Chang wondered if reflecting on death and mortality might lead to powerful benefits. Perhaps a nine-foot white-on-black sign begging the completion of the statement “Before I Die . . .” is the wake-up call we need to see the value in living for today. What if such a message got people to help others more, to give more to charity, to reconsider and reform their life goals, and even to experience better overall mental health?
In their honest encounter with death, more people might take on the qualities of supersurvivors.
Paul rode in a car along Maryland Interstate 95. His and David Charlebois’s good friend Michael Walker, also a pilot, was driving. It was November 2001. The snow on the ground was thawing. Overhead, big black birds were settled on the power lines. The car exited the interstate and pulled into the tiny parking lot of a flat, gray federal building. Paul buttoned his overcoat against the gloom and the cold. Inside, he and Michael passed through a security checkpoint and entered a small lobby, where an official handed Paul an urn containing the ashes of their friend David.
It was hard to believe David was really gone. “I was stunned and saddened. He was one of the nicest people you’d ever meet: friendly, popular, a genuinely good person. He had a family who loved him.” More than a decade after his death, Paul Watkins’s words still hang heavy. “It got me thinking. This young man. He was younger than I was. Gosh.”
It wasn’t that before David was killed Paul was ignorant of death. It was just that before David’s death, Paul didn’t really see death as something worth spending time thinking about. Life seemed long; certainly long enough for Paul to have made a succession of life choices. He always assumed life would just keep going. This hopping from life path to life path had paid off in remarkable ways. Eventually, after years of searching for his place in the world, he was finally happy.
Or, at least, he had been happy until now.
The drive back from the federal building to Front Royal, Virginia, was solemn. Paul and Michael turned off Highway 66 and drove to a little town on the edge of the Shenandoah River. The Blue Ridge Mountains were covered in white. Down East Criser Road, they passed a library and a grocery store and turned toward Warren Street, past small shops selling Civil War paraphernalia. They eventually arrived at the home of David’s parents and solemnly delivered his ashes.
That evening, Paul made himself a cup of coffee and took off his shoes. He didn’t sleep that night. “I thought a lot about life. How precious and tenuous life is,” he says. “Culture teaches us to expect that we’re going to live into our seventies and eighties. Sometimes that happens, sometimes that doesn’t. I think people feel they are entitled to that, that they have a right to that. That happens for a lot of people, but not to a fair number of people.” If he had been the one who died on September 11 instead of David, Paul wondered if he could honestly say he’d done everything he wanted to do in life.
We’ve seen evidence of how people clothe themselves in the armor of their cultural worldview as a defense against truly realizing they will die. In general, the participants in Solomon, Pyszczynski, and Greenberg’s studies didn’t consciously know that were marshaling such defenses. If you’d asked them, they’d likely have denied feeling much fear about death. “Yeah, I know it’ll happen eventually,” they might have said, “but I don’t have to worry about that for a long, long time.” This certainly was Paul Watkins’s refrain as he built his highly lucrative, highly respectable career. On some level, he knew that what he was doing ultimately wasn’t meaningful to him. Even though he was enjoying himself, making money, and benefiting from the respect of those around him, somehow it seemed empty. But there would always be tomorrow—after he accumulated his fortune and built his gumbo empire—to do something more meaningful. Life seemed endlessly long—until his friend David died and Paul could no longer deny that life was fragile, and shorter than any of us like to think.
What allowed Paul to confront death honestly while so many others seem to remain in denial? For that matter, why did Candy Chang’s “Before I Die” wall affect people differently from John Carpenter’s horror films? Shouldn’t both reminders of death trigger our tendency toward protective denial?
University of Minnesota psychology researcher Philip Cozzolino has some ideas about this. “The notion that human mortality provides sweetness to life—an added zest that makes living more meaningful—is certainly not the view of death espoused by typical individuals,” he writes in his 2006 article in the journal Psychological Inquiry. “The more common human response to mortality is likely to involve themes of denial, fear, and/or discomfort.” But this very book is filled with cases of people staring death in the face without flinching, and then using the experience as a springboard not into prejudice, materialism, or culturally sanctioned superficial achievements, but into an authentic life governed by their internal compasses.
Cozzolino proposes what he calls dual-existential systems. We can encounter death in two distinct ways. One is the superficial, abstract way we bump into it on a daily basis—the glorified but cartoony killing in Hollywood blockbusters and even the real but distant tragedies we see in the news. Cozzolino also thinks this superficial awareness of mortality is what participants in terror management experiments experience. “Terror management theory researchers have made mortality salient for participants by exposing them to generic, abstract representations of death such as gory video scenes, visits to funeral homes,” he writes. “Conversely, for a terminal cancer patient or for a person who believes that he or she has actually died in a car crash and come back from the other side, the subject of mortality has become a tangible, experiential fact of life that is systematically integrated into their thoughts and behaviors.” He calls this deeper, personal, undeniable encounter with mortality death reflection, and contrasts it with the more superficial, abstract, easily deniable experience of mortality salience.
To prove his point, Cozzolino, along with researchers Angela Staples, Lawrence Meyers, and Jamie Samboceti, performed a series of experiments of the sort that terror management theorists are famous for, but they asked participants to reflect upon death in a way that made it more deeply personal than in past studies. The researchers not only asked participants to imagine their deaths, but also prompted them, among other things, to reflect on the life they had led up to that point. It’s reminiscent of the way some survivors of near-death experiences say their lives flash before them, or the question Candy Chang asked passersby to consider. As a result, participants who normally were oriented toward extrinsic ends (e.g., money and fame) but who deeply reflected on their own eventual deaths became less greedy and more spiritual. Interestingly, those who considered death more superficially—those who experienced mortality salience rather than death reflection—became greedier. One of the participants in Cozzolino’s research, recalling what it was like to reflect deeply upon death, summed it up well: “I realize now that our time here is relatively short and it makes me want to live my life to the fullest. It seems like such a waste of precious time to become caught up in materialistic modes of thinking.”
Of course, life doesn’t afford us many opportunities to encounter the idea of death deeply. And when it does, these reflections are typically not pleasant—in fact, they’re often traumatic.
The morning David Charlebois was killed, people all over the world simultaneously became trauma survivors. Even though most people didn’t know someone directly who died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, many experienced trauma on a vicarious level.
Surveying a sample of American college students, Georg E. Matt of San Diego State University and Carmelo Vázquez of Universidad Complutense de Madrid found that between 30 and 40 percent of people reported posttraumatic stress and general psychological distress in the weeks following September 11, 2001, even though they were nowhere near the attacks. There were similar findings following the March 11, 2004, train bombings in Madrid that resulted in the largest loss of life from a single terrorist attack in European history.
But people experienced the events of 9/11 in both of the ways explored by Phillip Cozzolino. For most, the attacks were something that happened at a distance. Though the events were very real, for this group of people the actual experience was framed by the borders of a television screen. It wasn’t truly personal in the way it was for many others—those who were standing on Church Street or Liberty Street or Vesey Street that day, those who lost someone in the smoldering ruins, or those who narrowly escaped death themselves. The first group of people may have been able to use unconscious terror management defenses to deny their own fear of death. As the theory might predict, perhaps this is why news reports from all over the country highlighted rising prejudice against foreigners as many Americans fled to their own cultural worldviews as a defense mechanism. But people in the second group, such as Paul Watkins, who personally and deeply encountered death, couldn’t reassure themselves quite so easily. Many found themselves reexamining their lives. New Yorkers will tell you that their city was transformed in the weeks and months following the attacks. People were talking to each other differently. They were more courteous, more patient, more loving, more generous.
Paul couldn’t stop thinking about the course his life had taken. For the first time in years, he wondered why he’d chosen a life in business instead of fulfilling his religious vows. It was hard to remember. Something about ambition and age. He was now forty. His friends were making money, living conventional lives—the kind of lives that had previously seemed to Paul like the right way to live. But had he found real personal meaning in this kind of life, beyond the superficial trappings that only days before had seemed so important?
Since the tragic deaths of David and so many others, Paul realized on an emotional level what he had understood only in a hypothetical way before: We have only a limited amount of time before we die, and there’s nothing to do but make the most meaningful choices possible. Society tells us what the valued life paths are, what it takes to be respected by others. Starting his company was one of them, and it seemed easy to follow this path. But things had clearly changed.
Now Paul searched his heart furiously for a more authentic path, and saw that it had been there the whole time.
So he moved out of his upscale apartment and gave away most of his possessions to live in the community at St. Anthony of Padua Priory on Canal Street in New Orleans, joining the Dominican Order of priests. He surrendered his existence to God and committed himself to the ideologies of charity, community, common prayer, study, and service for the rest of his life.
He now sees this transformation as a kind of grace, one that allows him the opportunity to help others. Paul the millionaire entrepreneur had had no way to talk about grace or about God being present in the face of the evil of 9/11. “I couldn’t help anybody,” he says. “I had silenced myself.” His true aspirations had been present all along, concealed by convention and a straightforward view of success. “I felt there was a part of me that I had ignored and hidden from all this time.”
In 2005, Paul became the parochial vicar of St. Dominic Parish in New Orleans. Three weeks later, Hurricane Katrina made landfall. The nearby Seventeenth Street Canal levee failed. Garbage-filled water rushed over the city. Paul’s Bible and a rosary given to him by his father were lost in the flood.
The priests of St. Dominic Parish were among the last to leave the city during the forced evacuation, and Paul was the very first of them to return. He found the church, as big as an airplane hangar, submerged in ten feet of black water. The pews and kneelers were embedded in mud, and floodwaters had toppled the altar.
The neighborhood remained empty for weeks. Every house was damaged or destroyed. Electricity remained out, and basic resources were scarce. The community was uninhabitable. Paul assessed the ruins and wondered how on earth any neighborhood could come back from this.
But it would come back, and Paul would give it a push. “Someone had to take the risk and start rebuilding first,” he says. “The priests came back, and we all started cleaning. The National Guard carried out the pews. We reopened the parish and the schools, even though no one was there to use them. It was part of the healing process for the people, to see the church getting back to working condition. To have the church make a statement that it was committed to the city and the parish gave people hope.”
But to Paul’s surprise, the neighborhoods didn’t just bounce back; in many ways they bounced forward, in supersurvivor fashion. “If you’re going to reorient your personal values after a big tragedy like this, eventually you’re going to reorient your community’s values, which is what happened,” Paul says. “There’s no doubt the storm changed the city. There’s more compassion among the people. The focus on faith changed. It got stronger. Today, people who never, ever considered coming to New Orleans are moving here, and the city welcomes them.”
And in a weird convergence of faith and synchronicity, one of those newcomers was a young artist named Candy Chang. She’d come to New Orleans mourning the death of a dear friend.
Several weeks later, she would haul buckets of chalkboard paint to a dilapidated house with orange roof trim and stencil the words “Before I Die . . .”
7
Faith’s Mixed Blessing
Here is my secret. It is very simple: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
—ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY, THE LITTLE PRINCE
The dramatic conversion of James Cameron from schoolboy to supersurvivor began in the foreboding darkness of a hot Indiana night in August 1930. James was known in Marion as an amiable and upstanding kid who worked at the Adams Street interurban train station shining white peoples’ shoes. Unlike James, his school friends Thomas Shipp and Abe Smith had no compunction about committing petty (and not so petty) crimes. All three boys were in Thomas’s convertible coupe coming back from tossing horseshoes in a pal’s backyard when Abe suddenly pulled out a .38-caliber Iver Johnson special from his overalls. “Let’s go rob somebody,” he said with a crazed look in his eyes. “I’ll be the leader, and you boys’ll be my gang.”
Being the youngest of the three, of small stature for sixteen, and a natural follower, James wasn’t sure how he could back out of what he feared was about to happen. They crossed the Thirty-Eighth Street Bridge out of town, and before long they were cruising down a shadowy country road. Abe raised his hand, signaling to Thomas to apply the brakes. He’d spotted a Buick pulled over in a wooded area by the river.
James followed them out into the woods on foot, hanging back a little as they waded into knee-high grass awash in pale moonlight. A few yards ahead was the Buick, parked by the muddy river snaking past the Marion glass factory. A man and woman were inside talking. Abe shoved something into James’s hand and flashed a threatening glance.
“There’s nothing to it,” he said. “Just take this gun and put it on the people. Then say, ‘Stick ’em up.’ ”
James’s stomach tightened. He knew that what Abe was telling him to do was wrong; he felt it in every bone of his body. He thought about his God-fearing mother waiting for him back at home and suddenly wanted more than anything to drop the gun and run to her. But he was afraid of what Abe would do. Abe was his friend, yes, but James had come to fear him. The older boy could be cruel, vindictive, and unpredictable; James didn’t want to trigger his anger. Every step toward the car felt more and more wrong. Years later he would wonder what went awry in his boyhood mind to keep him from summoning the courage to turn around. But for whatever reason, he didn’t, and regret for this would later consume him.
James yanked the car door open.
“What’s going on!” the man inside demanded, wide-eyed and confused.
James leveled the gun at him. His heart was racing. “Get your hands up!” He nearly shrieked the order, his voice struggling to find a register of authority. Puberty had not yet fully changed his voice.
Abe stepped up, knowing that James’s fearful and
guilty look would get them nowhere. “Out of the car,” he ordered the couple. “Keep your hands high!”
Just then, James realized something that made his whole body go cold. The man he was holding up was Claude Deeter, one of his best customers from the train station. Claude was a good man.
James was thinking sensibly again. He shoved the gun back at Abe. “I want nothing to do with this.” The boys didn’t even try to stop him. They let him run off into the darkness. By the time James reached the country road, his skin was crawling with sweat and his heart was sinking with an understanding of what he had done. He thought about going to the police, turning his friends in. But in Indiana at the dawn of the 1930s, everyone knew what “justice” meant for black kids. Besides, he reassured himself, Abe and Thomas would just take a few dollars. Everything would be all right.
The Thirty-Eighth Street Bridge appeared around the bend. He was about to cross it when three gunshots rang out from the distance.
James didn’t know it, but Claude Deeter had been shot. As he lay dying in the hospital, Claude pointed investigators to the boys. It didn’t take long for police cruisers to surround James’s mother’s house. They found the boy hiding under his bedsheets and arrested him. As they pushed him outside, James heard his mother cry out, “Lord, have mercy. Give me strength, dear Jesus!”
Throughout Indiana over the next twelve hours there was talk about lynching the prisoners. At that time in history, justice for black people didn’t always involve courtrooms, judges, juries of one’s peers, or even prison sentences. Sometimes it involved brutal summary executions at the hands of angry white mobs. Between 1882 and the rise of the civil rights movement of the late 1960s, roughly thirty-five hundred black people were lynched in the United States. Less than a day after Abe and Thomas killed Claude Deeter, the surging, roiling sound of bedlam rose from outside James’s jailhouse cell. A mob had surrounded the jail entrance, ropes in hand. According to some reports, the Ku Klux Klan was responsible for stirring the crowd’s anger. Despite attempts by the police to prevent people from breaching the jail, two men used sledgehammers to break down the jailhouse door. The mob flooded into the building. Shouts of racial epithets could be heard over the slamming of footsteps. Blood for blood is all the crowd would accept.
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