Oh My God, We’re All Gonna Die
By: Matthew Broyles
Tags: Mortality, Death, Philosophy, Agnosticism, Parenting

It’s 2008. In a pediatrician’s examination room, waiting our turn, my 3-year-old son suddenly collapses into a wailing ball of tears and snot; a frantic, gooey mass I am trying my best to ungoop before the doctor comes in. He’s not afraid of the doctor, actually. What he’s afraid of, because he’s my child, is death.

Those of us who have decided to pass our genetic material on to a new, separate being bound to survive well beyond us, live in a state of perpetual deferred gratification. Schrodinger’s Parents, I call us. While we watch, the futures of these ambulatory lumps of flesh and neurons flicker before our eyes. Their adult selves are simultaneously overflowing with success and riven with failure. They are both ripe old octogenarians and tragic members of the Forever 27 club. The dearth of data about whether our efforts are doing anything whatsoever to promote a happy, healthy future is nothing short of excruciating.

This situation is exacerbated if, like me, one is committed to breaking with the past, as regards childrearing. Those of us who seek to change the world logically see the next generation as a key component in that transformation. But that also means that we’ve thrown out all the roadmaps, so when we find ourselves in the middle of the deep, dark woods, it’s impossible to know whether this uncharted territory is the path to greater freedom of thought or simply the nature trail to the grizzly cave.

Case in point: His parents’ decision not to explicitly endorse the existence of heaven.

I maintain that we here on earth put off far too many important decisions about our planet’s future because we are forever seeing it as a temporary stop on our way to the big pearly portcullis in the sky. What’s more, disagreements about the specific nature of the afterlife possess an inordinate hold on our cultural and political dialogue, making the business of coexistence way harder than it has to be.

This all sounds well and good in theory. That is, until your 3-year-old son asks you what will happen to him after he dies. If your answer is…well, nothing…then you really can’t be surprised when he breaks down into a screaming fit of existential toddler angst right there in the goddamned doctor’s office.

“I don’t wanna die! I DON’T WANNA DIE!!!!!!!” he shrieks, and right then, I know what it is like to be the worst person in the world. What kind of monster tells his child that death is the end, that after your few allotted years on the planet, your consciousness returns to the nothingness from whence it sprang? What kid is ready for that? I certainly wasn’t, not at 3, and frankly, not really even at 30.

It had not helped that he’d recently seen his great-grandmother laid up in a nursing home bed, gaunt and weak, tubes extending from all over her body. 93 years, and this was how it ended. He’s a smart kid. He put the pieces together.

We did the whole thing of matter transference, how his molecules had once been a supernova, a comet, a tree, a cuddly panda, et cetera, and would go on to be so many other cool things after they stopped being him. Predictably, this soothed his anguish not one whit. “But what will happen to ME?” he wanted to know, and of course we all know what he meant.

At that moment, when it all came crashing into the forefront of his mind, my overactive imagination constructed a bleak picture of his future. Nihilistic, defeatist, resigned to the grinding pointlessness of existence until the sweet release of death freed him from this cage of bones. Idiot, I cursed at myself. What have you done?

Eleven years later, I still don’t know what precisely it is that I am doing. None of us do, really. But on a visit to the doctor when he was ten, I had a quick flashback to that horrific day in 2008 when I was certain I had failed my only child. I was reminded of this not because he was having another fit, but because he was laughing.

How can a child whose parents deny him the peaceful certainty of heaven ever laugh? What, in this meat-bound existence, is there to laugh about? I mean, oh my god, we’re all gonna die, aren’t we?

“I think the parts of me that used to be Japanese want some noodles,” he told me.

“Just those parts?” I asked, amused.

“Yeah, because the parts that used to be monkeys want a banana,” he replied, giggling.

Idiot, I told myself, shaking my head. He’s stronger than you. In the absence of an easy out, his young mind had to do the heavy philosophical lifting that most of us don’t get around to until the teen years, or adulthood, or never. He’s over it already. Holy mother of goat cheese, it is just possible that I didn’t ruin his life.

Obviously, I still don’t know for sure. Locked irrevocably inside the big box of the unknowable, I cannot reliably see the end result of my parenting, nor of any choice that I make. The best we can do remains the best we can do. If we’re all gonna die, we need to accept that truth gracefully, and carry on.