The Wisdom (Teeth) of Philosophers

The only person I ever punched in the face is dead. His name was Seneca, like the old Roman philosopher. About the time I read his obituary, I died too.

I was working night watch at a GM plant outside of Detroit and, thermos full of hot water and backpack full of teabags and textbooks, I attended university in the mornings. Nine a.m., Ancient Greek. Latin right after. Then some history classes. On a welcome spring break my senior year, I arranged to have my wisdom teeth removed. By the end of that appointment, I was dead. Then resurrected. And dead twice more. Three times I died, giving Christ a run for his money and speaking of whom, I was already on my way to leaving Jesus, my faith behind.

On the day of my wisdom teeth extraction, there were several…peculiarities? Someone else with my first and last name was also at the oral surgeon at the same time. I remember seeing him walk in and give his name. He wore red-and-black plaid and a trucker hat, gray bearded, and had the awkward high step shuffle of a person who’d seen some knee or hip injuries in his time. His soft coughs made me think of someone who hadn’t stopped trying to clear his throat for a decade.

Then I was back in the oral surgeon’s suite, with a mask over my face receding into what they call twilight sleep. I woke up on the floor. When the oral surgeon hollered for the office staff to call an ambulance, my now-ex-wife thought it was for this other, older, more infirm doppelganger.

I coded again soon after arriving in the emergency room. Bedecked in leads and electrodes, I came out of another episode. A very young ER doc had asked my (now ex-) wife what I was studying at university. He spoke to me in clear, over-enunciated syllables: he asked me what day Julius Caesar was assassinated.

It was something I knew so well I didn’t have to think about it. My answer was recitation; autopilot. I was majoring in Latin. And history. I’d declared a minor in philosophy. I spent five full years—including some summers—taking classes. I was done filling out the extra paperwork to further declare to the school, the world, that I was overeducated.

This is why he asked me about Julius Caesar. He told me I was under—yes, under was the term he used, as if I had been put under anesthesia—for just under four minutes. He didn’t tell me the duration of time under, but I later got a copy of the rhythm strip: three minutes and fifty-three seconds. Four minutes is legally brain-dead. I keep this strip in a folder within a plastic storage bin in my garage as some token or talisman. I’ve never been able to decide.

But I knew I had died.

I wish I could tell you that in those four minutes I met Jesus Christ. Or, as Mitch Albom might tell us, I met up with certain pivotal people in my life who taught me poignant, meaningful lessons about accepting death. No, none of these things happened. For me, it was no more, no less than a deep slumber. The doctor was right—I was under. And it was unlike any sleep I’d had in my life. There was some aspect of consciousness, I think. It really was just wading in the inky fountains of deep absence, nothingness. It’s no wonder why we use the term, under; no wonder why the ancients situated the afterlife in a craggy underworld surrounded by black rivers, one called Lethe, the river of Oblivion. Nevertheless, people have always wanted to hear about God or Jesus; something—anything—hopeful in the end. Well, what’s so wrong with oblivion?

Forgotten Boy

I was The Forgotten Boy, given to God as a toddler on his way to a life of servitude. Puer oblatus, as they refer to the practice in Catholicism, in Latin of course. I was not raised Catholic as my mother had converted from Catholic to Baptist a few years before my birth. And she’d be sure to label herself as an independent Baptist, not one of those Southern Baptists. I have two older siblings who were baptized into the Church as infants. I was not.

After her Protestant conversion, my mom took her faith very seriously, running from some childhood trauma she has neither divulged nor acknowledged to this day. Instead, she gave her problems to God. Meanwhile, she had high hopes for me.

I was already exhibiting symptoms of autism spectrum disorder. I hated being touched and preferred being alone. By age three, I knew all the presidents in order, by heart. I memorized more Bible verses than anyone in the church we attended. I also understood the tenets of the faith enough to ask Jesus into my heart. This happened on the way home from visiting my dying grandmother in the hospital. I remember the moment clearly—how my mom used to let me stand in the front seat, rather than sit. This was a few years before seat belt laws were enacted in Michigan, before child seats.

So, instead of sneaking her infant son past the Pearly Gates of heaven through some religious loophole like infant baptism, in the weeks after my pint-sized road to Damascus, my mom took me before her church. This was a Sunday night. The old hymn, Just As I am, played on the organ behind us. My butt rode on her hips, mom-saddle-mode. She dedicated my life to Christ. The pastor asked her something I didn’t understand. I remember the hand-me-down white-and-brown tessellated parallelograms on my button-up shirt. I recall the highwater pants and white tube socks bared for the whole congregation to see.

The pastor asked everyone to bow their heads and close their eyes as he prayed over us.

There were fewer people in Sunday night services. Sunday nights, our pastor said, were for the faithful. Some might even say zealots.

For me, in Bumfuck, Michigan, I was a latchkey kid; watching cartoons, reading comic books, and counting down the days until I could play with kids at church. In Sunday School, I’d watch felt-board stories—cut-outs of Bible characters that clung to felt boards—to learn Bible stories. Once, twice, three times a week times a week, Mom would go “winning souls for the Lord” and drop me off at various church members’ houses for babysitting. This was before my dad left her.

There was that same family who drove an AMC Gremlin and had plastic covering on their couch. Their son, tasked with watching me, flipped on a channel with game shows while he smoked pot in another room. He told me a skunk got loose in the house, though he’d taken care of it.

An older woman, old enough for her kids to be grown and out of the house, let me watch Inspector Gadget and play with her miniature Schnauzer, Pepper.

A teenager who died of cancer two years later babysat me in the basement of the local township hall where our church met.

There was the daycare in the Cobblestone building in the downtown area of Sturgis. It was so loud, so boisterous with children and mirth, I cried and colored in a coloring book in the corner. I would have nightmares about it until early adolescence, about the same time I could stay at home alone for extended periods.

In my senior year of high school, I remember writing a quick note and sticking it in the envelope: a graduation invitation to my estranged father. I knew he had cancer, but I didn’t know the extent of it. I just knew he never responded or acknowledged me through back channels. Less than a year later, he was dead. Contemporaneous to this, my mom was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Her odds were 50-50.

I did the best thing I could in that situation: I bargained with God. I declared I would become a pastor and enter the ministry, thus fulfilling my childhood dedication. I married the girl I’d dated for a few years, because that’s what I thought God would want.

All the while, I couldn’t shake my disbelief. I scrabbled hard to make sense of the evangelical Christian worldview—the Earth is only six thousand years old; evolution, the fossil record is a lie from the devil or whatever was the explanation du jour. I couldn’t understand why Christians voted like they did. I didn’t understand the hypocrisy.

After a semester, I transferred to the university I had originally intended to go to. I took Latin. I took Greek. I interacted with others like me. I listened to more music and read more books that challenged my carefully curated worldview.

A year into studying Greek, I realized the most common translations of The Bible were riddled with errors. My pastor at the time had always said it was bound to happen as a result of imperfect humans transmitting the Word of God through time.

In my studies, I remember reading about Venerable Bede. He was given to the monastery as an oblated child when he was seven. He was a biblical and historical scholar. Did my mother do the Protestant variation to me?

But, when I died during my wisdom teeth extraction, I realized I had no more excuses. The Forgotten Boy had emerged on the other side of belief and remembered himself. Or, given the nature of my disorder, each death had given way to a new resurrection. And likely the loss of some brain cells, but that’s whatever.

One night soon after, driving home with my ex-wife, I told her about my doubts. She sobbed. She told me she feared for my soul, but over and over she wondered how she could marry someone like me.

I never really knew what she meant by “someone like me” though. She never understood my inner workings—not intellectually, emotionally, not even in an academic sense, never mind the neurodivergence. The rudimentary form of her love was most often a wasp’s nest of her hurt feelings and what we now casually call gaslighting.

We had met at a summer Bible camp. We wrote enough letters to each other, I started to think I was in a Jane Austen novel.

Her father was a pastor. Her mother? I’m not sure what to make of her other than she once accused me of being a pornography addict because I bought an issue of Uncanny X-Men.

Red-Handed

Through the years, I’ve had many people ask me what led me to lose my faith. My reply is simple: it was never any one thing. I didn’t stop believing, so much as it slipped away. I came to terms with the fact that I just wasn’t capable of mustering much in the way of belief.

I have a friend I got to work with for a summer after my first year of teaching. This same friend was raised Catholic but was immersed in the summer of his agnosticism, having recently dropped out of seminary. One afternoon in June, he opened the trunk of his car, though not before some hesitation. In it was a large gold leaf crucifix, some rosary beads; a copy of The Vulgate and books of biblical commentary; a painting of a saint that stuck out of the pile like a tombstone. I immediately made an analogy: he kept his dead faith in a trunk like a body he was trying to hide. In flagrante delicto. Caught in the act, as it were.

Within months, this friend was on his way to converting to Judaism. I celebrated my first Shabbat, drank my first Manischewitz, with him. By the end of the year, he’d moved on to the next faith. His newest religion is Trumpism.

I told my present-day wife that when it comes to one’s ability to believe, we were all born with a certain number of crayons that allowed us to color in the lines of faith. My friend, Jewish gain, was born with the Crayola 120-count box of crayons. Me, I think I was born with the restaurant two-pack they give kids to play tic-tac-toe and scribble stick figures.

I am at peace with my inability to believe, and I can’t say anecdotal evidence doesn’t support me from time to time.

A close childhood friend committed suicide only a few years ago. He had been a respiratory tech at a hospital close to where we grew up but got fired for drinking on the job. A few years later, his younger brother found him dead in a house his slumlord dad owned. He tied a sheet to a cupboard handle in his kitchen, then noosed himself with the sheet. He knelt down—and this is how his brother found him. Part of me wonders if it was the old David Carradine method, that he died of autoerotic asphyxiation. It is possible, though statistically unlikely. I think about his last moments often because at any point, he could have stood up off the cheap linoleum his dad never bothered to replace. He did not.

This was his choice.

His family refuses to talk about anything to do with it.

Instantly taboo.

They didn’t hold a funeral.

They didn’t talk to anyone: a life scuttled by alcohol and hypocrisy.

He and his family are Christians, and I don’t suppose I understand an unwillingness to address suicide within the Church if, as evangelicals teach, we always end up in the arms of God if we’ve accepted Jesus in our hearts. This friend was close enough to have shared laughter, hijinks, secrets. His family chose oblation; he chose oblivion.

Seneca, the philosopher and not my old classmate, said this: death is nonexistence and what care do we have for what preceded our lives. This is where I went when I died, To nonexistence. Avalon? Shangri-La? We imagine nonexistent places all the time.

I have a made-up place. It’s the graveyard inhabited by my old beliefs, where there are statues, mortuaries of memories and fates never fulfilled. One of which is me, offered up as a child in a swaying Sunday service, as puer oblatus.

Life Beyond Death: The Mitch Albom Part

 Maybe, by now, you’re wondering if I’ve died even more times and the answer is yes. Several. I wish I could tell you I came out of these experiences with some answers. It is why you came here, right?

In addition to teaching philosophy, I spend nights teaching English as a Second Language to immigrants at a local college. I spend my day job tilling the intellectual ground of young minds with the hope that one day, these students will, if nothing else at all, ask the right questions in life.

As it concerns my night school students, I make them read. A lot. I would never subject them to Kant or Wittgenstein. Not even Plato. But these are people coming from disparate geographical places equipped with their own backgrounds and, dare I say it, beliefs. I tell them the best way to learn English is to read a book. I point them to Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven. The English is honest, short, straightforward. Its relatability makes it readable for them. Dealing with our mortality is a struggle we endure irrespective of creed or culture.

When I teach the novella, I think of the lost family or friends; those who would make my list of people to meet on the way to the ever after. What are those nebulous, but pivotal moments that shaped my life—and who are the people involved?

Caesar’s Ghost—not the kind that skulks around in chains at midnight or who brings loyal, dutiful children candy on March 15. This should be a thing, right? Maybe beat effigies of Brutus and Cassius?

Caesaris astrum, Caesar’s Star.

After Caesar’s assassination, Romans saw a comet throughout the summer. Though to the Romans, it was the ghost of Caesar ascending into ranks of the gods. Even now, it’s said to have been the brightest comet to have appeared in our recorded history, even attested to in ancient Chinese sources.

In the days and months that followed my dental-chair-swoon into oblivion, I had plenty of time to think. Yes, I wondered, in a no religion specific but inspired by Dante way, if Caesar would have been my guide in the Underworld?

Nevertheless, we’re not all historical linchpins like Caesar. We have our own lonely, unsung journeys around the sun—a perihelion they call it in astronomy. If we are fortunate, the memory of our perihelia manifest light in our respective firmaments. But like when the doctor asked me about the Ides of March some two thousand years ago—I had to remember. Because resurrection is remembrance, a banishment of the forgotten. Into the deep we go.