DEATH BECOMES US

Photo by Twist/Find a Grave

By ANDREW SELSKY

Death is an everyday affair. It’s all around us: In the news headlines, in losses your friends have incurred, for example when an aging parent dies. Sometimes, and in developed countries this is rare, someone close to us is taken “before their time.” And then it becomes shocking, and personal.

Some 8 billion human beings currently inhabit the Earth.

Guess how many have died before us, passing from this realm into a different one (depending upon your religion, if you follow one) or passing into oblivion, into nothingness?

The answer is, and this number is far higher than I would have guessed, 109 billion.

109 BILLION people, over the course of 192,000 years. That’s roughly 14 times the number of people who walk the Earth today.

So it’s an everyday affair. Every year, 56 million people die. It should be routine, but it’s not. A life extinguished means the threads that tie a person to so many other people are reduced to cinders, leaving only memories, with no more to be formed.

I think what we, as a species, fear the most is a lingering death from disease. Or, in my case after having experienced some earthquakes,being trapped in a collapsed building with no space to even move. Trapped, and with no chance of rescue coming.

A quick death is preferred. And only after we’ve lived our expected life span.

But if a person dies long before then, it’s a life unlived. Those of us who carry on with living mourn and regret that the prematurely deceased will never get to experience a career, marriage, children, grandchildren, nor to explore different parts of our planet.

My schoolmate Eric Schram died at age 20, in Munich, in what was then West Germany. He and I had attended the University of Maryland, Munich campus, in the 1973–4 academic year. He was a loud, brassy character. A big personality. Hair down to his shoulders, slightly overweight. He had a wild streak. I remember he once related how he had thrown up in a toilet and all this red gushed out of his mouth. He thought he was dying from some drugs he had taken. Then he remembered, as he told the story with a laugh, that he had eaten pasta for dinner. It wasn’t blood he was expelling, but tomato sauce.

But drugs cost him. He was expelled from the university for possession. Instead of going back to his parents in Turkey, where his father worked for the CIA, Eric stayed in Munich during the summer of 1974.

I went back to Paris, where my own family was stationed, and got a summer job at the U.S. Embassy before transferring to a university in the United States for my sophomore year. A friend from Munich, Jim Klinger, called me on the phone one day.

“Did you hear that Eric died,” Jim asked.

Thoughts quickly flashed through my mind as I absorbed the shock of this news. How? I thought, but did not say: Was it a heroin overdose?

“What happened?” I asked.

“He drowned in Munich, trying to save a girl whose boat had capsized.”

I felt some relief that my instinctive thought was wrong, and that Eric’s death had not been a waste. He had died a heroic death, trying to save someone else. Details are sketchy, but Eric might have saved one person and gone back to help another, and both he and the second person drowned. An internet search for newspaper articles about the incident turned up nothing.

I thought of this the other day, because I had a dream in which I was reunited with another former student. In the dream, I told him I had visited with Eric the previous summer, impossible since he died 50 years ago.

Even after all this time, Eric Schram — who wasn’t able to start a career, a family and live a full life — lives on in the memory of people who knew him, and even those who didn’t. After my dream, I mentioned him in an alumni Facebook group.

Lynette Juenke, who attended the university years after we did, said she didn’t know Eric but that the fatal incident was highlighted in class.

“My Psychology Prof used that event as an example of how crowds react to emergencies, questioning why in a park full of people only one person reacted and everybody else just watched,” Lynette wrote.

“Had a hellava sense of humor,” said Phil Roy, who lived down the hall in Perry Hall, our dorm.

I can’t imagine the grief Eric’s parents had felt. They’re now buried beside him in Queen of Heaven Catholic Cemetery in McMurray, Pennsylvania, south of Pittsburgh. They outlived him by more than three decades.

I’ve been thinking about death also because two people I know are terminally ill. Recently, they went from being apparently healthy to knowing they don’t have long to live. It happened in a flash, like a tarot reader reaching out to a card, flipping it over, and the dreaded death card appearing. Instead, it was doctors delivering the grim news, not a soothsayer.

For privacy, I won’t say who these two people are. They’re both senior citizens, but in these times, life expectancy in America is 75 years for men and 80 for women — a good decade or a decade-and-a-half beyond the age of 62 or 65 when one becomes a “senior citizen.” These two people theoretically had years left to enjoy life.

That it will be cut short is crushingly awful and scary, but this also places a terrible burden on their loved ones. All of a sudden, they face the cold, hard fact that the person they have built their lives around will be gone.

All we can do is try to be there for them, but their absence will create a hole that will never be completely filled.

There shouldn’t be anything to fear when death comes. Billions and billions of people have died before us, and no one has ever come back to file a complaint.

The ride, if there is one, might even be enjoyable. A few people who have had near death experiences have described flying above a hospital gurney and looking down where their body lay, or described drifting toward an ethereal light.

We are built of stardust and, as the Book of Common Prayer says, to dust we shall return.