Surviving Death Has Different Meanings

It’s hurricane season here in Hawaii and we seem to have them coming at us from all angles, just missing us. Had Hurricane Lowell decided to pass over our island, its magnitude was such that it is highly unlikely that I’d even have a home. Fortunately, both the house and outhouse are still standing, as shown in the accompanying photo. In fact, I might have been shark food, the ocean being only a mile from my home and within easy blowing distance with hurricane-force winds. Living in “paradise” does have its downside. Actually, the biggest upside, the beaches, lost their appeal 50 or more years ago. When I first moved here 55 years ago, I went to the beach several times a week, usually for a refreshing swim after a run, but my last visit to the beach was about four years ago for a scattering of a friend’s ashes.

Having survived well beyond the average life expectancy and having accepted the overwhelming evidence that consciousness survives death, I don’t have the extreme fear of death that so many others seem to have. However, I do fear surviving such a stormy catastrophe with no home and a very limited food supply, not to mention all the comforts that come with electricity and various luxuries. I think about living in our backyard in a pup tent and wondering how long six jars of peanut butter and three boxes of high-protein bars will last us, whether we will have water, and how many months or years it will take to restore some of life’s comforts. The welfare and mental states of my wife and relatives and friends add significantly to the fear factor. I wonder if there will be a need to share our peanut butter and high-protein bars with neighbors who have exhausted their supply of food. It is not a pleasant scenario. There’s not much to hunt for here and there are limits to fishing. 

It’s unclear to me whether the hurricanes have increased in recent years because of climate change, whether it is all part of normal cyclical changes that have been occurring throughout earth’s history, or whether advanced meteorological forecasting has simply made us more aware of what is coming toward us. Could the hurricanes have been out there 30 or 40 years ago and we just didn’t hear about them?

Meteorology is clearly an inexact science, about as inexact as thanatology, the name given to the study of dying and death. Hurricanes don’t always follow the paths predicted by the meteorologists. For the most part, the meteorologists seem to do a very good job in charting out the path of the hurricanes, as well as in predicting wind velocity and the increasing or diminishing strength of the winds, but the hurricanes have a mind of their own and sometimes deviate from the predicted paths. In spite of their inexactness, meteorologists are referred to as “scientists” or at least I think they consider themselves such. 

According to the dictionary, thanatology is the study of the phenomena of death and of the psychological mechanisms for coping with them, but I have never heard anyone call him- or herself a thanatologist. It would no doubt be met with raised eyebrows if someone identified himself as such and claimed to be a scientist. They probably call themselves therapists or psychologists and their discipline does not extend beyond death itself. At least, it is my understanding that thanatology does not go beyond death into the survival of consciousness. As I further understand it, psychical researchers have all died off and parapsychologists are concerned with psychic phenomena while avoiding any mention of consciousness surviving death. Such mention would mean they are not scientists. To my knowledge, those who dare venture into the survival issue don’t have a name by which to identify themselves. If they support the survival hypothesis, they are sometimes called spiritualists, but many take that word to mean the same as “weird cultists” rather than the opposite of materialists. I’ve been called a “spiritualist” now and then, but I qualify that by saying I’m a spiritualist with a lower-case “s” and not a capital “S”. But I sometimes further qualify that and say that I’m 80 percent spiritualist and 20 percent materialist. I wouldn’t be driving a 21-year-old Honda or wearing a $9.95 watch if I were a materialist. I’d opt for Mercedes or a Porsche and a Rolex. However, I do enjoy certain comforts and have such luxuries as a computer and a television, which account for me being partly a materialist. 

Before Electricity

My materialist side also shows when we have long power outages due to strong winds created by hurricanes which come close to our island. With no air conditioning in our humid climate, no baseball games to watch, no computer to play on, and only a battery-operated light to read from, I always ponder on how people lived before electricity. I think about Mary Todd Lincoln, the widow of our great president, Abraham Lincoln, and how she lived as a widow in a downtown Chicago apartment before electricity. What did a person do in a small apartment with no electrical lighting, no radio, no television, no phone, no computer, no AC, no fans, no fireplace, just candlelight and maybe a few books? The men could escape to a pub and get drunk, but that wasn’t an option for women. Their only option was knitting. Men who didn’t drink could whittle or go fishing. 

Mrs. Lincoln apparently found a little escape in browsing around some shops near her apartment and chatting with the shopkeepers. She probably felt obligated to make some purchases from those shopkeepers and bought more than she needed. When her only surviving son saw all the excessive purchases still in boxes stacked around her apartment, he was alarmed enough to question her sanity and her ability to live independently and frugally. The fact that she was interested in Spiritualism added to his concerns and resulted in her being committed to a lunatic asylum. Fortunately, two of her lawyer friends, husband and wife Spiritualists, managed to get her released from the asylum after a few months. 

Back to the hurricanes, I’ve noticed that our television news people are making every effort to report on the threats in a very cheerful manner. A few years ago, they were scaring people with their dire forecasts, and apparently many stopped watching the new reports and/or they complained about the scare tactics. To regain viewership, they had to report on the approaching hurricanes with a smile and some optimism. It seems to be working, but it’s often difficult to know if the truth is being disguised by their smiles. 

I think the churches took the same approach with the afterlife. They were scaring people with hell fire and damnation, while strumming harps in heaven for eternity didn’t come close to offsetting that horrific picture. For Catholics, purgatory was as bad as hell, just not permanent. Thus, they just stopped talking about it. It’s now all about praise and worship of God with no mention of what comes after death.  

It’s all very unsettling, but it all provides adversity from which we can learn. 

Next blog post: November 2

Michael Tymn is the author of The Afterlife Revealed: What Happens After We Die, Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife, Dead Men Talking: Afterlife Communication from World War I. and No One Really Dies: 25 Reasons to Believe in an Afterlife. His latest book Consciousness Beyond Death: New and Old Light on Near-Death Experiences is published by White Crow books.