During my 7th summer, my grandmother Augusta died. This brought the reality of death to me for the first time. That was also the summer rats got in under our back porch, an infestation that drove Mom about crazy with fear and loathing. All that somehow came together to inspire me to imagine my own death. My concept of death – and I have no idea how I arrived at it – was that it meant, simply, “not being.”
Every night, all summer long, I lay in bed trying to imagine myself in that state. I got very good at it. As I recall, my method was to imagine myself getting younger and younger, getting unborn, and then being in a state of not-being. And as I recall, that state was rather like being part of an electrical field. It scared the bejesus out of me, but I was compelled to make the trip night after night, until it began to scare me less and less. It seems a strange thing for a boy that age to be up to, but maybe many kids privately go through similar experiences. I certainly never talked to anyone about it.
When I wrote about that strange summer in My Checkered Career, I hadn’t thought about it for many years, and it appears that I didn’t think about it much when I was recounting it. My editor claims I was entering a quantum field or some such arcane area, and for all I know, that’s what I was doing. I do know that, whatever I was doing, it pretty well ended my fear of death. Maybe that’s why I spent so many years of my life flirting with death. When that long flirtation came uncomfortably close to consummation, I found that while I still didn’t fear death, I didn’t feel especially eager to get there just yet.
Since then, I’ve realized that that imagined death has considerably enriched my life. I think the experience of not-being granted me a perspective that’s kept me largely free of harbored grievances or grudges, two conditions that poison many a life. And I think it left me with what some preacher I heard back in the 50s called (prepare to grind your teeth) “an attitude of gratitude.” Being aware all through my being that I didn’t have to be here in this particular form, that this “here” I inhabited didn’t have to be here, that I had no explanation for why there was something instead of nothing – that long summer of nothing left me forever grateful for the mere miracle of existence.
