The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 (47 page)

Like many years before, she could not lie.

"The Bible tells us that animals don't have souls," she replied. Perhaps seeing my devastation, she added, "But it also says that God knows when even the smallest sparrow falls."

 

According to Alan F. Segal, in
Life After Death,
my position is not unique: more Americans believe in an afterlife than in God himself. Furthermore, the General Social Survey he cites, conducted by the National Opinion Research Center, shows that Jewish belief in an afterlife has jumped from 17 percent (as recorded by those born between 1900 and 1910) to 74 percent (as recorded by those born after 1970). Segal's hypothesis, which is that a culture's conception of the afterlife reveals what that culture most values as a society, fits right in with these statistics. Americans define themselves as defenders of freedom and individual rights. We believe we should be happy, wealthy, and healthy all the time. Why, then, even after giving up God himself, or even when subscribing to a religion that doesn't pay much attention to the afterlife, would we consent to imprison ourselves with mortality? Why would we give up our individual right to eternal life?

Paul Bloom would attribute my tendency to believe in life after death simply to being human. Humans, Bloom maintains, seem to be born already believing in an afterlife. In his essay "Is God an Accident?" published in
The Atlantic
in December 2005, he argues that humans are natural dualists. He does not mean that we are born with a Zoroastrian belief in the opposing forces of good and evil, but that we hold two operating systems in our minds—one with expectations for physical objects (things fall down, not up) and another with expectations for psychological and/or social beings (people make friends with people who help them, not people who hurt them). These expectations are not learned but built-in and can be observed in babies as young as six months old. These two distinct, implicit systems cause us to conceptualize two possible states of being in the universe: soulless bodies and, no less possible, just the opposite—bodiless souls. The two systems are separate. Therefore, when a human's body dies, humans are predisposed to believe that the soul does not, necessarily, die with it. Bloom cites a supporting study by the psychologists Jesse Bering and David Bjorklund, in which children who were told a story about a mouse that was eaten by an alligator rightfully believed that the mouse's ears no longer worked after death and that the mouse would never need to use the bathroom again. But more than half of them believed the mouse would still feel hungry, think thoughts, and desire things. Children, more so even than adults, seem to perceive psychological properties as existing in a realm outside the body and therefore believe these properties exempt from death. According to Bloom, "The notion that life after death is possible is not learned at all. It is a by-product of how we naturally think about the world."

I want my mother to read Bloom's essay. I'm not sure why. Throughout her childhood my mother walked of her own volition up the hill from her house to go to the little church across from the junkyard. Her mother and sister went; her father and much younger brother did not. When she was nine or ten she was chosen by Mrs. Myrtle, the church organist, to receive free piano lessons. My mother had an old upright piano in her family's unheated front room. Some of the keys did not play, so the ramshackle instrument was eventually chopped up for firewood. Then she had to practice at Mrs. Myrtle's, and was sometimes politely sent home when she played too long. My mother has been the volunteer organist at Patapsco United Methodist Church for more than thirty years.

She is sixty-two years old. Why, at this late stage, do I want to push Bloom's essay into the face of her contentment? Why does it feel slightly cruel, as though I am a bully, and why do I want to do it anyway?

I bring "Is God an Accident?" with me during a summer visit. The first page has been somehow lost on the plane and I have to make a special trip to the local library to download and print out another copy. I'm hesitant to give my mother the essay, but when I find her one afternoon on the couch preparing for her Bible study—they've reread the entire book of Genesis, she says—it feels like an open invitation. She puts the essay to the side to read later, and the discussion that ensues between us is as unfulfilling, as inconclusive, as this discussion is everywhere—in high school biology classrooms; in rural, local papers' letters to the editor. It ends only with her decreeing, exasperated, "Your faith is stronger than mine." She does not mean my faith in Natural Selection, but my faith in God. She believes, perhaps counterintuitively, that all of my research and questions indicate some sort of allegiance to the religion I was raised with, or, at the very least, an inability to simply cast it aside.

My mother could live for forty more years, another entire life, longer than my own life has been so far. Or she could be dead in just eight years, at seventy, before her youngest grandchild reaches high school, possibly before she meets any child of mine. The current life expectancy for American women lies somewhere in the middle of that. Of course I know I could die in the next fifteen minutes from a brain aneurysm or be murdered by the man tuning my piano, but those are exceptions, and each would be a shock. If I were certain of the afterlife, what should not be a shock, what should be normal, is this:
our mothers are going to die, and for a while we are going to have to live without them.
But if I abandon my belief in life after death, am I putting my mother to rest before I really have to?

 

My mother tells me about an e-mail she sent to another of my nieces, Julie, who is seventeen. Julie had just lost her guinea pig, Charlie, a faithful pet for seven years. Twice in the last month she had found him lying in his cage, with his neck askew, unable to move. The second time, he died the next morning.

My mother wrote to Julie that she would never forget her cutting up vegetables for Charlie, making his daily salad.
He had a good life,
she wrote,
and you just might see him again one day.

I can't help but notice the difference between my mother's unsolicited response to the death of Charlie and her answer to my direct question years ago of whether my escaped and presumed-dead parakeet would eventually make it to heaven. Perhaps, with age, my mother's views have softened a bit. Honesty has become less important than comfort. What she would like to believe has superseded what she once took as fact. We come to see that death is less about losing the self than about losing what was built between selves when they were alive. When she dies, my mother will be in a casket on the hill outside Patapsco United Methodist Church. The question I would like to ask is: Will we find each other again? But that is not it at all. Rather, I must find a way to live now knowing that one day we will no longer be mother and daughter.

 

Now that I have discovered the ichneumon nursery standing in my woods, I will revisit it often. In spring I want to see the newly metamorphosed wasps born from the horntail's tunnels, these burrows that double as grave and womb. I'd like to see how many will emerge, how big they are, how long they rest on the dying tree before their first, seraphic flight. I'd like to search for whether there is any evidence of the horntail larva that nourished them—an exoskeleton, perhaps—or whether the larva is now present somehow only in the new body it has helped to form. All winter I will anticipate the decaying oak's promise: the giant ichneumon wasps' emergence.

There is life, it seems, after death—but it may be only here on earth. Nature provides too many metaphors for us to so easily give up on this idea. It pummels us with them season after season, and has done the same to others, I suppose, for thousands of years, playing on the human mind's ability to compare unlike things in its search for truth. I once shook a nuthatch from torpor on the side of a red pine, where it had stood unmoving, face-down—as only its kind can—all through my breakfast after a night of below-zero weather. I lifted a mourning dove, seemingly frozen into my cross-country ski trail during a surprise snow squall, in my own two palms, from which it flapped as if from Noah's hands. In my parents' woods, where my mother pitched a flower left from her mother's funeral, a patch of daffodils came up the next year—and has come up every year since—on its own, through a foot of dry leaf litter, shaded and unwatered. And there is the freezing and thawing of wood frogs in northern climes; the hibernation of chipmunks and groundhogs and jumping mice; the estivation of turtles in summer; metamorphoses of all kinds, but in particular the monarch butterfly (what Sunday school classroom has not used this metaphor at Easter?); the dormancy of winter trees; the phases of the moon; the seasons themselves; sleeping and waking; monthly bleeding; and, though it is too early to remember, probably birth even.

This is what it comes down to. My mother, in giving me life after birth, also engendered in me the idea of God, and the unstoppable desire for life after death. We live on an earth where it seems nearly impossible for humans to have ever avoided inventing heaven, an earth that throws things back at us so reliably it is hard not to imagine that one day we will be resurrected, too, and that we will live forever.
Sign here if you exist,
I once wrote, but the question of whether God exists is really a question of whether
we
do. Without God and the promise of resurrection, you become extremely short-lived. Or the other option: you live forever, but what you currently perceive as yourself is a mere phase, a single facet: once oak, now horntail, soon-to-be ichneumon.

What type of afterlife do I need to survive—not so much in the next life, I realize now, but to get me through this one? I got my elements from stars: mass from water, muscles from beans, thoughts from fish and olives. When Edward Abbey died, his body was buried in nothing more than an old sleeping bag in the southern Arizona desert. He said, "If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture—that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves." Abbey is right. Your trillions of cells—only 10 percent of which, remember, were yours anyway—will become parts of trillions of things. And even the 10 percent wasn't really yours to begin with. You were only borrowed. We've had it backward all along: the body is immortal—it is the soul that dies.

FROM
The New Yorker

I
T IS WITH OUR FACES
that we face the world, from the moment of birth to the moment of death. Our age and our gender are printed on our faces. Our emotions, the open and instinctive emotions that Darwin wrote about as well as the hidden or re-pressed ones that Freud wrote about, are displayed on our faces, along with our thoughts and intentions. Though we may admire arms and legs, breasts and buttocks, it is the face, first and last, that is judged "beautiful" in an aesthetic sense, "fine" or "distinguished" in a moral or intellectual sense. And, crucially, it is by our faces that we can be recognized as individuals. Our faces bear the stamp of our experiences and our character; at forty, it is said, a man has the face he deserves.

At two and a half months, babies respond to smiling faces by smiling back. "As the child smiles," Everett Ellinwood writes, "it usually engages the adult human to interact with him—to smile, to talk, to hold—in other words, to initiate the processes of socialization ... The reciprocal understanding mother-child relationship is possible only because of the continual dialogue between faces." The face, psychoanalysts consider, is the first object to acquire visual meaning and significance. But are faces in a special category as far as the nervous system is concerned?

I have had difficulty recognizing faces for as long as I can remember. I did not think too much about this as a child, but by the time I was a teenager, in a new school, it was often a cause of embarrassment. My frequent inability to recognize schoolmates would cause bewilderment and sometimes offense—it did not occur to them (why should it?) that I had a perceptual problem. I usually recognized close friends without much difficulty, especially my two best friends, Eric Korn and Jonathan Miller. But this was partly because I identified particular features: Eric had heavy eyebrows and thick spectacles, and Jonathan was tall and gangly, with a mop of red hair. Jonathan was a keen observer of postures, gestures, and facial expressions, and seemingly never forgot a face. A decade later, when we were looking at old school photographs, he still recognized literally hundreds of our schoolmates, while I could not identify a single one.

It was not just faces. When I went for a walk or a bicycle ride, I would have to follow exactly the same route, knowing that if I deviated even slightly I would be instantly and hopelessly lost. I wanted to be adventurous, to go to exotic places—but I could do this only if I bicycled with a friend.

At the age of seventy-seven, despite a lifetime of trying to compensate, I have no less trouble with faces and places. I am particularly thrown if I see people out of context, even if I have been with them five minutes before. This happened one morning just after an appointment with my psychiatrist. (I had been seeing him twice weekly for several years at this point.) A few minutes after I left his office, I encountered a soberly dressed man who greeted me in the lobby of the building. I was puzzled as to why this stranger seemed to know me, until the doorman greeted him by name—it was, of course, my analyst. (This failure to recognize him came up as a topic in our next session; I think that he did not entirely believe me when I maintained that it had a neurological basis rather than a psychiatric one.)

A few months later, my nephew Jonathan Sacks came for a visit. We went for a walk—I lived in Mount Vernon, New York, at the time—and it started raining. "We had better get back," Jonathan said, but I couldn't find my house or my street. After two hours of walking around, during which we both got thoroughly soaked, I heard a shout. It was my landlord; he said that he had seen me pass the house three or four times, apparently failing to recognize it.