Chilly is a Nervous Stuffed Snowman

My wife Jen has a friend who explained that should a nuclear attack ever come, and should she happen to survive the initial onslaught, she would immediately take to the outdoors and, along with her spouse and children, breathe in the radioactive fumes as deeply as possible, the better to assure a speedy and timely demise designed to preempt any prolonged exposure to the rigors of post-apocalyptic earth. My wife, on the other hand, is such a force of nature that it is all too easy to imagine her as the matriarch of Thunderdome, taking Tina Turner’s ruthless Aunty Entity in a kinder, gentler, and even sexier direction. All too easy but for, to borrow a line from Miss Piggy, moi.

Behavioral scientists have deduced that there are essentially two kinds of people: dandelions, who will thrive at the same basic rate no matter where you put them, and orchids, who are quite lovely under ideal conditions given their finely tuned sensitivity, but whose sensitivity turns out to be very much like Damocles’ Sword, placing the orchid at the mercy of social and material conditions which have proven rather less than ideal for the “unwashed masses” who make up the great majority of earthlings, past and present. Just try growing an orchid in your living room, much less planting one in a crack in a sidewalk where it can be trampled by people and peed on by dogs, and you will get a sense of the gulf between the world’s orchids and dandelions, a divide which, in comparison, makes the gap between the sexes about as consequential as mods vs. rockers.

Jen is the quintessential dandelion for whom radioactive sludge makes like Miracle-Gro. If anything, she would react to radiation like the X-Men, and develop even greater powers; her finger and toenails are already nearly as strong and sharp as Wolverine’s, and we don’t even have a microwave oven. But, as a card carrying orchid, I am as unfit for the post-apocalyptic landscape as Princess Diana, Emily Dickinson, or Vincent Van Gogh, three famous people on the list of Highly Sensitive People, i.e. orchids (http://www.genconnect.com/health/albert-einstein-nicole-kidman-jim-hallowes-list-of-famous-highly-sensitive-people/), and a trio whose respective biographies make life as a famous orchid sound only slightly more attractive than the post-apocalypse. (Here’s to obscure blogging!) So, if the nukes come, Jen and the kids will be joining me on the surface breathing in the fumes, Jen breathing the deepest , because if you keep spraying a plant with Miracle-Gro its gotta croak eventually. Unless she wants to have a go at single parenting while running Thunderdome, which possibility I refuse to contemplate, preferring to think of her as Juliet to my Romeo, our lives without one another unthinkable. (The Shakespearean fantasy, of course, is much easier to indulge for the orchid, who is almost certain to die first; would-be dandelion Juliets should think twice before marrying their orchid Romeos.)

The trouble with the orchid’s sensitivity is that we are sensitive to everything. Unlike Wolverine’s claws, which can be retracted, the orchid’s radar can never be turned off; we are, always and everywhere, taking it all in, which is why this orchid is always nagging his dandelion wife to leave parties once we have stayed long enough such that leaving wouldn’t be impolite, so that I can go home and recover in a dark, quiet room. My nagging is as ineffectual as everyone else’s (nagging is, by definition, barking up the wrong tree), and my darling dandelion has invariably sunk her roots deep into the party by the time I begin to give her my pathetic looks from the other side of the cheese platter, at which point I cope by retreating to a far corner of the inevitable toy-strewn playroom under the auspices of “minding the children,” none of whom are ever bothered by my self-sufficient parallel play.

One of the things to which orchids are exquisitely sensitive is the constant potential for disaster. At least, I hope other orchids share in this and it’s not just me constantly echoing C-3PO’s “We’re doomed.” This tendency of mine is exemplified by the role I played in a college party planning ritual. Prior to each party we hosted, my friends and I sat down to draft the official “Party Scorecard,” on which potential points were allotted for various celebratory hijinks. Maximum points were typically assigned to behaviors involving the various group totem objects, e.g. if, at the party’s climax, someone became so enthused that they spiked the oversized can of Bruce’s Yams (Bruce being the name of both the yam canning company and our group’s Gladwellian Connector) in the manner of a fullback spiking the football after a touchdown , or if the number of people we convinced to drink National Beer communally out of the National Bear was greater than 7 (in his first life the National Bear was a clear plastic cookie container in the shape of a teddy bear). My main contribution to the scorecard, beyond once suggesting that we see how many total ex-girlfriends we could convince to attend the party, a number I could barely influence given that there was at the time but one such extant ex-girlfriend (as a monogamist I don’t even rate the prefix “serial”), was in always insisting that the first item on the scorecard was “No tragedy.” On my watch there were to be no deaths by alcohol poisoning, gunfight, or drunk driving, nor any unwanted pregnancies. I can’t remember how many points we allotted for “No tragedy,” probably because it was, in truth, a placeholder for “Tragedy,” for which we would never have been able to accurately estimate the negative points. “No Tragedy” was the dot of yin in the party scorecard’s predominate yang.

It’s going on twenty years now since we held the last of our parties at the double-wide Baltimore row house we rented senior year, parties from which, tragedy-wise, we got away scot-free. But the potential for disaster still looms. Each time I leave my house I head back in for a quick check that the oven is well and truly off, lest my house literally explode in my absence. And each time my wife tarries at one of her evening social engagements without texting, I am convinced that she is dead. By the time she arrives home I have made my first pass through the five stages of grief and begun the contingency planning for single parenting. It is tempting to paint my ongoing fear of disaster as life’s constant background noise: death terror. About which death terror, more in a moment. But the interesting thing is that my fear of disaster isn’t limited to the fear that, in the words of Jim Morrison, “This is the end.” See above re: unwanted pregnancies, which are, of course, a beginning. See also my meltdown earlier this week, staged in the presence of all three of my children just to remove any lingering doubts they may have had that Daddy is wound a little tight, when the bag of Chipotle foodstuffs began leaking its juices on the interior of Jen’s brand new Toyota Highlander, a vehicle in which she has outlawed food consumption for just this very reason, leaving me if not in violation of the letter of the law, at least in violation of its spirit. The communicative intent of my meltdown boiled down, of course, to “We’re doomed.” Leaving me wondering whether I am actually afraid of death or, in punishment for violating the law, afraid of being cut off from love. Or, quite possibly, that the two are one and the same thing.

It was with the first of these possibilities, death terror proper, in mind that I recently encountered my cartoon double, and the implicit suggestion of a Buddhist solution to my hypervigilant death watch. Chilly is the stuffed toy snowman magically brought to life by Doc McStuffins, the lead character on the eponymously titled Disney cartoon. Chilly is described thusly on the inside flap of each Doc McStuffins book: “Chilly is a nervous stuffed snowman. He’s constantly worried that he will melt. But Doc always reminds him that he’s not a real snowman.” This is easily translatable into the following: “Chris is a nervous human being. He’s constantly worried that he will die. But Thich Nhat Hanh always reminds him that he’s not a real self.”

Buddhist sage Thich Nhat Hahn’s No Death, No Fear, is one of the most important books I’ve ever read in that it simply and straightforwardly outlines how the Buddhist experience of no-self means that the concepts of birth and death are just that, mere concepts, leaving death terror to dissipate like so much steam. Given that my death terror remains intact, my grasp of the book’s message clearly hasn’t translated into any meaningful progress on the actual eight-fold path, but Thich Nhat Hahn’s explication of the Buddhist encounter with death remains the most seductive of the approaches to death and its aftermath on offer in the three religions I know absolutely anything about. Full disclosure: I am not sure my wife would agree that I know absolutely anything about Judaism but for a few vocabulary words, and I’m not sure I would disagree with her, which we are attempting to remedy with reading assignments, an approach that, thankfully, spares me from actually having to talk with anyone other than my better half. That said, take anything I say below about Judaism with a grain of salt.

So in reviewing my affinity for each of these three religions’ potential as therapy for death terror, I may as well start with Judaism’s take on what happens after death, which, as best I can tell, is to not have a take on what happens after death. Judaism’s approach to the big questions about death’s end result appears synchronous with Wittgenstein’s “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence,” a synchronicity amplified by Wittgentstein’s “pass over” and Judaism’s Passover, as well as the fact that Wittgenstein was of ¾ Jewish descent. Judaism’s silence on questions of life after death has one significant advantage over that of Christianity and Buddhism, in that it is far and away the most intellectually honest of the three, Buddhism’s claims to direct experiential knowledge of no-self notwithstanding, because unless one has awakened to the insight of no-self for one’s self (Ha-ha!), no-self must be taken on faith every bit as much as Christianity’s promise of eternal life. Reading between the lines of Judaism’s silence on the matter, Judaism’s commentary about life after death appears to echo Socrates’ famous “I know that I know nothing.” As such it is not only honest, but accurate, and of little obvious value in the face of death terror. Because if there is anything we fear, it is the unknown. Judaism’s silence is, if anything, a call for courage. Meaning I’ll come back to that if I can’t find anything easier.

At first blush, Christianity appears to speak about what Judaism has passed over in silence, with its promise of eternal life. The first step of understanding eternal life is to set aside the idea of an eventual bodily resurrection for all true believers, marking it off as inaccessible, at least to those of us disinclined to fundamentalist readings of scripture. ( In the words of Jon Stewart, “That’s Episcopalian for ‘Shut the fuck up,’” i.e. a literal interpretation of the Rapture, with its bodily resurrection of those saved by Christ, necessarily also involves the Great Tribulation’s “worldwide hardships, disasters, famine, war, pain, and suffering, which will wipe out more than 75% of all life on earth,” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Tribulation) for the billions who don’t happen to be Christian, making the celebration of such a Rapture indecipherable from celebrating Hiroshima or Auschwitz.) Thusly understood, eternal life has as little to do with the Rapture as it does with the fantastic old Woody Allen line that “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.” We can only define eternal life by what it is not, which is anything but immortality through not dying. Even God, it seems, can’t undo death and taxes. So eternal life involves death. After that, it’s pure mystery. So, is the difference between Christianity’s de facto definition of eternal life as mystery and Judaism’s silence in the face of life after death, at the last, stylistic?

If, then, death is a problem for which Judaism offers no solution, and for which Christianity offers no solution in the packaging of a solution, then perhaps neither is really all that different from Buddhism, which responds with something of an Alfred E. Newman’s “What, me worry?” in its assertion that there is, per Thich Nhat Hanh’s No Death, No Fear, no problem to solve. Which religion you prefer, at least as far as death goes, becomes a matter of taste: do you like your lack of information straight up (Judaism’s “Socratic” silence), on the rocks (St. Peter, the rock upon which Jesus built his church, is also the one who meets you at the pearly gates, which legend is another fancy way for Christians to say they have no idea about what happens after death), or with a twist (the Buddhist twist, of course, is that you can’t say anything about nothing). But whichever of the three you choose, if you want answers you still have to wait until you die. Which leaves me and Chilly still feeling a little unsettled.

My first reading assignment to expand my general fund of Jewish knowledge beyond its current meager mish-mosh is James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, a history of “the profoundly troubling two-thousand-year course of the Church’s battle against Judaism.” In his reckoning with the legacy of the Holocaust and its implications for Christianity, Carroll writes the following about death:

“The alternative to thinking of God as a ‘cosmic sadist…an eternal vivisector,’ … is to stand before the unfathomable mystery of death- the death of Jesus, the death of one’s own son, the deaths of the six million- without attempting to understand it, and also without attempting to deny its character as a terrible outbreak of evil. It is here that these questions break out of any narrow reference to religion, Christian or Jewish, to press against the awful anxiety that every human must feel in the face of death.”

Carroll clearly hasn’t been reading his Thich Nhat Hanh. But if we momentarily set aside the possibility that one can overcome death terror via awakening (making enlightenment something of an Odd Couple with the previously tabled Rapture; I see Jerry Falwell as Felix Unger and Thich Nhat Hanh in the role of Oscar Madison), then we can locate my constant Chilly-an fear of death in the understanding of death as “a terrible outbreak of evil.”

Humans seem incapable of perceiving the presence of evil as anything other than the absence of God; see the failure of every attempted theodicy as well as Jesus’ own “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” Death as understood by Carroll, death as evil, then, is death as abandonment. Bringing us right back to my earlier question of whether the fear of death and the fear of being cut off from love are the very same thing.

Wait for it…wait for it… Enter, stage left, Sigmund Freud, by way of his signature “Tell me about your childhood.” Because it is in early childhood and its inevitable encounter with all too human parenting that we first experience the withholding of love, that we get our very first taste of death. Becky Bailey, in her brilliant manual for managing children’s difficult behaviors, Conscious Discipline, captures this process succinctly (just substitute “parent” for “teacher”):

“Most teachers accept the premise that when a child makes a decision an adult likes, the child has earned encouragement. This is demonstrated by teachers praising children for ‘good’ behavior. The underlying message is, ‘When you do what I want, you earn my love. When you ignore what I want you to do, I will withhold my love.’ Many adults have internalized this kind of thinking. Many of us desperately seek approval and try so hard to please for this reason. We act appropriately not because we love others, but because we fear they won’t love us.”

By this same logic, I would argue that we desperately seek God’s approval in the hopes that we will never die, even as we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that abandonment, and the concurrent outbreak of unfathomable evil, is inevitable. Even as we earn God’s love, “We’re doomed.”

Which combination of aspirational worthiness and inevitable abandonment is perhaps an even deeper source of Chilly-an anxiety in its collision with an obscenely reliable God. David Foster Wallace describes the latter in his novel, The Pale King, problematizing “the religious confidence that one is ‘loved unconditionally’ by God- as the God in question is defined as something that loves this way automatically and universally, it doesn’t seem to really have anything to do with you, so it’s hard to see why religious people claim to feel such reassurance in being loved this way by God.” It would seem that you can either have a personal relationship with a God whose love must be earned before She inevitably abandons you, or receive unconditional love from a God who doesn’t love you in particular, or even enough to abandon you. The latter God, whose unconditional love has nothing to do with you, may even explain the popularity of Western Buddhism; how can God have nothing to do with a self that isn’t even there. Seen from this angle, Western Buddhism can be defined as “You can’t fire me, I already quit!”

If it is better to have loved and lost then never to have loved at all, then I would argue that it is better to have been a self and died than never to have been a self at all. This may just be my way of saying I prefer my religion on the rocks, and not with a twist. Given my particular bias, the best antidote I’ve yet encountered for death terror may at first seem exceedingly facile. It is the observation that if we are terrified by the prospect of death, why aren’t we equally horrified by the retroactive annihilation of our absence from the universe prior to our birth? Hidden in this question is the insight that death itself is the much lauded “ground of all being,” is, therefore, hardly evil, and, assuredly, nothing new; if we fear the unknown then death is nothing to fear. “Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shall return.” Moby, of all people, implies the very same thing: “We are all made of stars.”

As for the fear of withheld love, I can only say, as I did when a then 2-year-old Jessie Pearl spilled root beer on herself in our booth at the deli, there’s nothing to be done. (There’s always something to be done- Bubby sorted Jessie Pearl out with a single, well placed paper napkin. It’s just that, in the case of fearing withheld love, I don’t know what’s to be done.) And as for God, I would argue that Her unconditional love is a lot like Meatloaf’s “I’d do anything for love, but I won’t do that.” “That,” of course, is allowing you to live on in your apartment.