As I’ve grown older, I’ve begun to come to grips with my mortality. We all live; we all die. We just don’t think about it much when we’re younger. It seems so far away. Think about how we experience time: It always takes forever for Yule or your birthday to come when you’re a kid; summers seem to last forever – as does the school year. But where once it took forever, now it’s here before you know it – before you want it. What, another birthday, already?

The time just seems to start flying by, and pretty soon ten years have gone past, or twenty, and you wonder where they went. Hours become minutes, days become hours, and years…well, some days you wake up feeling like Rip Van Winkle. Is it really more than 30 years now since that rainy afternoon when I first saw Star Wars?

Now too I’ve been told that I am having heart problems. I have known of my mitral valve prolapse for many years – it kept me out of the Army when I tried to enlist back in the 70s (I was going to Berlin as part of the Third Brigade – an artillery spotter). But it’s never really been problematic until recently, when shortness of breath and fluttering led me to the cardiologist, who, after some tests, informed me that my heart was too big, too weak, and that the valve leaked too much.

Surgery was always inevitable, he told me. It was just a matter of when. Well, when was suddenly upon me. “It isn’t the news we wanted, I know,” he told me, “But it is what it is.” That may be a tired old expression, but it has the virtue of always being true.

Two tests later (heart catheterization and transesophageal echocardiogram, or TEE), I have been told that my heart is less weak than previously thought (which is good news), and that because I am fit and healthy in all other respects – no diabetes, etc, I am in good shape for surgery.

The heart surgeon came into my room after the catheterization. He told me that he loves doing mitral valve repairs. He had a childlike gleam in his eyes as he told me he has been doing this for 15 years and that he is successful 90% of the time. If he cannot repair it, he said, he will replace it. I told him I chose the synthetic valve over a pig or bovine valve – not because I don’t dig on swine or cows but because both those would wear out over time and require, as he put it, a second, even more dangerous surgery.

He gave me all the percentages, which is only fair. It turns out I have only a 2% chance of dying. Not bad really. Think about it: climate scientists say with 90% certitude that we are experiencing anthropogenic global warming (AGW). As James Hoggan says in his Climate Cover-Up (2009), if somebody told you that there was a 90% chance the plain you were on was going to crash, you would seriously consider making other plans.

Well, it works both ways. 90% is pretty close to 100% – and you can’t have 100% certainty in science or in most other aspects of life. If there is a 90% certainty that he can repair the valve, I’m going in pretty confident. The 2% seems trivial by comparison – except that if the repairs can last decades, running afoul of that 2% lasts – forever.

I’ve had a lot of time – and many opportunities – to think about death. My brother was killed when I was 10. My grandparents died in the 80s, and I was holding my grandma’s hand as she died.  My ex-father-in-law died in the 90s and I was very close to him. Both my parents died a few years ago. One of my ex-sisters-in-law suddenly died last year. She should have outlived me. As you get older, you start losing people. It’s simple math. I don’t think anyone should become accustomed to the idea of people dying, but perhaps exposure to it makes you a little less afraid of it.

I’m 53. By any generous estimate I’m at the half-way point. When your gas gauge dips below half, you start thinking about a fresh tank. There aren’t any fresh tanks in life, so we should start thinking about our legacy instead, if we haven’t already.

It’s probably no surprise then that I’ve thought about my own death as I’ve grown older – the legacy I want to leave behind, the awareness that time to do the things I want to do is not infinite. Particularly now, with the heart problems.

I’m not afraid of dying. Even before I became a polytheist I liked what Socrates had to say about it. He provided an example for us all in his Phaedo, when he told his friends that there was nothing to fear:

[E]ither death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. . . . Now if death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is a journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead are, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this?

My Heathen ancestors had a great many conceptions of death, and to what road it led: to the halls of our ancestors, to Hel (nothing like Christian hell but just a place you go when you die), to Valhöll if Odin chooses you. Skjöldunga Saga speaks of “going to King Odin” and “the underworld,” and there is some sense of going “into the mountains” to join your ancestors. There is also a limited appeal to reincarnation, as Ellis-Davidson puts it,  “belief in the birth of the souls of dead ancestors into the living world again, in the persons of their descendants.”[1] And of course, there are the dísir, who are female ancestors who have stayed behind to help the household.

Who knows? It is difficult to know what to make of all the various ideas surrounding death. Islamic traveler Ibn Fahdlan, when watching a Varangian funeral,  spoke of “paradise” which was the best he could interpret the Norse word as he was made to understand it. But anything that smacks of paradise cannot be bad.

Outside of the claim to Valhöll (a claim no mortal can make) the poem heard by Ibn Fahdlan at the chieftain’s funeral, and re-rendered by Michael Crichton in the 13th Warrior, captures the essence of Heathen ideas of death:

Lo, there do I see my father.
Lo, there do I see my mother.
And my sisters and my brothers
Lo, there do I see the line of my people
Back to the beginning.
Lo, they do call to me.
They bid me take my place among them
In the halls of Valhalla
Where the brave may live forever.

My ancestors did not live their lives towards an afterlife, or for a hope in some afterlife, though ideas of joining their ancestors shows that they expected them to be there already, waiting for them. They lived their lives as part of a continuum, inheritors but also progenitors, descendants and ancestors to be. And they lived their lives for life, for what mark they made on this world, what they did for their families and communities – and for their gods. And for what name they left behind them. As I quote in every email I send out:

Cattle die,
kinsmen die,
oneself dies likewise,
but good renown
will never die
for him who earns it.

- Hávamál, 76

I think this is true. And who does not want to be well thought of when they are gone? Who would choose ill-renown over good? We all want to have had a good impact on those whom we love and care for. We want that “son of” or “daughter of” to mean something.

So how have I done? Too soon to tell. As another Norse proverb tells us, “Praise not the day until evening has come, a woman until she is burnt, a sword until it is tried, a maiden until she is married, ice until it has been crossed, beer until it has been drunk.”

And I think that is as it should be. We should not be judged on our accomplishments until we are done with the opportunity to affect change – that is, when we are dead. I hope that when the day comes that I have shaped my final fate that I will have done some praiseworthy deeds. That is what we should all hope for.

Followers of the White Christ hope for some form of eternal salvation, a nebulous form of afterlife in which they will enjoy the fruits of their devotion to their god. I find there is a disconnect between “up there” and “down here.” But our gods, like us, are of this world; there is a connection that is very real between we mortals and the Otherworld.

It is only fitting that as I have lived “down here” that I be judged “down here” and by the people I have lived among, whose lives I have in some way impacted and whose lives have impacted me. I hope that my deeds will have been found worthy of my ancestors, that the good will have outweighed the bad, wisdom foolishness, and piety impiety. I would very much – like Theoden King in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings – to go before my ancestors unashamed, just as I have hoped to live my life unashamed.

We all make mistakes. We all make decisions we are not proud of; say and do things we regret later, or fail to say or do things we feel we should have said or done. We don’t have to apologize to our gods for those oversights. Instead, we redeem ourselves here. It is redemption – not salvation – that is meaningful.

But in the end, as each of us shapes our own fate, we have nothing to complain about. Our decisions, our actions, have brought us to where we are now. If sometimes (as in my case) genetics jumps in with a “surprise!” then there is still no reason for complaint, no reason to rail against gods or fate.

So in the end, my concern is where it should be, not with some nebulous and unknowable afterlife or paradise but with the world I leave behind, the world I belonged to, and whether or not I’ve done enough to have made it a better place.

The gods will know, but they will not judge. That will be left to my fellow mortals here on the little island in space we call Midguard.

(I have my surgery on March 8. I will be missing from the Internet for a few days. I am told a couple of days in ICU, completely cut off, and 5-10 days in the hospital after that, during which time I will probably write but may or may not be able to get on the Internet. There will be some limits on my activities afterward, but none that should keep me offline or from writing – 3 weeks without driving, six weeks until I can perform ordinary household tasks on my own, 12 weeks before returning to work, and several months before full recovery. At the end of it all, I am promised I will feel better than I have in a while, which is something to look forward, and something, I should add, more tangible than beliefs in an afterlife. I will continue to post up until March 7 and I will look forward to seeing you all again after that – Hrafnkell)

Notes:

[1] H.R. Ellis-Davidson, The Road to Hel: A Study of the Conception of the Dead in Old Norse Literature (1968), 145.