Religion

NINE Why I Am Not

Afraid to Die

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A FRIEND of mine, a clergyman I admire, turned to me once with a problem. A member of his congregation, a forty-two-year-old doctor, was hospitalized with an in- operable brain tumor. My friend said to me, "I don't know why, but I just can't bring myself to visit him. I like him, I care about him, I know how much my visits mean to him, but I keep finding reasons not to go and see him, and it bothers me." I told him, "I think I understand why you do that. I suspect that you see too much of yourself in him. Seeing him ill and dying makes you think that a year from now, it could be you in that situation, and you can't handle that. I would guess that you are afraid of dying-it's nothing to be ashamed of; lots of people are---and that is why seeing someone your own age dying is so hard for you to deal with. "

"How do you get over the fear of dying?" he asked me. 1 told him that I was not ready to die, that I hoped to live ~or many more years, but that I was not afrai_d of dy!ng

1 ecause I felt satisfied with what I had done with my _hfe. ~ad the sense that I had not wasted it, that I had hved

With int · · egnty, had done my best, and had an impact on

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eople which would outlast me. I poi~ted out to him that ~e could certai nly say the same thmgs about himself about his life and his work, th at he had already reached the level of living humanely . It is only when you are no lo nger afraid to die that you can say that you are truly alive .

I believe th at it is not dying that people are afraid of. Something else, something more unsettling and more tragic than dying frightens us . We are afraid of never having lived, of coming to the end of our days with the sense that we were never really alive, that we never figured out what life was for .

Of all the fears that haunt us, from fear of the dark when we are young to fear of snakes and high places, there is nothing to compare to the fear that we may have wasted our lives with nothing to show for it. I have attended many people at the end of their lives. Most of them wanted to live longer if they could. They did not want to leave their loved ones. But they were not afraid of death because they knew that they had had time to live and they had used that time well. Virtually the only people I have known who were afraid of dying were people who thought that they had wasted their lives. They would pray that if God would only give them another few years, they would use them more wisely than they had used all the years up till then . I can think of no punishment for a wasted life more fright- en ing than that, and no reward for a life well lived more grati fyi ng than the sense that you accepted the challenge to be human and were up to it.

There is a story told of a man who died after having led a thoroughly selfi sh, immoral life. Moments later, he fo und himself in a world of bright sunli ght, soft music, and fig ures all dressed in white. " Bo y, I never expected this ," 156

.. Why I Am Not Afraid to Die

'd to himself. "I guess God has a soft spot in His heart he sat H d ti . h ' t for a clever rascal like me." e turne to a_ gure m a w I e robe and said, "Buddy, I've got something to celebrate. Can I buy you a drink?" The figure answered, "If you mean alcoholic beverages, we don't have any of that around here." "No booze, huh? Well then, what a.?~.u'. a game of cards? Pinochle, draw poker, you name ti. I m sorry but we don't gamble here either." "Well, what do you do all day?" the man asked . "We read the psalms a lot. There is a Bible class every morning and a prayer circle in the afternoon ." "Psalms! Bible study all day long! Boy, I'll tell you-heaven isn't what it' s cracked up to be." At which point the figure in white smiled and said, "I see that you don't understand . We're in heaven; you're in hell."

Heaven, the story suggests, is having learned to do and enjoy the things that make us human, the things that only human beings can do. And by contrast, the worst kind of hell I can imagine is not fire and brimstone and little red figures with pitchforks. The worst hell is the realization that you could have been a real human being, you could have been a mensch, and now it's too late. You could have known the satisfaction of caring for another person, of being generous and truthful and loyal, of having devel- oped your mind and your heart, of controlling your in- stincts instead of letting them control you, and you never did it.

"Who sha ll ascend into the mountain of the Lord and who shall stand in His holy place? One who had clean hands and a pure heart. " (Psalm 24:3--4) "Ascending the mountain of the Lord" doesn't necessarily mean going to heaven after you die, nor need it refer to going to church or syna gogue (though the original reference in the psalm

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was probably to visiting the Temple of Jerusalem). Cli b ing the mountain of the Lord can mean growing to 7 1 humanity in this life, using y~ur years well, living "clean hands and a pure heart, so that even while you alive, you will have that feeling of "standing in His h:~; pl ace." ~hen you have done that, even the prospect of death will hold no terror for you.

Many years ago, I saw a scene from a play on television, and I have never forgotten 11. A young man and a youn wom~n arc standing a~ the railing_ of an_ oc~an liner. The~ have Just gotten ma_med, and this cru1~e 1s their honey. moon. They are talk.mg about how fulfillin g their love and marriage have been for them, even beyond their expecta- tions. The young man says, "If I were to die tomorrow I would feel that my life had been full because I hav~ known your love." His bride says, "Yes, I feel the same way." They kiss and move away fro m the rail, and now the audience can see the name of the ship on a life pre- server: TITAN IC.

If people in biblical times grew old at about the same rate that we do today (and there is reason to believe that they did; the ninetieth psalm says the average person lives to age "threescore and ten," that is, about age seventy, and the exceptional person to age eighty), then I can picture Ecclesiastes as a man in his mid- to late forties, perhaps close to fifty. He is at about the same point in his life that I am in mine. And he is beginning to be afraid that he is running out of time. The years ahead are almost certainly fewer than the years behind, and he still is not sure that he has done any thing meaningful with his life. He may be looking back with regret on wasted times and wasted op· portunities.

I sometimes think of this as the "instant coffee" theory

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of life. When you open a jar of instant coffee, you dole it tin generous, heaping spoonfuls, because after all you

~°ve a whole full jar of it and you see that you are only :ing a little at a time. By the ti me you get down toward

~he bottom of the jar, you realize that you don 't have all that much left, and your portions are more carefully mea- sured. You reach after every last grain in the corne r of the jar. I think we tend to treat time that way. Young people think that they will live forever. They assume that they have all the time in the world. They can afford to "invest" their time in activities that will not pay dividends until well into the future. They take entry-level jobs and low- paying apprenticeships as a foothold in th e working world. They date people they know they will not marry because they are developing the skills of relating to an- other person.

But as we get older, halfway down the coffee jar, we learn not to be so casual with our time because we under- stand that it will not last forever. We stop asking the young person's questions-How high will I rise? How far will I get?-questions which are answered in terms of success and competition, and we start asking the questions which haunted the author of Ecclesiastes-What will I have accomplished? What difference will I have made? What will be left of me when my time is over?-questions which are answered on the basis of things shared with other people. It is a sign of maturity when we stop asking, What does life have in store fo r me? and start asking, What am I doing with my life?

Some examples of that process at work: When I turned forty-five, I cut back on giving sermons

and teaching classes and began to write books, as a way of bri nging my ideas to people even when I was not physi-"' a

WHEN ALL YOU' VE EVER WANTED ISN'T E NOUGH

cally present with the_m. Till then, I had dealt in spoken wo rds, and words vamsh as soon as you utter them. With - out r~izing it, I had begun to feel the need to express myself m a more permanent medium.

A friend of mine who owns a gas sta tio n, when he wa in his early forties, changed the name of his station fro s "Maple Street Garage" to "Al Jones' Garage." Like m rn he responded to middle age by wanting to see his name,

. h ' e wntten on somet mg permanent, not only in spoken words .

In January of 1984, Senator Paul Tsongas of my home state of Massachusetts announced that he would retire from the Senate and not stand for reelec tion that year. Tsongas was a rising star, an overwhelming fa vorite to be reelected, frequently mentioned as a potential candidate for Vice President or even President. A few weeks befo re his announcement, he had learned that he had a fo rm of lymphatic cancer whic h could not be cured but could be treated and would probably not affect his physical abilities or his life expectancy . The illness did not force Paul Tson- gas out of the Senate, but it did fo rce him to confront the fact that he would not be around foreve r . He would not be able to do everything he might want to, so what were the things that he most wanted to do in t he limited time that he had? Most of us manage to avoid that question; Paul Tsongas , waiting for word from his doctor, had to face up to it. He decided that what he wanted most in life, what he would not give up ifhe could not have everything, was being with his family and watching his children grow up. He wo uld rather do that than shape the co un try's laws or get his name in the history books. He unders tood tha t if he was to ha ve any sort of immo rt ality, any sort of life

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be ond his years on earth, it would be rooted in that, not . yhis legislative accomplishments. 10

After he made his decision known, a frie nd wrote to congratulate him on having his priorities straight, adding, "Nobody on his deathbed ever said, 'I wish I had spent more time on my business.' " And of course Ecclesiastes, who was haunted by the same fear that there would not be enough time to do it all, said it first : " Go cat you r bread in gladness and drink your wine in joy ... Enjoy happiness with a woman you love all the fleeti ng days of life that have been granted you .. . " Paul Tsongas was for ty -three years old when he made his decision.

If I were afraid of dying because I realized statistically !hat my life migh t well be two-thirds over and because I saw more people my age dying sudd enly, I would have to live out my remaining years in fear and apprehension. As the author of the Twenty-thi rd Psalm und erstood so many years ago, God does not redeem us from death. We will all die one day . But He redeems us from the shadow of death, from letting ou r lives be paralyzed by the fear of death. He hel ps us prevent death from casti ng its shadow over the years we do have to live.

The philosoph er Horace Kallen marked his seven ty- lh ird birthday by wr iting, "There are persons who shape th eir lives by the fea r of death, and persons who shape !heir lives by the joy and satisfaction of life. The former live dying; the latter die living. I know that fate may stop me tomorrow, but death is an irrelevant contingency. Whenever it comes, I intend to die livi ng ."

I have no fear of death because I feel that I have lived. I have loved and I have been loved. I have been challenge~ in my personal and professional life an d have managed , tf

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no~ a pc~ect score, at least a passing grade an a little bit better than that. I have left d Perhaps

d I h my mark on an ave come to a point in life where I no 1 ?Cople to leave my mark on people I can look , onger need

ct f 1·, . ,orward to th 1 a o my 11e, however long or short it ma . c ast knowledge that I have finally figured out J be, in the how to handle life. I walk unafraid throu : to I am and the shadow, not only because God . _g he Valley of bcca H h is with me no b

use e as guided me to this point Th . w ut to prevent dying. But the cure for the i e~e is no way make sure that you have lived. ear o death is to

In the previous chapter we saw Ee 1 . 1

. ' c es1astes comet h con: us1on that Senator Tsongas did. A rn ° t e

10g IS achieved not by a few great im rta1 I c of mean. a lot of little ones. The challenge' is n:: t _deeds but by level of everyday life by O nsc above the hall

some superhuman eft c cngc is to find something truly hum d ort. The of our r Wh an to o every day

ives. en you realize that you d h . for evcrythin h O not ave time

g, w en you find out that t · everything into a twenty-four-hour day learymg to cram leaves the thi ves you tired 1 ngs you do incomplete and half-baked cl caves the people you share life wi•h feeling that y , an

stop moving 1 · ou never what arc the ong eno~gh for them to get to know you, arc th thin nonnegotiable elements of your life? What can f~l th gs you absolutely must have and do so that you In our exp;~r~;i~n~a:; :cd ~our life and not waste~ it? we have identified h desiastes and of our own hves,

t ree thmgs:

Belong to people. Accept pain as part of your life Know that you have made a difference.

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We need to belong intimately to a few people who are pcr111anent elements in our lives. Having a lot of casual acquaintances to talk sports or recipes with is no substi- tute . Just as "one chimpanzee is no chimpanzee," one human being cannot be completely and authentically human without ongoing relationships with a few people. And they have to be people with whom we share our whole lives, not just a fraction of our time and ourselves.

That is the reason, I suspect, why women tend to sur- vive the emotional trauma of divorce or widowhood better than men do. Women tend to have close friend s, people with whom they share their whole selves . Men tend to have acquaintances, business associates, people to bowl or carpool with, but people with whom they share only a part of themselves, not their whole selves.

When my previous book became a best-seller, I had the opportunity to give up the rabbinate and become a full- time writer and lecturer. It offered fame, travel, and more money for less emotionally demanding work. I chose to remain in my congregation, in part because being a rabbi is who I am, but in large measure because I intuitively realized that I needed to have the same people in my life on an ongoing basis. As a lecturer, I would be introduced to a lot of people I would never see again. I would give my talk , receive their applause, and leave town. If I am an effective speaker, I might say something which would re- main with them, something which they would find helpful over the years. But I would not have a close, co ntinuing relationship with any of them. As a congregational rabbi, I officiate at weddings of young women whom I have watched grow up since they were born. I counsel families whom I have known fo r years, with whom I have shared innumerable happy and sad moments. Just as our bodies

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have a need for ai r and food, our souls have a need to be connected to other people, not to be constantly sur. :,ounded by strangm. As one of my t~chcrs used to say,

We do not appreciate what we receive, we appreciate what we share. "

One of the memo~able essays in the field of sociology in recent years was entitled "Portnoy's Mother's Complai t" by Pauline Bart. A young social worker describes assi~mcnt of int~rvicwing a fifty-year-old woman w:~ has Just been admitted to the hospital , suffering from se- vere depression. The woman was manifesting an extreme case of the "empty-nest syndrome. " Her children had grown up and moved away, and she felt deprived of the only role that had ever given her life meaning. She had become so depressed that she had herself hospitalized. But what is fascinating about the interview is that " Mrs. Port- noy" (the doting but rejected mother) is not comfortable having the social worker asking her questions. She docs not simply want to tell her story of how ungrateful and uncaring her children are. She insists on asking questions of_ the social worker: "Arc you married? Wh y are you so thtn? Do you live by yourself? Do you cook your own meals? You really ought to take better care of yourself, cat more fruit, get out in the fresh air. Here, would you like a chocolate?"

When she is asked to talk about her own life, " Mrs. Portnoy" comes across as apathetic and depressed. She sighs, she shrugs, there is no enthusiasm in her voice. But when she can tum the tables and "interview" the social worker, she becomes animated. She cannot get excited at the prospect of her children visiting her in the hospital or of getting a weekend pass to go home, but the prospect of

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going shopping to help the social worker buy a new dress excites her.

"Mrs. Portnoy" needs someone to mother. That is the only way she knows to define herself as a useful, compe- Ient person. She needs to be surrounded by people who need her and are grateful for her advice. When the last child struck out on his own, " Mrs. Portnoy" found herself "fired" from the only job she had ever known. Fifteen or twenty years sooner than it would happen to a man, she finds herself involuntarily retired from the commitments that gave her life meaning, and her depression and sense of worthlessness resemble the reactions of the older worker forced into retirement. That is why she responds as she does to the appearance of the young social worker. "If you really want to help me," she seems to be saying, "you won't help me by taking a case history and fi nding hobbies for me. You will help me by letting me adopt you as a daughter, fuss over you, worry about you, give you advice. I do it well, I need to do it, and frankly from the looks of you, you could probably benefit from it. So put away your notebook, stand up straight, don 't wear so much makeup, wear brighter colors, take me home to cook some chicken soup for you. You' ll see, we' ll both be happier."

A life without people, without the same people day after day, people who belong to us, people who will be there for us, people who need us and whom we need in return, may be very rich in other things, but in human terms, it is no life at all.

I was sitting on a beach one summer day, watching two children, a boy and a girl, playing in the sand. They were hard at work building an elaborate sand castle by the

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WHEN ALL YOU'VE EVER WANTED IS N'T ENOUGH

nal passages. Just whe n they had nearly finished their proj ect, a big wave ca me along and knocked it down reducing it to a heap of wet sand. I expected the childre~ to burst into tears, devastated by what had happened to all their hard work. But they surprised me. Instead, they ran up the shore away from the water, laughing and hold- ing hands, and sat down to build another castle. I realized that they had taught me an important lesson. AU the things in our lives, all the complicated structures we spend so much time and energy creating, arc built on sand. Only our relationships to other people endure. Sooner or later the wave will come along and knock down what we hav~ worked so hard to build up. When that happens, only the person who has somebody's hand to hold will be able to laugh.

To be fully and authentically human, we have to be prepared to take off the armor we usually go around wear- ing to keep the world from hurting us . We have to be prepared to accept pain, or else we will never dare to hope or to love. Without the readiness to feel , which must include feeling pain, we will never know the joy which Ecclesiastes identifies as on e of the chief rewards of life. We have to make room in our souls for the tragic view of life. As long as we still insist on happy endings, we will still be children, upset and angry if God doesn't respond to our cries and make everything work out for us . I don' t have very much good to say about suffering, but it docs rob you of your illusions about how the world is supposed to work.

Our son Aaron was born the week that President John Kennedy was shot, and I remember a tearful Daniel Pat- rick Moynihan saying after the assassination, "When you're Irish, one of the fi rst things you learn is that sooner or later this world will break your heart." It was one of

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the first things I h_ad learned from Jewish history as well, d I would learn tt more personally over the course of our

m 1 h . h · n's brief life. I don't envy peop e w o come mto t ctr }~rties without ever undergoing a serious illness, bereave- ment, or failure, because I know that sooner or later one will come their way, and I worry that they won't be able to handle it, never having had to do it before. The lan- guage of grief, the language of feeli ng anything, is like all languages. We learn them better when we are young. Like mumps or chicken pox, it is not much fun at any age, but if you have to go through it, you are better off going through it when you arc young and developing a measure of immunity to it.

Why do hundreds of young people who seem to have so much to live for take their own lives every year? Why are there "epidemics" of teenage suicides, often in happy families , in affluen t communities, inciden ts not necessarily born out of despair or hopelessness but seemingly rand om tragedies which leave families shattered and high schools and entire communities feeling haunted? More than any other tragedy , suicide leaves everyone feeling burdened and guilty, asking himself, "What could I have done to keep it fro m happening?" Y ct such things are happening in increasing numbers throughout the country. The num• bers, and the stories behind each incident, are truly tragic.

For that matter, why are middle-aged and older people driven to take their own lives, often when they find them- selves faced with the prospect of serious illness or scandal? I suspec t that the answer has to do with our society's attitude toward pain. From the outset, we have been told that for every pain, there was a pill we could take to make the hurting stop. In essence, we have been promised a pain-free life. When it does not work out that way, our

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inability to handle any strong emotion, especially p . leaves us fee ling confused and helpless, and we do not ~-; • feeling helpless. When something happens to hurt us : we cannot make the pain go away-illn ess, rejectio: dreams t hat don' t come true--wc do not know how t' deal with it. Sometimes we try to den y it , to pretend th it did not really happen or to pretend ("sour grapes") t h a

1 it does not really bother us . When we a re unable to fo~ l ourselves, when the pain still hurts, we are at a loss. Neve having learned to live with pain, some people see no othe: way out except to give up on living. Much mental il lness is a way of fleeing from the pain of reality. Chronic alco- holism may often be an attempt to deaden t he pain . But most tragic of all is the suicide of a person who is loved and talented and has much to live fo r , b ut forgets a ll th at when he looks into t he futu re and sees more pain than he is prepared to handle.

Yet pain is part of being alive, and we need t o learn that. Pain does not last forever , nor is it necessarily unbearable, and we need to be taught that. Adolescents need to accept the fact that broken hearts, like broken bones, h urt dread- fully but ultimately they heal , and t hat there is life beyond the hurting. People whose shameful secret is abou t to be revealed need to be assu red that there is forgiv eness as well as condemnation, that there arc people in th e world and a G od in t he world capable of fo rgiving and lo ving · even the most flawed and imperfect of us . T he terminall y ill need to be reassured that we will cherish t hem and spend time wit h them and take them as seriously as we d id when they were healthy. Most of all , we have to learn to trust our own capacities to endure pain . We can end ure m uch more than we think we can; all human experience testifies to that. All we need to do is learn not to be afra id of pain.

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•t our teeth and let it hurt. Don 't deny it, don't be Gn !helmed by it. It will not last fo rever. One d ay , the ;:~~ will be gone and you will still be there.

The final ingredient which enables us to say, "I have lived and my life m attered, " is the knowledge that we have made a difference. Ultimately I suspect that is why Paul Tsongas chose to spend his time with his children rather than in the Senate . In politics, he could only hope to make some sm all lasting impact. At home, he knew that his influence would be substantial and permanent.

In what is probably the best psychological study done on the stages men go through as they grow up, Seasons of a Man 's Life (Knopf, 197 8), Dr. D aniel Levinson writes about the significant role of a mentor. A young man start- ing out in his career will benefit greatly if he has a mentor, an olde·r patron, not old enough to be a fath er figure, but perhaps a half-generation older, someone who knows the ropes and will teach him how thin gs are done, someone with enough prestige and infl uence to t ake a personal interest in his career. T he young man or woman who fi nds such a mentor has a better chance of being successful.

Later in the book, Levinson looks at the process from the mentor' s point of view. He writes:

Being a mentor with young adults is one of the most significant relationships available to a man m middle adulthood. The distinctive satisfaction of the mentor lies in furth ering the development of young men and women fa cilitating their efforts to form and live out their dr~ams ... More than altruism is in- volved: the mentor is doing something for himself. He is making productive use of his own knowledge and

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skill in middle age. He is learning in ways not other- wise possible. He is maintaining his connection with the forces of youthful energy in the world and in himself. He needs the recipient of men toring as much as the recipient needs him.

When I was forty-eight years old, I took a major step toward restructuring my work and my time. I persuaded the leadership of my congregation to reduce my respon- sibilities and bring in a full-time associate rabbi to share the teaching and pastoral burdens with me. I did this for two reasons. First, it would give me the time to write and lecture, to be with my family in ways that a full- time pastor often finds difficult. Second, it gave me the opportu- nity to be a mentor to a younger colleague, as I had been fortunate to have an older mentor when I began. I would have someone to pass my professional tricks of the trade on to, to sec him grow as a result of my personal invest- ment in him. Our daughter would be going off to college soon, and like "Mrs. Portnoy," I needed someone to guide and shape.

And so do we all. We all teach, officially and unoffi- cially, not only the classroom teacher or college professor addressing a group of students, but the experienced book- keeper or facto ry worker passing tips on to the new ar- rival, because having an impact on another person, shap- ing his or her life in some small but vital way, is one of the most enduring satisfactions we will know. We teach because we need to share. Erik Erikson has written that the challenge of these middle years is to choose between generativity and stagnation, between continuin g to have an impact or sitting around waiting to die. The inability to generate can cause a person to become excessively in-

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volved with himsclf-:-his health, . his popularity, his memories, his disappomtments. Enkson goes on to say, "Man is so constituted that he needs to be needed, lest he uffer the mental deformation of self-absorption. Gen-

:rativity is expressed in parenthood but also in work and creative thought. Man needs to teach." (Eri kson, In sight and Responsibility, Norton, 1964, p. 130.)

Jfwe think of life as a limited resource--a giv en number of years to live, x million breaths or heartbeats before our hearts give out-then every passing day or year brings us closer to the time when we will have none left . No wonde r the prospect of growing older fills us with dis may. (A character in a short story I once read is asked why she has so little to say. She replies that each of us is born with a quota of words to speak in our lifetime, and when we use them up, we die.)

But suppose we could learn to see life not as the using up of a limited resource but as the accumulation of trea- sures. Every new frie nd we made, every new truth we learned or experience we underwent would make us richer than we ever were before. There is more to my life today than there was five or ten years ago because of all the ways in which I have grown and been enriched in that time. Mystery writer Agatha Ch ristie's second husband was the archaeologist Lord Mallowan. Someone once asked her what it was like being married to an archaeologist, an_d she answered, "It's wonderful. The older I get, the more inter- ested he is in me." You don't have to be an archaeologist to feel that way , The older we all get, the more interesting we become as people, because the experiences of the pass- ing years have deepened and enriched us. .

A friend once suggested that life was like a fine wme, 171

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improving with age . I told him that what I did not like about that com parison was that, with every sip of the wine , there was that much less left. I would rather think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to come together and make sense. Characters become more full y developed , and the meaning of earlier incidents begins to become clear. And when we finally come to the end , there is a satisfying sense of completeness 10 it .

Life, if you will, is a work of art, and if we have paid loving attention to its details, we will be able to take pride in the finished product. How can an artist paint a picture or shape a statue, knowing that some stranger will buy it from her and she will have no way of knowing how much pleasure it gives its new owner? How can an author write a book which will be read by strangers living hundreds of miles away, and he will never know the impact it has on them? When we know the answer to those questions, we will understand why a person works so hard at living, at making something of his life, knowing full well that one day h is life will be taken from him, and only other people will remai n to remember how good it was.

The Talmud says there are three things one should do in the course of one' s life: have a child, plant a tree, and write a book. They all represent ways of investing our creative, generative energy in things which will endure after we a re gone, and will represent the best that was in us. They offer us the reassurance that our lives were not in vain, and that the world is indeed better for our having passed through it.

What gratifies me most about the success of my previ- ous book is not the financial rewards it brought me or the

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Why 1 Am Not Afraid to Die

fact that it has been tran slated into ni~e languages and was a beSt-seller in three foreign countnes. Spy novels and gossipy biographies have done better than that. _What grat- ifies me most is the expenence of going to a city where I know no one and have never been befo re, giving a lecture, and having eight or ten people come up to me afterward to tell me, "Your book changed my life. I could never have made it through this past year without it. "

Think one more time about the author of Ecclesiastes. He was so fearful that death would rob his life of meaning, making it as if he had never existed, that he had trouble finding pleasure in the pleasurable moments of his life. We don't know if he ever had children, but we know that he planted trees and gardens which people would be able to enjoy long after he was gone . And of course he wrote a book which continues to challenge and instruct people lhousands of years later. What greater satisfaction, what greater promise of immortality could anyone want?

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