis — Part II: Lessons for Finding Solace.
