Mid-Shore Life

By Dwayne Eutsey

As Halloween approaches and autumn colorfully marks the year’s demise, two recent items in the news reminded me of our culture’s generally paradoxical view of death. At the risk of oversimplifying it, it seems to me the two main ways we try to make sense of what happens when we die involve either superstitions or science.  

On the superstitious side, for example, Rolling Stone reports that researchers claim a photo of Jim Morrison’s ghost haunting his gravesite is “unexplainable.” Although it isn’t clear who these researchers are or how they reached their conclusion, the article notes that they believe the photo of the dead rock-and-roll legend’s apparition “was in no way manipulated, and also rule out any possibility that it’s merely a trick of the light.”

http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/10/16/unexplainable-photo-snapped-at-jim-morrisons-grave/

On the scientific side, CNN ran a story about a neurological researcher who says that cryptic near-death experiences (NDEs) are actually quite explainable.

Dr. Kevin Nelson asserts “that near-death experiences are part of the dream mechanism” the brain uses to cope with a life-threatening crisis. He goes on to say, “The most common cause of near-death experience in my research group is fainting. Upwards of 100 million Americans have fainted. That means probably tens of millions of Americans have had these unusual experiences.”

http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/10/16/cheating.near.death/index.html

Personally, I don’t have a lot of faith in either view represented in these articles. The skeptic in me finds ghost sightings like the Morrison photo dubious (the “researchers” are selling a book of ghostly images, after all), while cold clinical attempts to explain phenomena like NDEs seem sterile and too narrowly focused to me. As Shakespeare might have said to the neurologist, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Dr. Nelson, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Many people who have had an NDE would probably agree with the Bard. They insist that there is an ineffable reality beyond this mortal realm. “I know I went someplace else,” Laura Geraghty, who died for nearly an hour last April, says in the CNN article. “I know I went someplace else other than here.”

I’m not sure what happens to us when we die, whether we go “someplace other than here” or not. However, I do believe that you don’t have to go anywhere else but here to experience something profound and larger than ourselves.

Simply observing the beauty of the nature’s near-death experience unfolding around us here on the Mid-Shore can give me that experience. Ghost sightings can’t compare with the haunting, earthly palette of red, yellow, orange, green, and brown trees beneath a graying sky. Science falls short of explaining the feeling I have when I see one of fall’s apocalyptic sunsets quietly erupting on the horizon of a barren cornfield.

In such moments a hint of the eternal can creep in as it occurs to me that this natural cycle was happening long before I was here…and long after I’m gone it will continue to go on.

There’s also the awareness that although our landscape is succumbing to the cold and dark of winter, the promise of new life re-emerging in the spring is ever present. Perhaps nature, in its quiet way, is letting us know that such a promise awaits us, too.

That possibility is not as intriguing as a ghost sighting or as quantifiable as a research study. But the philosophies we dream up to figure out life's most daunting questions often pale beside the subtle answers that heaven and earth give us rooted and rustling out there among all those beautiful, multihued trees.