Episode 6: Death

Welcome, welcome, welcome to the VUISM from the Aerial View. This is podcast number six. I'm joined today by a man who's trying to kill me, I think, Dr. Mark Klein. I say that because today's conversation is actually scary to me. And in your book, you have a whole chapter on it. And I will read you the first couple of words. You said death. Just the word is spooky. Say it out loud. And temperature in the room seems to suddenly Yeah, I will tell you, sometimes, I admit this, sometimes at night, I'm lying in my bed, I'm thinking, what happens when I'm dead? What do I do? Death scares me to death. I lost both my parents, because at my age, if they were alive today, they'd be well into the hundreds. And I'm still scared of death. You're not.

That's true. I'm not, I'm not trying to kill you. In fact, I will do, I will do everything I can to keep you alive.

Good, because I'm scared of death. Thank you, thank you. So why are you not afraid of death?

because I see death differently than you do and probably than most people do. So I have famously said, and this hasn't been received particularly well by too many people, but you know, do you have lunch every day?

Okay.

Somewhat. Yeah, I'm not a great eater of lunch, but yeah.

Okay, okay, well, we're not going to talk about lunch, let's try something else. But okay, we'll stick with lunch. So most people have lunch. We don't make a big deal out of lunch. You're going, my God, I'm having lunch today, right? We don't make a big deal out of it, we just have lunch. Because everybody has lunch. Everybody, a lot of things everybody does, already gets up and, you know, gets ready for work, goes to the bathroom, whatever, right? We don't make a really big deal out of it. But we make a really big deal out of death. But it happens to everybody.

No, it's fine. Yeah. Yeah.

Close the bathroom. Yeah, right. Right.

Mortality among humans remains 100%. Everybody is going to die. We treat it like a surprise. Did you hear? So-and-so died. Sunday morning, there's a show on CBS called Sunday Morning that I watch. We tape it actually, know, watching it's like Monday night or something. So I should probably change the name to like Monday night. But anyway, I called them. I said, can you change the name to Monday night? No, they insisted I keep calling it Sunday morning.

Correct. I watch it every week.

Me too.

And Jane Pauli said no, goodbye, she hung up. Go ahead. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, if I could get her on the phone. anyway, so in this show, they often will talk about there's always a section, I'm trying to what it's called, about the people who passed away that week. There's always a little segment, Beautiful music, it's pretty cool. I like it. And there's always, you know, there's always somebody sad who died, like maybe committed suicide at 35. But most of the people are like, you know, 80s, 90s, 100, right?

Yes, and with beautiful music they play too.

And when you see somebody who dies at 100, you go, wow, that person died. And you're like, well, come on, at some point that person was going to die, right? Everybody dies. So we tend to make a big deal out of death, even when we shouldn't. You know, it's sad when it's a child, for sure. It can not possibly not break somebody's heart to watch a child die.

Yeah.

and even young people. the younger, the more upset we are. But we even get upset when older people die. I've been to many funerals, as you have, I'm sure. And I'm listening to the eulogy, and everybody's teary and sad. And I'm sitting there thinking, that person had a beautiful life. What are you crying about? They died at 94. Wow. I'm listening to what all these things this woman or this gentleman did. I'm thinking, wow. But still everybody's sad. That's not inappropriate, of course, right? You lose somebody. But how you react, there is another way you could react to that. So I don't want to sound callous that I don't care about death. I do. And I cherish life. want, you know, I've spent my life as a physician trying to help people have healthy and long lives. And certainly I do whatever I can still to this day to help anybody I can in any way have a better life and even a longer life. So I'm not insensitive to death. It's how we interpret it that I'm concerned with. So we look at death as this awful ending when in fact we know it's coming and we act surprised by it. And I think that's because we misinterpret it. So let's get back for a second to the jukebox of time that we've talked about pretty much in every episode. So remember we talked about the fact that from the moment we're born, that first record we're on, to the day we die, that last record we're on, all those records that are what we call our lifespan, we're on every one of those records. But remember that they're playing forever. Everyone is playing forever. So it's not like the past is something that is just a memory. Each event in our lives is happening simultaneously as a moment in the present, as if just as this moment we're talking now. It's a very hard concept to wrap your head around, but that's how time works. So think about this. In a very real sense, we never lose anyone.

the whole idea of death in a way is misleading. Because if you're still actively alive in all the moments of those records that are still going on and playing in perpetuity, that to use the word death implies an end to a life. But what it really should mean is you're not in any more records. But you're always going to be on the records that were composed your lifespan from the moment you were born to the moment you passed away. You are still very much alive on all those records. We can't see those records. We can't go back and enjoy them, at least while we're alive in this earth. But that doesn't mean they don't exist. A lot of things we can't see. We can't see x-rays and ultraviolet rays. There's a lot of things we can't see. So we can't see those moments that are still very much alive. We just can't appreciate them. But they still exist. So the whole idea of death in a way, when you think about it, is a little misleading. We never really lose anybody. We're not with them going forward, but we're still with them and all those records that we share together. That is a very

But it's the going forward part, though. You'll miss somebody. I can't have that conversation anymore. I can't ask for your opinion anymore. I can't ask you to go to the movies with me anymore. So to me, the concept of death, whatever that means, it's still final. I don't have the opportunity to do what I used to do anymore. And that's why I think it scares you.

important concept to wrap your head around.

OK, right. that's because, again, I really want to focus on this because it's a misinterpretation of how the world works. Yes, you cannot. I think I've told you about this. I think I write about this in the book that the dog, my last dog was just a fantastic dog. I knew we lost your dog not too long ago also. So about three years ago, lost my dog. I love this dog. Twelve years old, big golden doodle, the sweetest dog ever. So, you I was very sad the day I lost him, very sad. But then of course I recognized it was time to return to the aerial view and get a change at what I consider the more correct perspective. I think about the fact that when I'm in my kitchen eating, I still see him flop down next to me. I still see him in the family room, you know, bugging me to play with him, right? Because he still is. I don't see it at the moment, but in my mind, I recognize the fact that these things are still happening. That's very comforting. Getting back to the aerial view and how we deal with death. So again, this metaphor of the jukebox of time is so important. So when you're in the aerial view, you see that you were not on all the records that preceded the day of your birth. Like I said before, weren't on the record of 1492 or 1358 or the year one. You weren't there, right? Nobody's upset about the fact that you weren't on those records. But now all of sudden we're upset about that we're not on the records after our death. When you stop and think about that for a moment, right, if you move yourself and you sit in the air with you and now you see all of time and you see those records you're on, the ones you weren't on before you were born and you're not on after you die, you recognize that that sliver that consists of your lifespan, those records are playing forever. And the moments after your death and the moments before your birth are not any different. They are exactly the same. We don't interpret it that way, but from the aerial view, you can see that they are exactly the same. We should be no more upset that we're not on the records after the day of our death than we were that we weren't on the records before the day of our birth. Right? They are equivalent to the universe. In the jukebox of time, these are equivalent moments.

We imbue the ones after our death with more significance than we do the ones before our birth because we can't imagine before our birth, but yet we can imagine after our death. But that's just a function of our brain, of how we interpret. That's a misinterpretation of how it really works. So you shouldn't be any more upset about the fact that you're not on the records after your death than you weren't on the records before your birth. Once you appreciate that, everything changes. So A, we never lose anybody. All those moments of our lifespan are active and going on forever. So all those people we were with, your parents, our dogs, our friends, anybody we've lost, we are still with them actively on all those records. We can't see them, I get it, but again, we can't see ultraviolet light, we can't see x-rays, there's a lot of things we can't see. That doesn't mean they don't exist. Those moments are alive forever. And again, this is not Mark Klein talking, this is Albert Einstein talking, right? So that's number one, very comforting. Imagine that idea that in a very real sense, we never lose anyone. How comforting is that? I mentioned my friend who had lost his son at a young age, right? For him to be able to understand that they're still together, that he and I coached our kids on a soccer team together. We're still out there actively coaching. Our kids are still running around playing with each other. These things are still happening. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they're not. Physics tells us They are, right? Again, just like the fact that we can't see other wavelengths of light. It's the same idea. Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it's not real. So that is a super comforting thought. You're alive in every moment of your life, of your lifespan in perpetuity with all the people and animals you were with during that time. That is extremely, extremely comforting to me. And it's real. It's true. I like to say it's not faith, it's physics.

Well, so it's interesting that people say somebody passed or they passed away. I think there's a difference in even maybe the meaning of it. Did they pass? Where do they pass? Did they pass away? I've noticed that you used either one. You've used both. Do you know what it means? What is to pass? Where are we passing? Passing to and if you're passing away, away from what?

Well, I don't know the origin of the word to pass away, I assume it or to pass because you've heard people when we were growing up, I think both of us we'd heard we heard passed away, right?

Never used past was always passed away. But now it's passed right.

always passed away. Yes. No, I think it has to do with the environment in which you and I grew up, the culture we grew up in. But there were other cultures for whom, you would say, he passed, or he's going to pass, right? Meaning passing on to something else, that concept of something else. Now, we've talked about that a little bit in this podcast series, and we'll talk about it more. What comes next, right?

Right.

I try to make the case, and again, I'm not trying to sell anybody on anything. I'm not trying to start a movement or religion or anything else. I'm just trying to help people manage the life we're living right now and to improve our lives and our society. But I do believe that all the clues point to the fact that life is preparation. Now, I cannot tell you what we're preparing for. I'll give you an analogy I like to use. You can tell I'm big on analogies, right?

Yeah.

Some of them are good, some them stink, but we give it a shot, right? Because analogies are helpful for people to relate. So, you know, I went to high school with you and then I graduated, to college and you went to college and then I went on to medical school. And then after medical school, I did five years of additional training, internship, residency, fellowship. That was five more years. So from the day we left high school to the day I was able to finally practice medicine was 13 years, right? So. And that was a lot of hours, many weeks as a resident and in turn a resident fellow, I'd work up to 100 hours a week. That's when I learned that there are only 168 hours in a week. And if I'm working 100 of them, that's bad. But that's what we did in those days. We don't let residents do that anymore. Probably it's a good idea. But we did. We could easily work. We could work up to 100 hours, a long time. So imagine after all that time, those 13 years of all those hours, all that effort, staying up all night, every third night from all those years, that somebody came to me and and said, good job, you finished. Now, here's your little certificate that says you did it, and we're gonna give you a stipend every month you can live on, so have a nice day. And I'd say, wait, after all that training, you don't expect me to do anything? I mean, I just went through that, don't you want me to work? Don't you want me to put what I've learned to use to help people? No, no, no, you're done. You did it. No, of course not. That's ridiculous, right? And yet we live this life and we go through all these trials and tribulations and we go from being that useless infant, that selfish, dependent, demanding infant to making this evolution, hopefully, to moving away from ourselves, changing the camera from self-focused to outward-focused, preparing ourselves, learning all these things. And then that's it. Now we're... older and we've learned so much and we finally have garnered some wisdom and we don't have to do anything with it, that doesn't make sense to me. We talked about the fact that have backward lives and we're smart when we're old and dumber when we're young and we can do stupid things and shorten our lifespans. In terms of evolutionary biology, that doesn't make any sense. It'd be much better if we were smart when we're young and dumber when old when it doesn't really matter, unless the purpose of life is not longevity.

in which case being dumb when you're young is just fine, and learning along the way so that you're ready for whatever your next job is. So my personal feeling is that wherever we're passing on to, I think it's gonna be, I think we're gonna have to do something. I think we have a responsibility that to, I like to think we're gonna have another job putting to use all that we've learned. Now, do I have any proof of that? Of course not, none, I couldn't tell you. And could I be wrong? Of course I could be wrong. But I just look at the clues. I look at how the world works, all the things I discussed in my book, and we're gonna discuss hopefully in many, many, many, many, many episodes to go. We're gonna discuss all these things and what the meaning of all this is. again, to me, that looks like what we're headed, that there is a purpose and that purpose is to prepare for whatever comes next. I can't prove it, but I think all the clues that we have talked about and we'll talk about lead us in that direction.

Do you believe in an afterlife?

Well, like I said, I believe in an after and another job. I don't think it's like sitting around and, you know, whatever is your ideal view of life, whether it be sitting on a beach or whatever, you know. I don't want to get into what each individual's perfect after life would be, but I think the evidence that I have looked at... to me points to that there's something that we're to have responsibility going forward, that there's something else we have to do with all the wisdom we have garnered over these years of life. Just like I did training, or any doctor does training to become a doctor. It doesn't make sense to put in all this effort and to make that evolution. When you graduate medical school, they call you doctor. The best month of being a doctor is from the day you graduate medical school to the day you start your internship, which is, in those days was probably around six weeks or something like that. I don't know what it is now, but probably similar. Because you get to call yourself doctor and you don't have to do anything. Right? Because the truth is you don't know anything. You don't have anything useful. So my first day as an intern, my very first day was Saturday night in the emergency room. That was my first rotation in an inner city emergency room. So I show up at like whatever time that shift started, it's probably like 11 o'clock or whatever it was. I don't remember. Maybe it seven o'clock. And I show up.

Yeah.

And in those days, we didn't have what I call attending senior doctors running the emergency room. The emergency room was run by morons like me. We had three interns who were just starting and a resident who had been there a year. And that's who ran the emergency room in a major U.S. medical center. Now, we don't do that anymore because it's so insane. But anyway, I was petrified. I was catatonic. Right. I was useless. Right. So so it's the same idea that when you know that when you're young, you're not you're not really

Thankfully, yeah.

of tremendous value yet, you have to learn along the way, whether it be a trade or a career, how to be a good person, how to relate to other people, all the things we go through in our lives. And we continue to learn, we just continue to continue to continue to learn. The point being that at the end to say that that's it, you're done, now you're finally valuable, right? Now you're finally worth something, you can help, really can help people, and that's it, you're done. I don't think so. I think it's more like the medical school analogy, the training analogy from a doctor. think it's much more likely in my view that we're going to have another responsibility.

Yeah.

You know, as a doctor, you've probably witnessed death. You've probably seen a patient die. I saw my mother die. She died in my arms. And it's interesting because there's a sort of a calmness that overtakes one, as though maybe this is Pollyanna of me, but they're looking forward to what's next. There's a calmness that comes over. My mother, unfortunately, I literally watched the process.

Many.

you

We started turning purple. The doctor said that's beginning phase of death and whatever. And I thought, but she doesn't seem to be upset. She doesn't seem to be anguished about this. Unlike prior, because she was very, very sick when she died, then all of sudden it was lifted and she was calm. And I thought, well, maybe death is not that bad. I don't know. But it's still, I miss her. We miss people in death. I have a question for you, your friend who lost the son and he didn't know that his life should go on. That's what you said. How did he go on? What was it that he did to make himself go on?

You know, think for most people, time is a great healer. Even if you do nothing, eventually time helps. You we've all lost people and we recognize that that's the crazy thing about death. You know, you don't wake up every morning crying about the loss of your parents, right? You go on, you've had... You've had a very meaningful life since you lost your parents, as have I. I lost my dad when I, my dad got sick when I was 19 and died 18 months later. And I think out of those 18 months, he was feeling good, maybe three, right? So I kind of look at my father's death the day I found out about his diagnosis. To me, in my mind, that's really when I lost my dad. I was 19 years old. The next 18 months were horrible for everybody. Okay, but and I was all by myself. I had really no support. I told you I was poor. I was poor. I had no source of income. really, really little was effectively by myself. And, know, was panicked at that time. But I look back now and I think, okay, well, how is my life gone since then? Well, it's gone great. You know, yes, I miss my dad and I talked to my children and, you know, none of my children met my father. And certainly, obviously, their grandchildren never met their grandfather. So that's unfortunate, but life has gone on and many good things have happened. I've grown, my children have grown, we've evolved. So the fact that you lose somebody, as you move away from that moment, naturally, life goes on. Naturally, it gets easier. I had another friend who lost his wife suddenly. who said the same thing to me, I wanna kill myself within like, you know, an hour of this happening. And I look at him now, he's a very successful, happy guy. It's many years later.

But time has a way of healing these things. But what can make it even easier is to understand what death is, right? You mentioned that your mother looked peaceful. Most people look peaceful before they die, unless there's obviously a traumatic death or something horrible happens to them. Most people who have time to prepare get to that. The other thing they do is very often you'll see people have a very lucid moment sometime before they die. Like they might have dementia, they may have been in a coma, whatever, maybe not a coma, they're surely not, you know, with the program. and all of sudden, they have this lucid conversation with you for a minute, for five minutes, for an hour, who knows, right? And it's like they're about to go and they go, wait a minute, I guess I want to do one thing. They come back as their old self and they have a conversation. My dad did that. I couldn't believe it, right? And at that point, I probably just turned 20 and I was with him in his hospital very often because he was in the hospital lot. All of sudden he sat up and he started talking to me. This is like either the day he died or hours or within 24 hours of his death. And I was like, holy mackerel, I couldn't believe it, right? So that happens also. So I think people who've experienced, who've watched people experience death, certainly as a doctor, I've seen too many people die. But you notice that many of them do reach that. calmness right before they go. And the other thing that's very interesting to me is when you see the person alive and they're very close to death, and the moment they die, they close their eyes or they stop moving, whatever, but something else happens. I don't know you've noticed this, maybe it's because I've seen, and you can see it in animals too. It's like something's gone. It's like the stuffed animal that you've taken the inside out of, right? It's like all of a sudden, it's not just the presence of activity, of breathing, of heartbeat, of motion, whatever. Something else is gone. You just get that sense that, do you know what I'm talking about? Well, whatever you want to call it, something's gone. Have you noticed this?

Is it your soul?

Well, I've been lucky enough to only have witnessed it once. I think at that moment, no, I didn't notice that. I was too busy being devastated. it's interesting about this. getting back to past and passed away. I think part of our religious background, our upbringing, our faith, was always passed away. And then I met people of different religion. They would talk about

It's quite interesting to behold, right? Okay.

Yes, I could see that.

And I've often thought about why we call it passed away, they call it pass, and now it's interchangeable. It just strikes me. And also about this whole notion of the body versus the soul. That's just sort of an interesting thing for me to think about. And I don't know, and I don't have an answer, neither do you.

So this is a very fun topic. It's very fashionable to talk about the mind-body relationship, the mind-body duopoly, whatever you want to call it. I like to say your mind and body are independent entities and are not necessarily best friends. Because your body, in a sense, has a mind of its own. It goes bad, parts break, you get cancers, you get...

Yes, right. Right. Yeah.

strokes and heart attacks and dementia, whatever, your body just gives out at some point, right? And it's not like your mind and body are on the same page all the time. They're not. Your mind's thinking, what are you giving me pain for? I don't want pain. What's the matter with you? If they were on the same page and they were truly best friends, it probably wouldn't work that way. But they're not. There's something separate. This idea of consciousness. Now, it's remarkable that at this point in history, we have no idea what consciousness is. And a lot of scientists will say, consciousness is really a product of the chemistry that's going on in your brain, the neurosynapses, the neurotransmitters, all these things, right? Well, clearly they have something to do with it. There's no doubt about that. But it doesn't mean that that tells the whole story. I don't think it tells all the story. As a doctor, you know, again, I'm a science guy by nature. I'm a skeptic by nature. That's what happens when you're in science, I think. have to kind of be honest about what you see. But you also have to be willing to accept that there are things you don't know. So I've had to get used to the fact that we don't have all the answers, that we don't know what's going on. So consciousness to me, you can call it the soul, you can call it whatever you want. I just know there's something else. I mean, I'm so convinced at this point. The evidence to me is so overwhelming. And these little things we talk about, like what happens at the moment of death, that calmness, or what I appreciate as that removal of some entity other than just, you know, You could call it the life force, whatever you want to call it. It's just not just the death is not just a cessation of breathing and heartbeat and chemical processes. Something else happens. You can see it. I have no idea what it is. You might refer to it as removal of the soul, whatever. I have no idea. I have no idea what it is. I just recognize the fact that there things we don't know, things we don't understand. I'm perfectly okay with that. Let's get back to death for another reason why I think we can be less anxious about death. One, we talked about the fact that we still are alive on all the records in the jukebox that comprise our lifespan. And so is everybody else we ever knew. That is extremely comforting. And I really believe in that sense, we never lose anyone. That is a fact as far as I'm concerned.

That's the way the world works. That's how time works. Super comforting. Here's another thing. When I was growing up, I was not the most courageous child. And I don't think I've ever been the most courageous person. And I'm always super impressed by courage. I really am. I look at people in the military, first responders, police. I look at these people that run into burning buildings. They man, you, who pull people out of burning cars. These people are remarkable to me, just remarkable. A, I think they, and I realized over time that they know something that I don't, or they inherently know something, maybe not consciously, but they inherently know something I don't. So have you ever heard the statement, it's better to be a live coward than a dead chicken? No, a live, better to be a live chicken than a, no, is that right? Better to be a live coward than a dead chicken. Yeah, something like that. I'm messing this up. I don't know, maybe I've never heard of it either. The point is that,

you

I've clearly never heard it maybe neither have you. don't know.

that if you're courageous, you could lose your life. You lose your life, that's the end of everything. So why be courageous? Really, if you think longevity, we've talked about this a lot, if longevity is the purpose of life, then the last thing you want to be is courageous. That's just dumb, right? If you really believe longevity is the purpose of life, then courage and being courageous are a really bad strategy. And yet, we admire people who are courageous. I certainly do. So what have I learned? Oh.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is what struck me one day. I'm thinking, is there a reason to be courageous? How does that fit into the aerial view and the whole idea of longevity? And I have a quote somewhere that I want to read you. Let me see if can find it. The idea being that courage is the proof, courage is evidence, that's it. Courage is evidence that longevity is not the goal of life. If longevity were the goal of life, nobody would be courageous. But people are courageous. because there's a sense that there's something more important than longevity. To save another life, to put yourself at risk for somebody else, that truly is the highest calling. That tells you that longevity cannot be the goal of life. Otherwise, nobody would be courageous. And so I've learned that fear that I had about taking risks, lacking courage when I was younger. I had that wrong, completely wrong. And it's taken me many years to watch people of courage, to admire them, to understand where they come from and to say, they have figured it out. That's it. They know somehow or another that longevity is not the purpose of life, that giving yourself to others is the purpose of, certainly a purpose of life. And maybe... giving yourself to others in the sense of sacrificing your own life, well, that's the ultimate courage. That's the ultimate statement of that sense of being outward focused. So that's something I've learned over many years. I think really is another example of why longevity cannot be the goal of life and why death should not be feared the way it is.

So much to think about, so much to digest. This has been a podcast that I hope spurs some conversation and maybe alleviates some of the angst that we have a tendency to feel about death.

Do you know why I think about death a lot? I think about death all the time. A, I'm curious, as I mentioned to you, but B, it keeps me focused, right? In other words, I have a limited time on this planet. I need to fulfill my mission of becoming outward focused to helping as many people as I can. That's why we're doing this podcast, of course. That's why I think people should use death as an instrument of...

Right.

of to improve their lives. should not be something to be feared. It should be something to be respected and to understand that that should be motivation for moving along this path of evolution from selfish to selfless, from inward to outward focused.

what a great way to end this podcast. I thank you. Thank you.

I thank you. All right, we'll see you next time everybody. Thanks for listening.

Have a good day. Bye bye now.