Fear, Control, and the Inevitable Death of All Men

I, like many men, consider death as a problem to be addressed later. Many men like to pit themselves against challenges and find worthy advisories to engage with towards a man finding out what he is made of. “Worthy” means a foe who could beat you. Seems to me death is going to beat me. I’m not ready for that. I may never be, but I’m prepared.

Life challenges can play like a video game, where the object is to win minor battles with lessor monsters to earn resources that enable overcoming a big monster.

One of my monsters found me when I was 5 years old. An adult cousin was showing me how to play a card game. He referred to a King as being a Jack and continued to do so. When he started getting the numbered cards mixed up and kept ignoring my attempts to correct him, I got increasingly worried. I had adults down as people that could teach me things to help me feel more safe in the world. What was going on here? I jumped up out of my chair, found the nearest door and ran away as fast as I could. I didn’t know that I was running towards a busy inter – state highway. My mother did and ran after me, screaming for me to stop. I didn’t listen, as I was now unsure that she knew what she was talking about. So many things are difficult for a 5 year old child to understand, to suddenly realize that I needed to rule out adults as a source of understanding was terrifying. All that I had left was to run. I was reminded that my mother could still out run me. I never made it into traffic. I decided to believe my mothers’s explanation that my cousin was the kind of adult that was mentally retarded. He looked just like an adult, but in some ways was more of a child than I was.

For a long time after that, people with intellectual or physical disabilities gave me the creeps. I remember how I would sometimes feel my scalp twitching when I encountered one of these strange creatures. I grew up and went to college. There were less of these people around.

I majored in psychology. I developed an interest in the work of BF Skinner and learning theory. I had fallen in love with psychology, by taking an introductory seminar at a local college when I was a senior in high school. The professor who inspired me, gave me the wise counsel that if I obtained a BA degree in psychology that and a nickel would buy me a cup of coffee. ( I guess that was a long time ago, judging by the price of coffee today).

It was fun taking book learning and applying that to condition habits in rats. I worried that there might not be many jobs in the rat training field post graduation.

I learned of an opportunity to work with children who were close to rats in their intellectual abilities. I figured there might be some money in that. The arena for this work was a large classroom with an entire wall devoted to a two way mirror. The room was wired for sound. When I looked through the mirror, it was like Alice and her looking glass. I saw disgusting creatures with strange movements, making strange sounds, and oozing bodily fluids and waste products. Again, I wanted to run. I wanted to run back to the lecture halls.

With my scalp squirming like a toad, I entered the room. I would go on to learn how to help these creatures follow directions, feed themselves, use the toilet, speak and dress themselves. I learned their names and to enjoy their personalities and recognize our common humanity.

I learned the power of using food, smells, textures, sounds, and touch to teach and make connections. I didn’t learn how to make my scalp stop twitching, that just happened.

I went on to have a satisfying career helping people with disabilities and it paid for my coffee. In that college I found another way to make a buck.

In college I learned that it was fun to get drunk sometimes. You know, college being that “fountain of knowledge where many go to drink.” I have forgotten where I first heard that line. I was around a lot of people who seemed to be having all sorts of interesting experiences taking all sorts of interesting drugs. Many of the people were interesting to talk to when they were not using drugs. I wanted what they had, but was afraid to go and get it.

I declined offers to get high, with some standard line about reality being enough of a challenge for me, thank-you. I encountered people who had stopped going to class feeling that they were learning more exploring inner space in their dorm rooms. I was uncomfortable about being around illegal activity. Most of the people with drugs for sale seemed nice enough, but some of them were kind of scary. I decided that drug using people made me more uncomfortable and for the most part I stayed away.

I looked for exotic experience, late at night and early in the morning, in the canyons of the college library. The experience was not that exotic, but it felt safe.

Time went by. There was college graduation, marriage, graduate school, children, car payments, a mortgage and the price of coffee kept rising. I needed a part time job, in addition to my full time one. I responded to an notice for a job opening working in a hospital. It was an on call position, which could fit nicely around my full time job and family responsibilities. Problem was that hospitals had always made me anxious.

I had never spent a day in a hospital. I still didn’t like them. People suffer and scream and lose control and die in them. No way was I going to take such a job, unless I really needed the money. I really needed the money. So who would I get to work with in the hospital, drug addicts.

The job was for a social worker, so I would not be directly responsible for bodily fluids and the health concerns of people who were out of their minds, but still. . .

I learned a lot about life from those whose lives had been disrupted by substance abuse. It became my full time job. I learned that if people who have been in the habit of altering their moods with chemicals without a prescription and have had a great deal of trouble braking that habit, it can be quite risky to keep doing that, even a little bit. Many people need lots of support in developing habits that alter their moods that doesn’t involve substance abuse.

I became more aware as to how most people have habits that alter moods with negative side effects that they wish to avoid. I became more aware that I was like most people.

I learned to identify strongly with people with disabilities and with people experiencing difficulties with substance abuse. It is  now time for challenging myself more with identifying with men who will die one day.

When I had to stop working due to the progression of my Parkinson’s disease, there was a new clientele that made me uncomfortable. The future me. Parkinson’s disease is progressively neurodegenerative. If you are lucky to live long enough, the disease can take away the ability to walk, talk and take care of yourself. It can make you forget who you are and see things that aren’t really there. I don’t know where it will take me, only where it has taken others.

I have learned that people who are pretty messed up with being able to do things that I now take for granted, can be interesting to hang out with. I have learned that when your life is falling apart, there are many things that you can do, that don’t have harmful side effects, to cope with changing mood.

I hope that my road to this life will be slow and gradual. I hope that unanticipated joys I have found as my life slows down, will continue to delight. I hope that my loved ones will need to spend little time being interested with the quirks of my mental and physical degeneration.

I find myself counseling myself by writing this. I like what this does for my mood.

I like to think that if you have read this far, there might be something here that could help you. If your life has been torn apart by drugs or disease, if you are on some path of unavoidable decline, if as a man you feel you are losing the thing that you value most, the ability to control your fate, good. Because feeling it is the way to go, while you fight for control as long as you can.

Many of us men are out of control so much more than we usually like to admit, because it is so scary to do so. How we have coped and have helped others to cope with worthy adversaries, has much to teach us on how to cope with the ultimate adversary – the awareness of DEATH. Many of the power tools that we have learned how to use to exert control, can be put into the service of letting go.

The Good Men Project web site is a good place to visit regularly for men who are ready to have conversations with themselves and others about facing death. If you are ready and nobody around you is, please remember that The Good Men Project is ready to help you get started. This start involves picking and choosing for yourself what posts you read, on countless topics. You chose what topics you want to have conversations on with others in your life. The more comfortable you are talking about stuff that is difficult for men to talk about, the more comfortable you’ll be talking about anything.

Please know that I make no claim that I have my pending death all figured out or that I have achieved some state that this is easy stuff for me to talk about.

Please know that I have no service or book or seminar to sell you.

I would like to sell you on The Good Men project. You can have that for free. You can have complete control as how to use it. Come on and join in the conversation.

____
The role of men is changing in the 21st century. Want to keep up? Get the best stories from The Good Men Project delivered straight to your inbox, here.

Photo credit: Getty Images