By now you’ve seen a few different video perspectives on last week’s mid-air collision at a Dallas air show. I’ve seen a few now and will watch as many as I can get my hands on because I really want to know what happened. Long ago, I spent hours studying aviation accidents as that’s the best way to avoid the mistakes of others. Today, long past my flying days, it’s still an area of interest.
The most recent video showed up on my social media timeline this morning, and is a clear, relatively close perspective on the accident. My heart goes out to the victims of this tragic loss, and to their friends and families.
I wrestled with whether or not to post this. You’ll find the video below, but it’s very graphic. I don’t recommend watching it, but I’ll leave it to you. If you’d prefer a recap: two WWII era planes collided at low level – a Bell King Cobra (small, single engine) and a B-17 Flying Fortress. All 6 aviators were killed.
I didn’t post this for the morbidity factor. At the end of the video, you can hear a child asking, “Wait… was that supposed to happen? Was that supposed to happen?!!” Her tone and volume suggest that she desperately hoped that the incident was staged.
Kids especially will have a difficult time integrating what they saw last Sunday with their understanding of reality. The idea that 6 people fell from the sky and died in a fireball is a bit hard to reconcile with the average 8-year-old’s ontology. But this poor little girl wasn’t just watching a bunch of pilots meet their fate, she came face to face, probably for the first time in her life, with the reality of her own death.
She’s not simply hoping that a bunch of people didn’t just die, she’s hoping that she’ll never die.
For all of us, regardless of when this happens, it’s a terrible realization, so we try our best to talk ourselves out of it or find a distraction; whatever system we can get our hands on that might take our focus off of the turnstile we all have to walk through.
Anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote about this in the 70’s and was posthumously awarded the Nobel Prize for his work. Until then, he wasn’t very popular. His work was too raw for that era, far too focused on the reality of death for the modern mind that, at the time, was preoccupied with distracting itself.
His book, The Denial of Death, confronted readers with the tension between two realities that are difficult to reconcile:
“This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression – and with all this yet to die.”
To Becker, the truest expression of humanity is to live in this tension, to ultimately accept the fact that our existence here will end. Facing death, not denying it, is the best way to live.
But, according to Becker, that’s anathema in our culture.
We don’t like to talk about death, especially with our children. We’ll talk about drugs, money, behavior, family, future, responsibility, etc., but not the part about us closing our eyes and never coming back. In our defense, that’s scary as hell – a fear we haven’t dealt with ourselves – and we haven’t found any good reason to face it, so we avoid it like the plague.
A good example is the media coverage of Queen Elizabeth II’s passing. We celebrated her life, took tours of her many years of service, journeyed through the photo album of her life, but saw absolutely 0 pictures of her deceased body. Why would we? What would be the point of that level of morbidity?
Or a blogger posting a video of an air show crash. Isn’t that taking things a bit too far?
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, author of the acclaimed, On Death and Dying, suggested that affluent, educated, socially distracted people (read, Americans) have a special struggle here, much more than in those parts of the world where suffering and difficulty are part and parcel to everyday life:
“Simple people with less education, sophistication, social ties, and professional obligations seem in general to have somewhat less difficulty in facing this final crisis than people of affluence who lose a great deal more in terms of material luxuries, comfort, and number of interpersonal relationships. It appears that people who have gone through a life of suffering, hard work, and labor, who have raised their children and been gratified in their work, have shown greater ease in accepting death with peace and dignity compared to those who have been ambitiously controlling their environment, accumulating material goods, and a great number of social relationships but few meaningful interpersonal relationships which would have been available at the end of life.”
Sheldon Solomon, Ross Professor for Interdisciplinary Studies at Skidmore College, took this a bit further:
“Americans are arguably the best in the world at burying existential anxieties under a mound of French fries and a trip to Walmart to save a nickel on a lemon and a flamethrower”
Anthropologists, psychologists and others have long suggested that the energy, time, and resources that we expend in our repression of death is affecting our lives.
The Stoics argued that, in facing death, one can find thankfulness and appreciation that there is, at least, one more day to be alive. If I knew that I’d die tomorrow (so long as I was guaranteed a quick, painless death) I’d live today in a completely different way than I’m planning to live it. I’d probably be a better parent and husband, willing to let little things go, focusing on what truly matters, uncharacteristically present.
If you received a terminal diagnosis with 3 months to live. Your next 90 days would certainly be affected, but if you had no choice but to face it, would you be freer? Kübler-Ross’ “Five Stages of Grief” suggests that you might find a freedom you’ve never experienced before, so long as you make it to the final “acceptance” stage.
My own encounters with death/terror/loss have me convinced that there’s something to all of this.
I once saw a friend gunned down a few feet away from where I was standing. On two occasions, I landed an airplane that had lost power. Years ago, my wife and I were caught in the middle of a Napa wildfire. Just before COVID, on a trip to San Juan del Cabo, I pulled a man out of the ocean (with the help of a lifesaving ring and a bunch of guys with a rope), so close to drowning that he could no longer move – alive, but slowly sinking.
When my sister was in her early 30’s, in a moment of anger and desperation, she took the buckle-end of a belt, wedged it between the jamb and the door of her bedroom, climbed onto a footstool that she had painted blue with white flowers, tied the other end of the belt around her neck, and ended her life.
My family and I drove to her home in Houston to care for her things, then to the mortuary where her body lay in state. The first thing I noticed were the bruise marks around her neck.
In all of those moments I felt a tangible presence that I’ll call “death.” It’s the most ugly, repulsive thing I’ve ever encountered. All I could feel was “get me the hell out of here.”
Now, when I think of death and loss, I can’t help but think about control. I’ve seen enough to believe that my life (and yours) hangs by a thin thread at the whim of something we simply can’t understand, much less control.
That stands in stark contrast to the way I live my American life. There is a mountain of pressure to control everything when we believe that we’re supposed to control everything. My death will be the cosmos’ last attempt, the final purging of the idea that I’m the one in the driver’s seat.
Maybe, when we accept death, at whatever point, we let go like we’ve never let go before.
It might also be that we transition into something else when we die, and our illusion of control can’t come with.
Either way, my heart goes out to the little girl at the air show, not just because of what she witnessed, but by the way our culture will step in to soothe and distract, compelling her to place great distance between herself and the reality of death, leaving her more convinced that her life is to be spent trying to control everything.
“It might be helpful if more people would talk about death and dying as an intrinsic part of life just as they do not hesitate to mention when someone is expecting a new baby.” ~ Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash
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