A fine and private place

I recently joined Substack (I encourage you to check it out and subscribe if you like -- my focus there is different than here at Skeptophilia), and a poignant post there got me thinking about graveyards.

I've always been fascinated with cemeteries -- and, even as a child, didn't find them to be scary places.  Somber, perhaps, but peaceful, tranquil, quiet.  Part of it was simple familiarity; I lived with my grandmother for about a year and a half when I was a kid, in the little village of Broussard, Louisiana, and her house was only half a block away from Sacred Heart Catholic Church, with its attendant (and very old) cemetery.  So in my free time I spent many hours wandering amongst the gravestones, reading the inscriptions and wondering who those people had been, what their lives and deaths had been like.

So okay, maybe I was kind of a peculiar child.  I doubt anyone who knows me would find that particularly surprising.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Bobbywomble, Old Grave Stone, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Some years later, I visited the cemetery in southwestern Pennsylvania where my great-grandparents were buried (as well as many cousins of varying degrees, and older generations of the family -- the Scottish/English side of my family lived in that part of the world for two centuries).  While most of the inscriptions in the (largely French-speaking) community of Broussard were pretty prosaic -- names, dates of birth and death, and every once in a while something like "Chère Maman" or "Toujours Dans Nos Coeurs" -- the ones in the mostly Anglo-Celtic, Protestant community where the Pennsylvania branch of my family resided frequently waxed poetic.  I still remember one that had the haunting, eerie lines,

Remember, friend, as you pass by,
As you are now, so once was I;
As I am now, so you will be;
Prepare for death, and follow me.

Grim, but also strangely beautiful. 

Of course, not all of them were so thought-provoking.  There was also one that said,

Here lies my wife, Sarah Bly.
She's at peace, and so am I.

They all contain stories, from the poignant to the banal.  Some of the tales they tell, though, are hidden, and the graves can hold secrets you'd never guess.  I'd long wondered why my great-great grandfather, Elias Scott, was buried there when he died in August of 1884, while his wife, Harriet (Kent) Scott, who'd died only two months earlier, was not.  It was only after going through transcripts of old newspaper clippings that I found out the reason.  Elias had suffered from "shaking palsy" (now called Parkinson's disease) and had been in a slow decline for years.  That whole side of the family was too poor to afford good nursing help, and Harriet had been solely responsible for his day-to-day care.  According to the article I found in the Waynesburg Republican, Harriet had succumbed to despair from her burdens and had taken her own life by poison, explaining why she wasn't buried with her husband -- many sects of Christianity forbid the burial of suicides on consecrated ground, which adds an extra layer of tragedy to the whole story.  The article did say, though, that she had been "an excellent lady when in her right mind, and had the respect of all who knew her."  I was so shaken by this discovery that it inspired me to write a poem -- infrequent for me, as poetry is not my usual medium -- which I titled Nocturne for Mrs. Scott:

Her husband watches from the bed they share,
Watery eyes following her deft movements,
The cleaning and tidying, done with no conscious thought.
Take his empty water glass, put away the medicine the doctor left.
Straighten the lace on the bedside table, pull back the curtains.
She will not meet his eyes.
Her mind is caught in a web of remembering,
Trapped like a dying moth waiting for the sting, the poison, and oblivion.

She sees a time when this weak and withered man
Whose thin limbs and creaking voice she despises,
Was a laughing farm boy with chestnut hair and powerful arms,
And she remembers the chase, and wanting to be caught,
His arm looping around her waist,
Catching her up, twirling, spinning, kissing,
And falling to the ground together.

She despises him more because it wasn't always as it is now,
The dying old man fading and failing on the linen sheets,
Leaving her still in the midst of her strength,
Still in the depth of her own needs.

There is a brown glass bottle in the cabinet, near his medicine.
The paper label is gashed with crimson lettering.
Each time she pours the medicine, thick and dark, into a cup for him to drink from,
Her eyes brush across the label with a touch like snow on bare skin,
And she wonders how long it would take, and how she would feel, free.
Then she sees the laughing boy he once was,
And she leans against the counter
And weeps for her own weakness and wickedness and foolishness.

One summer morning, after the cleaning and tidying and straightening and pulling back of curtains,
The brown glass bottle with the crimson lettering
Fell from her numb fingers to shatter on the tile floor of the kitchen,
A trickle of dark fluid staining the jagged fragments.
And upstairs, the creaking voice, weak from need, weak from not wanting to need,
Still calls for her.

Humans have been ritually burying the dead for at least a hundred thousand years -- the first certain burial is from Qafzeh, Israel, and carbon-dates to around then -- and possibly a lot longer ago than that.  When the concept of an afterlife became woven into it is a matter of pure conjecture, but certainly ancient "grave goods" -- things like tools and adornments and talismans -- suggest that our ancestors very early on were convinced that there was some kind of life after death, and providing the deceased with cool or useful stuff would ensure that they at least started off well.

I still recall being in college, and reading the lilting, sassy poem To His Coy Mistress, by the seventeenth-century writer Andrew Marvell, which has to be the ultimate carpe diem poem ever written.  (An English lit major friend summarized it, accurately if crudely, as "Life's short, let's fuck.")  Marvell's lines, "The grave's a fine and private place/ But none, I think, do there embrace," are certainly in that spirit, but I think the poem says way more than simply a plea for love.  A walk through a graveyard is a good exercise in staying cognizant of life's fragility -- and its shortness.  Marvell's poem reminds us of that as well, and I've found the final stanza to be good advice, even beyond the amorous aspects.  And perhaps that's as good a place as any to end this:

Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our Sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

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The dying of the light

In July of 2004, my father died.  I was at his bedside in Our Lady of Lourdes General Hospital in Lafayette, Louisiana when it happened.  He'd  been declining for a while -- his once razor-sharp mental faculties slipping into a vague cloudiness, his gait slowing and becoming halting and cautious, his former rapier wit completely gone.  The most heartbreaking thing was his own awareness of what he had lost and would continue to lose.  It looked like a slow slide into debility.

Then, in June, he had what the doctors described as a mini-stroke.  Afterward, he was still fairly lucid, but was having trouble walking.  It had long been his deepest fear (one I share) that he'd become completely dependent on others for his care, and it was obvious to us (and probably to him as well) that this was the direction things were going.

What happened next was described in three words by my mother: "He gave up."

Despite the fact that the doctors could find no obvious direct cause of it, his systems one by one started to shut down.  Three weeks after the mini-stroke and fall that precipitated his admission into the hospital, he died at age 83.

I had never been with someone as they died before (and haven't since).  I was out of state when my beloved grandma died in 1986; and when my mother died, eight months after my father, it was so sudden I didn't have time to get there.  But I was by my father's side as his breathing slowed and finally stopped.  The event itself wasn't at all dramatic; the transition between life and death was subtle, gentle, and peaceful.  However wrenching it was on my mother and me, for him there seemed to be hardly a boundary between "here" and "not here."

Of course, I'm judging that from the outside.  No one knows -- no one can know -- what the experience was like for him.  It's funny, really; death is one of the experiences that unites us as human, and one which we all will ultimately share, but none of us knows what it actually is.

Noël LeMire, La Mort et le Mourant (ca. 1770) [Image is in the Public Domain]

A study in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, though, may be the first clue as to what the experience is like.  An 87-year-old Canadian epilepsy patient was set up for an electroencephalogram to try and get a picture of what was causing his seizures, when he unexpectedly had a severe heart attack.  The man was under a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) order, so when his heart stopped beating, they let him die...

... but he was still hooked up to the EEG.

This gave his doctors our first glimpse into what is happening in the brain of someone as they die.  And they found a sudden increase in activity in the parts of the brain involved in memory, recall, and dreaming -- which lasted for thirty seconds after his heart stopped, then gradually faded.

"Through generating oscillations involved in memory retrieval, the brain may be playing a last recall of important life events just before we die, similar to the ones reported in near-death experiences," said Ajmal Zemmar, a neurosurgeon who was the study's lead author.  "As a neurosurgeon, I deal with loss at times.  It is indescribably difficult to deliver the news of death to distraught family members.  Something we may learn from this research is that although our loved ones have their eyes closed and are ready to leave us to rest, their brains may be replaying some of the nicest moments they experienced in their lives."

Which is a pleasant thought.  Many of us -- even, for some reason, the devoutly religious, who you'd think would be positively eager for the experience -- are afraid of death.  Me, I'm not looking forward to it; I rather like being alive, and as a de facto atheist I have no particular expectation that there'll be anything afterwards.  Being with my father as he died did, however, have the effect of making me less afraid of death.  The usual lead-up, with its frequent pain and debility and illness, is still deeply terrifying to me, but crossing the boundary itself seemed fairly peaceful.

And the idea that our brains give us one last go-through of our pleasant memories is kind of nice.  I know that this single patient's EEG is hardly conclusive -- and it's unlikely there'll be many other people hooked up to a brain scanner as they die -- but it does give some comfort that perhaps, this experience we will all share someday isn't as awful as we might fear.

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An act of faith

Over the last couple of months I've been dealing with a health problem that is one of those collections of symptoms that falls somewhere on the spectrum between "mild inconvenience" and "I'm going to be dead in three months."  Fortunately, at the moment the doctor is leaning strongly toward the former.  (I won't go into further details because I hate it when People Of A Certain Age begin every conversation with what my dad called "the organ recital" -- telling everyone they talk to intimate details of their various health-related issues.)

In any case, this kind of thing absolutely plays hell with someone who has chronic anxiety.  Frankly, over the last two months the anxiety has been far worse than the symptoms themselves, and I have no doubt that it's actually made the symptoms more severe.  But it's put making any firm summer plans on hold, given that my brain keeps shouting at me that I might not be able to follow through on them on account of being incapacitated, hospitalized, or dead.

But it started me down a line of thought that, for once, was productive instead of irrational and paralyzing.  It brought to mind the word faith.  I realize this is not one you'd expect to hear from a skeptical atheist type.  But it struck me that faith is what's invoked any time we make plans -- faith that we and the ones involved will still be around when the plans come to fruition.

That seems pretty dark and pessimistic, but actually it's the opposite.  None of us are guaranteed another day, another hour, another minute, so the only option is to act as if we do, to be right here in the moment and let the future take care of itself.  It's like what Jean-Luc Picard -- then in the mind of the character Kamin -- said to his daughter in the beautiful episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called "The Inner Light:" "Seize the time, Meribor – live now.  Make now always the most precious time.  Now will never come again."

Being ill has made this thought come back to me again and again.  It occurred to me a couple of weeks ago when I bought a couple of tropical plants to replace some of the ones I lost this past winter when my greenhouse heater malfunctioned on one of the coldest nights in January, and I heard a sepulchral voice in my mind say, "Maybe I won't be around to see them flower."  When I saw the daffodils blooming in April and it occurred to me that this might be the last time I ever would.  When I was outside playing with my dogs and wondered how many more opportunities I'd have.

I know these thoughts are coming from my mental illness; I do trust the doctor that I'm probably going to be okay.  But really, isn't that the situation we're all in?  It's all an act of faith.  Getting out of bed in the morning is an act of faith.  We maneuver our way through this dangerous, unpredictable, endlessly weird world and plan for meeting some friends at the pub day after tomorrow, for a vacation this summer, for visiting with family during the winter holidays, simultaneously knowing that none of it might happen.  But that's what we have to do.  The only other option is to descend into panic now because of what might or might not occur later, to willfully destroy our present because our future isn't guaranteed.

My grandma used to tell me, "Worry is like a rocking chair; it keeps you busy but it doesn't get you anywhere."  I'd make it even stronger, though.  Worry wastes what we've got right here in our hands.  I'm not going to say it's easy to conquer; I've had anxiety disorder my entire life, and I'm not expecting it to go away magically.  But I have -- and so does everyone -- control over deliberately choosing to live life the best I can regardless of how much of it I have left.  It's all a risk; every action we take, or decide not to take.  As J. R. R. Tolkien wrote, in The Fellowship of the Ring, "It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door.  You step into the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to."

The question is not whether you want to take a risk; the question is which risk you want to take.  For me, I'd rather risk the possibility of my plans and aspirations not coming to fruition than risk giving in to my anxiety, then getting to the end of the path and realizing what I missed.

So my advice: carpe the absolute fuck out of every diem you've got left, whether it's one or ten thousand.  I'm completely agnostic about whether there's an afterlife; maybe there is, maybe there isn't.  But as far as what I know for sure, this right here, right now, is all I've got.  And right now the sun is shining and the weather is warm and pleasant and there are people who love me.  There's music to listen to and stories to write and dogs to play with and books to read.  Okay, it won't last forever.  But I'll hang on to the sweetness I've got right now for all I'm worth, and have faith that whatever happens tomorrow, I'll have made the most of today.

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Racing with death

Before I run a race, I have to give myself a serious pep talk, because I'm the kind of person who always assumes the worst.  Although I've run many races without mishap, there's always this haunting thought in the back of my head that this is going to be the one where I faint or puke or fall down and tear both of my Achilles tendons or get run over by a car.

Just a cockeyed optimist, that's me.

Me, attempting not to die.  In this case, there was actually a significant chance of it, because it was about 93 F and the humidity usually found in a sauna.  More than one person collapsed on the course.  I made it to the finish line.  Then I collapsed.

So it was with great interest that I read an article in the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology a friend sent me, suggesting that my errant and morbid brain might actually be onto something.  In a paper entitled "He Dies, He Scores: Evidence that Reminders of Death Motivate Improved Performance in Basketball," Colin A. Zestcott, Uri Lifshin, Peter Helm, and Jeff Greenberg of the University of Arizona's Department of Psychology have shown that thinking about death prior to a competition may actually make an athlete perform better.  The authors write:

This research applied insights from terror management theory (TMT; Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986) to the world of sport.  According to TMT, self-esteem buffers against the potential for death anxiety.  Because sport allows people to attain self-esteem, reminders of death may improve performance in sport.  In Study 1, a mortality salience induction led to improved performance in a “one-on-one” basketball game.  In Study 2, a subtle death prime led to higher scores on a basketball shooting task, which was associated with increased task related self-esteem.  These results may promote our understanding of sport and provide a novel potential way to improve athletic performance.

Some participants were given cheerful directives like "Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you," and, "Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die and once you are physically dead," and those who didn't break down into sobs were instructed to take some shots on the basketball court.  Surprisingly, these players scored better than ones who were directed to think about the game itself, with prompts like "Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of playing basketball arouses in you," and, "Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you play basketball."

So the time-honored method of coaches telling their players to keep their mind on the game might not have as much of a beneficial effect as if they said, "Have you pondered your own mortality lately?"

Author Lifshin explains why he thinks they got the results they did.  "Your subconscious tries to find ways to defeat death, to make death not a problem, and the solution is self-esteem.  Self-esteem gives you a feeling that you're part of something bigger, that you have a chance for immortality, that you have meaning, that you're not just a sack of meat...  When we're threatened with death, we're motivated to regain that protective sense of self-esteem, and when you like basketball and you're out on the basketball court, winning and performing well is the ultimate way to gain self-esteem."

Apparently even a subtle suggestion worked.  When Lifshin wore a shirt with a human skull on it while working with test subjects, "Participants who saw the shirt outperformed those who did not by approximately 30 percent.  They also attempted more shots — an average of 11.85 per minute versus an average of 8.33 by those who did not see the shirt...  They took more shots, better shots, and they hustled more and ran faster."

So maybe my incessant focus on the worst-case scenario is a good thing.  And whether or not my attitude has anything to do with it, I've been pretty pleased with my running performance lately, especially since just last week I finished a 400-mile virtual run, a fundraiser for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, in 88 days.  Unfortunately, because of COVID, I've been mostly running alone, so no one was around to give me a high five afterward except my dog, and he would probably have been equally enthusiastic if all I'd done was walk to the end of the driveway and back.

Even if pessimism may make your athletic performance better, I can't say it's a pleasant attitude to have, and I've tried to adopt a sunnier outlook whenever possible.  I'm not sure my natural bent will be that easy to eradicate, however, and given the research by Zestcott et al., maybe it's better just to embrace it and run each race as if it'll be my last.

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If you, like me, never quite got over the obsession with dinosaurs we had as children, there's a new book you really need to read.

In The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, author Stephen Brusatte describes in brilliantly vivid language the most current knowledge of these impressive animals who for almost two hundred million years were the dominant life forms on Earth.  The huge, lumbering T. rexes and stegosauruses that we usually think of are only the most obvious members of a group that had more diversity than mammals do today; there were not only terrestrial dinosaurs of pretty much every size and shape, there were aerial ones from the tiny Sordes pilosus (wingspan of only a half a meter) to the impossibly huge Quetzalcoatlus, with a ten-meter wingspan and a mass of two hundred kilograms.  There were aquatic dinosaurs, arboreal dinosaurs, carnivores and herbivores, ones with feathers and scales and something very like hair, ones with teeth as big as your hand and others with no teeth at all.

Brusatte is a rising star in the field of paleontology, and writes with the clear confidence of someone who not only is an expert but has tremendous passion and enthusiasm.  If you're looking for a book for a dinosaur-loving friend -- or maybe you're the dino aficionado -- this one is a must-read.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Run to the museum

Two recent studies suggest the popular wisdom that if you want to improve your health, mood, and sense of well-being, get out and do stuff, is substantially correct.

The first is (to me) the more impressive study, because it actually looked at the electrical output of the test subjects' brains, so we're seeing at least a hint of the underlying mechanism.  In "Play Sports for a Quieter Brain: Evidence From Division I Collegiate Athletes," which appeared in the journal Sports Health last Monday, a team of neuroscientists at Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois) found that the FFR (frequency-following response, a measure of neural crosstalk between the parts of the brain responsible for interpreting complex sensory stimuli) was substantially higher in athletes than non-athletes, and increased in both groups after strenuous exercise.

The authors suggest that the higher FFR in athletes occurs because sports in general require focused attention, thus a diminishment of the "neural background noise" all our brains engage in.  The ability to turn down this chatter and devote more energy and brain activity to sensory interpretation could certainly explain how athletes develop their preternaturally fast and accurate reflexes.

It also explains something that I've witnessed more than once, as a fan of Cornell University hockey.  The Cornell students are notorious for their jeers -- um, cheers -- that make fun of the opposing team in any way that is convenient.  In particular, the opposing goalie is ridiculed incessantly (starting, but not ending, with referring to him as a "sieve"), but almost always the goalie is capable of somehow shutting out the roar of insults coming from the student section.  I've always wondered how they did that so effectively -- almost never do the goalies even react, much less try to interact, with the students.  They seem entirely undistracted by it.

But the Sports Health study suggests that a laser-like focus is a neural feature of a lot of athletes, so well-developed that it shows up on an electroencephalogram.  I still wonder, of course, if we're not mistaking correlation for causation -- it could just as easily be that people are attracted to sports because they already have the ability to focus and ignore neural background noise, rather than playing sports causing that ability to develop.

Either way, it's an interesting study, deserving of more research -- especially if it could be demonstrated that engagement in sports improved neural focus, which would give some hope to ordinary mortals like myself who like to run but get distracted if a squirrel farts.

The other study I present with the same qualifier; the convenient conclusion could well be a correlation/causation error.  Still, it's an interesting finding.  In "The Art of Life and Death: 14 Year Follow-Up Analyses of Associations Between Arts Engagement and Mortality in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing," which appeared this week in the British Medical Journal, researchers at University College of London found that engagement with the arts -- even something like regular museum visits -- was correlated with a lower risk of mortality from all causes, even when they controlled for age, prior health conditions, and socioeconomic status.

The study followed six thousand British citizens, all aged fifty or over, for fifteen years, and the differences in survival rate were not small.  Individuals who were occupied in some way with the arts had a 31% lower mortality rate than those who did not.  The mechanism is uncertain, although there have been other studies that correlated brain activity of all kinds (even doing crossword puzzles or sudoku) with a lower rate of dementia.  The naysayer in my mind, however, feels compelled to point out that it could be that people with conditions that will ultimately prove fatal -- even before they're diagnosed -- might be less compelled to go out and take sketching classes than those who are (unbeknownst to them) facing long-term good health.  Just as in the crossword puzzle studies; there is some indication that horrifying disorders like Alzheimer's start to show in measurable ways far earlier than anyone thought, so it's understandable that someone who is starting the slide into losing his/her cognitive faculties wouldn't be inclined to do a crossword puzzle even if they're not consciously aware yet that the decline has begun.

But still.  It could be the other way around, which is certainly how the popular media is portraying it.  And there's nothing to be lost in buying a year's worth of museum passes, or signing up for that sculpture class you've been considering; just as with the other study I referenced, there's nothing but benefit to joining an intramural soccer league or a running club.  Keeping physically and mentally active certainly improves your quality of life, and even if you won't end up with the focused attention of a Cornell hockey goalie or living to age 103, it's still worth doing.

So I suppose that means that I should get my ass up out of this chair, turn the computer off, and go for a run.  Or work on the clay mask I've been making for the last couple of days.  Either is probably preferable than sitting here immersing myself in the news, which has been my fallback, and is not good for either my mood or my blood pressure lately.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun, and a perfect holiday gift for anyone you know who (1) is a science buff, and (2) has a sense of humor.  What If?, by Randall Munroe (creator of the brilliant comic strip xkcd) gives scientifically-sound answers to some very interesting hypothetical questions.  What if everyone aimed a laser pointer simultaneously at the same spot on the Moon?  Could you make a jetpack using a bunch of downward-pointing machine guns?  What would happen if everyone on the Earth jumped simultaneously?

Munroe's answers make for fascinating, and often hilarious, reading.  His scientific acumen, which shines through in xkcd, is on full display here, as is his sharp-edged and absurd sense of humor.  It's great reading for anyone who has sat up at night wondering... "what if?"

[Note:  if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]