It surprised me. I started talking about this with my driver. “Yes,” he said, “what you are feeling is called ubuntu. It is a Zulu word meaning, generally, you are not a human being until you express your humanity with other human beings.” My guide, my guard, gave me an example: “It means how can you be happy when a child is starving?”
There is no English equivalent to that word. Essentially, I came to understand, it simply means real happiness comes from helping other people. There was a time in America when neighbors helped their neighbors, but the reality is that now too often we don’t even know our neighbors beyond a nodding recognition. Nobody has a barn-raising anymore. In a time when social media makes us readily available to almost anyone on earth, many of us are isolated. It reminded me of something I had realized after Leonard Nimoy’s death. It was made clear to me that I was not welcome at his funeral. That was painful. I had an easy excuse. Months earlier I had agreed to appear at a Red Cross fund-raiser being held by Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago that same day. Millions of dollars had been raised. The media, naturally, made a big deal of the fact that I did not attend the funeral. At that dinner I told the guests, “I want all of us to remember the name Leonard Nimoy as long as we can, but I know that within a few years his name will be forgotten. Over time all of the great movie stars, all of our leaders, all of us, will be forgotten. There might be a statue or a building named after that person, but people will wonder who it was.
“But the good deeds we are doing here tonight may well reverberate until the end of time. That child that you are helping keep alive by being here tonight will go on to live his or her life and eventually have children who will have children. While you may not even think being here tonight is a good deed, it may well justify your existence until the end of time.”
I believe that without reservation. My father was very active in charitable organizations in Montreal. He used some of the money he was able to save to bring other members of his family from Europe to Canada and America. He changed lives forever. And he lives on in me. So as I said that night, long after my name has been forgotten the good deeds that I did will continue to live on through other people.
It is odd, those things we remember late in life. Those events that happened early in our lives that continue to have an impact as long as we live. At the beginning of my career I accepted an invitation to join Tyrone Guthrie’s Stratford Festival. I packed all my possessions into a used Morris Minor, a very small car that my father had loaned me $400 to purchase, and headed toward Toronto. During a torrential rainstorm I was crossing a rickety bridge while a massive sixteen-wheeler was coming from the other direction. As we got closer the air this truck was displacing pushed my little car to the side and for an instant I thought I was going off the bridge. That instant of fear, whether or not it was rational, has lived inside me for the rest of my life. It wasn’t so much the possibility of dying but rather the realization that if I had been killed on that bridge, nobody but my parents would mourn for me. It would be as if I had not existed in this world. I wouldn’t have left a scratch on the world to prove that I had been here, even for a brief period of time. That’s what really terrified me. And that feeling has never gone away. This need to justify my existence in this world has been a motivating factor in my life.
And after living all my years, after all I have seen and done and learned, after sorting through an array of principles and personal ethics, I have come to believe that making that mark, that leaving behind some slight evidence that proved you were here, matters most of all.
10. Where Does Time Go?
Where does time go:
I finish the dishes, I go to the store; before I know it, time is no more.
I plan for the weekend, I drive to the sea, stop for lunch at the deli, no time for tea.
Where does time go: Into space that it flies, a power that takes it, and no one ask why, or where it lies,
With only you is there peace and everything slows down, at last my mind rests and all is profound.
I need you beside me to push back the past. With us holding each other, we can make time last.
Where does time go: For dreams for each other we can make the time last, we can make the time last.
In time, the earth disappears, along with our hopes and dreams and fears, all of history gone in a cloud.
Nothing remains; ambition, empires, soldiers so proud, where does time go when it comes to an end?
All that is us with time we will blend.
Those are the lyrics to a song I wrote with Billy Sherwood titled, properly, “Where Does Time Go.” It is, obviously, about the most profound mystery of life: death. Believe me, as I have gotten older I have thought about it, I have wondered about it, I have had nightmares about it. In a weird way, I can’t bring myself to believe that I am going to die.
Every person I have ever known, everything I have ever read, at some point ponders the mystery of life and death. The most ignorant people in history still looked up into the night sky and wondered, What the heck is that? There were people who believed the stars were simply tricks with light. All the attempts to explain it eventually evolved into what we now call religion. And as an inducement to follow a certain religion people were offered the one thing they craved: eternal life, in one form or another.
My first real contact with death was my father’s sudden death. I took it very hard and grieved for more than a year. Until then I hadn’t been forced to confront death. I was aware of the Holocaust, and I was told relatives of mine in Europe had been put to death, but I didn’t know them, so they remained remote. They didn’t touch me. After my father died I spent a considerable length of time trying to understand this thing, death, and eventually came to the realization there is no way to understand it. Since then, I have seen many loved ones die. The pain of their loss becomes part of my life. The drowning death of my wife Nerine haunts me. I found her in our pool and lifted her out of the water. The emergency responders rushed to the house, but there was nothing that could be done. I saw her body lying there in the moonlight. She was as beautiful then as she had been in life, but everything about her was gone. Her voice, her laughter, her pleasures, and her fears. Everything that made her the person she was—with the exception of a physical presence—was gone.
I have held tight to several beloved animals as they died. I have looked in their eyes as the life force went out of them. My beloved Starbuck lived to fifteen, a great age for a Doberman. I wrote a lyric for him, “His muzzle is gray, his back is sore and he is a little cloudy of eye; Then the truth of what I see is so am I?… Now he is old and stiff and sore and getting ready to die. I look at him with love and realize, so am I.” I had a champion stallion who was suffering terribly. He was about to be put down by the veterinarians. We dug a grave for him and led him to it. As we did, a younger horse came to the fence to watch. The stallion, in a final act of noble defiance, reared up on his bandaged legs and neighed, frightening away the other horses. Seconds after the veterinarian gave him the drug he collapsed into the hole. The life force that had been in him seconds before was gone. It is unimaginable. I can’t understand, no one can understand, what that force is. In one second there is this energy, life, intelligence, and glamour, there is knowledge and history; and in the next second you are in the earth, as dead as the soil in which you are buried. It happens in an instant. What is that magical thing that made the difference between Starbuck being alive on the kitchen floor and seconds later dead in my arms? What is that? What is that miracle that fires your engine? We don’t know what that life force is. What is it that makes the cells cease to function? We think it might be amino acids, but it might just as easily be sunlight or thunder for all we know. That is what has been worshipped as long as rational mankind has existed.
The playwright Robert Anderson wrote so accurately in I Never Sang for My Father: “Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor’s mind toward some final resolution,
some clear meaning, which it perhaps never finds.” But the one thing that the death of a loved one or even a beloved pet does not prepare you for is your own death.
I find it very difficult to grasp the reality that I am going to die. Many other people around me have died. But me? It seems impossible that all of this that I have built around me will no longer have any meaning to me. The entire concept of some form of life after death exists because the concept of a final ending is beyond anything we can comprehend. That’s one reason we appreciate spirit and ghost stories, as those exist as a form between the life we live on Earth and whatever it is that comes next. That’s a reason so many of us respond to stories of out-of-body experiences or people coming back from “the light.” They at least hint at the possibility there is more than this life.
I’ve wondered about that; I’ve wondered about it a lot. Where does that life force go? What happens to it? It is matter, and the greatest minds tell us matter cannot be made or lost. So that life force cannot possibly be lost into the universe of inanimate matter. But where does it go? What form does it take?
As far as the afterlife proposed by religions, I don’t believe there is any form of pearly gates waiting to welcome me, nor do I believe there is a horned creature with a pitchfork inviting me to spend eternity with him. I wish I did. But it defies logic. When I meet my parents, will they be their younger selves and I won’t recognize them? I have been married several times; which wife do I spend eternity with? What about the people I’ve fought with? Will they be there and finally realize I was right?
So I don’t accept the vision of angels with wings and an unlimited buffet, although I am heartened by the possibilities. It is absurd to believe we know the answer. We know so little about our world. We don’t have a clue how matter was formed, or why. It is obviously beyond our tiny imaginations at this point. During a discussion about the possibility of a Divine presence we were having, a friend of mine quoted a phrase: “The eyes cannot see what the mind cannot encompass.”
I responded, “What about discovery?” Discovering something means it wasn’t known before you discovered it. There is a legend that claims when Columbus’s ships sailed to the Americas the Indians didn’t see his ships because they couldn’t imagine such things existed. Applying that to the concept of a Divine Being doesn’t make sense to me. That within the minutia of our logic a being is watching over the billions of our lives?
Conversely, there have been so many fortuitous events in my life that sometimes it is difficult to believe there is not some greater plan.
I want to believe there is more to come. From that night as a camper when I was completely overwhelmed by the vastness of the universe, I have never lost my awe for the majesty of creation. We have no idea what’s out there; on a regular basis astrophysicists discover things they can’t explain. Why is the universe expanding rather than contracting? What is light? What is a photon of light? I can spout these terms, but I don’t know what they mean. Even those things we now believe in many cases will be modified: We know with great certainty the speed of light and that will never change, but who knows?
The fact that we know so little encourages me. It is my feeling that without question there are multiple life-forms, far more than we now comprehend. I don’t mean Klingons, but I have seen that forms of life have filled every available niche. Scientists have found unique life forms able to survive at seven hundred degrees at the bottoms of the oceans and under the ice in the Arctic cold. Life is energetic and prolific. There is so much we can’t explain in scientific terms right in front of us that the possibility that there is more to existence can’t be ignored.
But death, as we understand it, is the ultimate stop sign. It means you can go no further along this road. There is no exit; there isn’t even a roundabout. I fear it. Whatever else there might be, this beautiful present will be gone, and I am loving every second I can hold on to my life. The fact that I will no longer be has great tragic overtones to me. I will never see my wife and my children, all of the wonderful things that are part of my life, again. In 2017, two of my dogs whom I loved so dearly died. It seemed to me they were just pups and then they became limp bodies that I buried in my backyard. They were here, and then gone forever. I am frightened practically to death by the inevitability of death.
There are many people who find solace in their religion. I envy my religious friends who believe in the afterlife. I have seen that people who believe in their ideology with the totality of their being, with absolute faith, without skepticism, embrace the possibility of death because they accept without doubt that this is just a beginning. It is simply, if you truly believe, your religion allows you to accept unanswerable questions. It provides some semblance of peace in the face of great tragedy. In fact, for that true believer, their faith does give them most of what they expect from it. I remember when Liz’s mother died, Liz went to the hospital. While she was there a woman came up to her and said, “I deal in life-ending care at a hospice. And I can tell you that right now your grandmother is hovering over you.” In an odd way, that provided great comfort for Liz at a terrible time.
A member of my family became a born-again Christian. I didn’t understand it. She had graduated from a fine university and was a very intelligent person. Yet she was teaching her children that the earth was five thousand years old, that the Bible is literally the word of God, and that human beings emerged as we are today rather than having evolved. I tried to talk to her; I asked if it was possible that evolution was the way God worked. But she was not in a place to listen. That was difficult for me, but she had found a certain peace by giving herself over to that. She had found a form that answered all her questions and fulfilled her needs and fears.
I can’t go there. I can’t believe that after death there is some form of life similar to what we are living. Logic suggests that our energy, our matter, assumes another shape. That makes the most sense to me, although it lacks the level of grandeur that the universe has shown to us. I would love to explain the mysteries of the world by referring to the hand of God, but there is nothing that comforting for me out there, that the amazing things that have happened to me in my life have been the result of Divine Intervention, but I am stuck with the belief that any answers will be found in science, in the laws of quantum physics that we haven’t yet begun to understand.
To me, the essence of religion is the respect it pays to nature and the mysteries of the universe. If you light a candle and say a prayer you are respecting that mystery. The concept of God is a large one. But I think it refers more to the mystery than the embodiment of a single entity. What I admire most about certain religions is the belief that every human being is unique and needs to be treated with respect. The problem, for me at least, isn’t the religions themselves but rather how they are taken over by people who often use them for their own advancement.
In too many instances religion is used to manipulate people, to take from them rather than give to them, as an excuse to further the agenda of people seeking power. It is a cliché, but more wars have been fought in the name of God, a whole variety of Gods, than for any other reason. The hypocrisy in many instances has always amazed me: “We are a peaceful religion fighting wars to bring peace to people who worship a different God.” Explain that to me?
I did have the semblance of a religious upbringing. I had a bar mitzvah. My devout Uncle Louie told me if I wore a tefillin, a box containing fragments of the Torah affixed to your arm with leather straps, for a year he would give me a $50 bond. I agreed to try. What I remember most about that was how harsh the leather straps were. The edges cut into my skin and it was exceedingly uncomfortable. I remember wondering why they didn’t use deerskin, which was soft, rather than rough leather. I never earned that bond. In fact, if anything, this experience helped break whatever bonds to religion that I might have had. So I haven’t found solace by turning to religion. But I am hedging my bets. A friend of mine, who believes as I do, is married to a religious wom
an. And when he expresses his doubt about an afterlife, she tells him he will regret it: “After you die, when someone says to you—”
He stops her right there. “If I’m dead and someone says anything to me, I’m in!”
What I do believe, based on the little that I know, is that all of us are made of the same elements that comprise the universe. We are all one thing; when I stand outside and consider the vastness of the sky and feel my spirit and my soul, my electrical being going out into the universe, that becomes clear to me. When we disappear we become stardust, and stardust is what coagulates and forms the stars, and that has been going on for billions of years. It is a continuous flux of energy into matter and back into energy and we are part of it. That stardust is us. We are all part of the same thing: Our differences, whether it is our DNA or our chosen religion, are far more alike than they are dissimilar. There is something magical going on. Wise men have felt this for almost the entire history of mankind and been trying to put it into words, and those words eventually evolved into the body of wonder we call religion. While at the same time other great men have been probing and testing and speculating and the body of knowledge they amassed is science.
I look back at all the civilizations that tried to conquer the known world and subject the inhabitants to their rule. That has been a dream throughout recorded history—and in every instance it eventually has faded into nothing. All that vanity, and then it is gone, and then history repeats itself. For a time it seems so complicated, but in fact it is so ridiculous. Nothing lasts. Nothing.
Live Long and . . . Page 15