DEATH HAS NO STING FOR THE ATHEIST

Lately, I’m 66, I’ve been thinking about my own death, and my thoughts have definitely matured. When I was younger, I’d shiver with the thought of my body buried under the ground in a coffin. I was very attached to my body at that time for why else would I think of myself alive down there in the ground dead? An impossible situation, yet one that caused me great fear. I suppose it was a very literal feeling of being dead and buried for eternity while still being aware of my predicament.

This morning, I don’t know why, I realized with great clarity another scenario for my death. I’ll just lose consciousness, I might even go to Oregon to do it, if I think the quality of my life is no longer worth maintaining. Death no longer has a sting for me. It’ll be just like getting a needle and going to sleep for an operation. Nothing to it. Only this time, as I fall almost immediately to sleep, I won’t wake up, but more importantly, I will no longer care. I’m asleep forever and no nightmares this time.


MY FIRST ATHEIST

I was just a young kid, 22, recently out of the Navy, and I got a job with the American Optical Company, the company that partnered with Michael Todd to develop the Todd/AO optical system for wide screen movies used in “Around The World In Eighty Days”. Todd was one of Elizabeth Taylor’s husbands, remember? He was reputed to be a larger than life financial genius. Their yacht once pulled into the harbor of Nantucket when I was stationed there in 1958. Crowds gathered in the street outside the restaurant they were supposedly eating in. I never got a glimpse of them, but I may have glimpsed Sterling Hayden on a beach during my first summer on the island.

Eventually, I became a delivery driver for the AO branch in Dayton, Ohio. I delivered lenses and frames all around Dayton and small outlying towns, drove their red Nash American. It was much like a VW, like an upside down bathtub in shape, but it was economical, and I never delivered anything big.

My last delivery of each day was west of Dayton, in Eaton Ohio, to a Dr. Spitler. He was doctor and optometrist for that small town. He worked out of a huge white building with several outbuildings, and, not only was he a practicing physician, he ran his own medical school. Young students would be there, learning to sew stitches in a side of bacon, practicing giving shots to an orange. I’m serious, a one man medical school!

White haired, goateed Dr. Spitler was accompanied in his business by a trim, very attractive, gray haired nurse, and I heard about their affair which the whole town knew of, I guess. His office, where I delivered the goods was huge, old, carpeted, with tall windows around a bay letting in lots of light. Bookcases and cabinets lined the walls and stacks of books and magazines covered every free surface. Stacks of books bloomed from the carpet all around his desk and desk chair too.

Eventually, the good doctor learned I was leaving American Optical to go to the University of Dayton. That’s when, one day, when I was idling around listening to him talk, he handed me an old, hardcover book, open to a page with pictures. That’s the first time, ever, that I saw a picture of one of those fat round earth goddess figures from the ancient past. He spoke to me about them, and I recall nothing of the moment but the book and the picture inside. He was, I’m sure, trying to tell me things about atheism and mythology, wanting me to get a good, scientific start toward my education, but I wasn’t even close to being ready to hear him. I was going every Sunday to the Lutheran Church with my wife and child. I was blind, deaf and dumb to science. True knowledge would come much later.

To this day, I try to recall how naive I was, even at 22, whenever I’m dealing with a blind, deaf fundamentalist in a discussion of evolution. You are either ready for the truth or you are not. The average mind must develop a lot of wrinkles before it’s ready to understand the obvious and to cast off the mysterious.
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"If I could drop dead right now, I'd be the happiest man alive!" (No! It ain't the Bushman. It's...
—Samuel Goldwyn, a Yogi Berra in his own right