In his own words

hen I was a child, sometimes just as the darkness preceding sleep surrounded me, my mind would turn to death. I would imagine the blackness of space and the permanence of eternity, and my insides would churn.
      Now I have ALS, and death will soon overtake me. In fact, I have arranged to take my own life, when the end stage of this disease arrives -- when I can no longer speak or swallow, and have increasing difficulty breathing. I have no intention of either embracing or enduring that kind of experience.
      How did I come to be friends with death?
      I have always followed the slant of my own inclination. Never was I confined by a geography, a career or a relationship. I have been an auto mechanic (certified by Volvo), head chef at a New York restaurant, a researcher, president and director of a service for people with Alzheimer's disease, a house-restoration painter, an EMT, a factory worker, a pharmaceutical salesperson, national director of media marketing for a newspaper, student, piano player, lecturer . . . ad astra, ad nauseam. I have had my 15 minutes of Warholian fame, and all of Steven's and two other people's -- and then some. I have been on both hemispheres of the earth. I have indulged in a few other cultures and learned their languages. I have been rich and poor, stressed out and stress-free, depressed and elated. I hold a master's degree in education, but more important I can tell you everything about superconducting. I can get you to understand the wonder of long-bone ossification in a fetus, the way to load spools in making lace by hand, how to bake an apple pie (I was 15th in the bake-off). It's all wonderful to know and exciting to share. To me, it is the getting it that counts.
      I have loved and failed, and won. After many long, slow accidents, I at last have known those transient moments when she breathes in and I breathe out; when I precede her thought as a cup of tea appears before she asks for it. And she has soothed places in me that I did not know were sore.
      Once, in Vietnam, on a blisteringly hot morning as cloying fog shrouded the mud flats of the Mekong, an enemy soldier appeared not 20 meters from me. Someone down the line shot him and he fell into the mud with a dull moan. As he lay there in pain his moaning grew and ebbed, while the low fog slowly rolled over him. After 15 minutes, in a soft guttural heave, he died, and as he succumbed something disturbed the fog above him.

have since encountered many deaths. I have sat all night holding hands with the death congregation. I have broken ribs of strangers CPR-ing them to try to keep them alive. I have seen the mottled skin walk the surface of life, the autonomic breathing surge and stop, the pulse run dry.
      What I know from this is that we have some choice in when we die. Once I waited 24 hours with someone who would not die until her daughter came into the room -- whereupon she passed. Nothing could be more obvious than that thoughtful good-bye.
      Einstein said it best as part of the underpinnings of relativity. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed -- only changed.
      What is the difference between the compounds that make up your body and a bowlful of those compounds sitting on a table? What is it that animates you and not your compounds in the bowl? It can't be structure; water can be H20 or 0H2 or H0H, and it is still water. It's not some convocation of the zodiac or invagination of the powers of the stars. It's not God or Allah or Vishnu or any other ordained imaginary synthesis. It's not the momentum of our species, not the alchemy in the primordial ooze -- how would we explain other creatures' lives?
      By process of elimination, we come to the understanding: energy.
      So when we die -- given that energy can be neither created nor destroyed -- this animating energy leaves us. In doing so, it dissipates into the other energies in the world.
      Some of it goes to the ground. Some, perhaps, provides the impetus to cause a seed to germinate and, maybe, become broccoli, which is eaten by someone and provides energy for that person's life. The speculations are without end; knowing the utility of the energy is therefore pointless.
      Suffice it to say that the energies of all living things precedent to us are still with us. They are recycling silently, out of our view.

-- Nöel David Earley, July 1996

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