Death and Time 29-29
Perception of Time
This is an excerpt from One Family, which will be published as a paperback on December 10.
When my memory plays tricks on me, often the issue relates to time — the order of events and their duration. My perception of time varies with my emotional involvement in what is happening, as well as with my age. Time drags for a child and races ahead for someone as old as me. The final moments of a sporting event can remind us of the variability of time.
Because of rules that stop the clock, the last two minutes of a football game or a basketball game can go on and on, with reversal after reversal. I particularly remember the Harvard-Yale game of 1968.
It was the last game of the season, and both Harvard and Yale were undefeated. But Yale had Brian Dowling at quarterback and Calvin Hill, a future star for the Dallas Cowboys, at halfback. Undergraduate Gary Trudeau had made them two epic heroes in his Bull Tales comic strip in The Yale Daily News. We were sure to overwhelm our arch rivals.
At one point Yale led 22–0. And with 42 seconds remaining, they led 29–13. Then in a series of impossible flukes, Harvard scored 16 points. The headline in the Harvard Crimson the next day read “Harvard Beats Yale 29–29.”
(42 seconds? In The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, that number is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.)
A 2008 documentary brings that game to life, with actor Tommy Lee Jones, who played for Harvard in that game, as himself. That movie is now available streaming on YouTube. Search for “Harvard Beats Yale 29–29.”
Having endured the agony of that game (from the Yale side), my perception of time has been skewed ever since. And that distortion has been reenforced repeatedly since then by last-minute changes of fortune in critical football and basketball games. Now I see that as a good thing.
Our lives are limited. X years and it’s over. But those years are made up of minutes, and minutes can miraculously expand during trauma as well as closely fought games.
I’m reminded of the race between Achilles and the tortoise, as told by the Greek philosopher Zeno. The tortoise gets a head start. Then, with a single step, Achilles covers half the distance between them. Then with every step, he cuts the distance in half again, but he never catches up with the tortoise, never passes it.
Death might be like that. In your consciousness, time expands — a minute feels like an hour, a second like a year, a nanosecond an eternity. It might be an end point you approach but never reach, as time, for you, expands.
The final minute of a Super Bowl game is a harbinger of that kind of immortality.
No wonder we become addicted to time-limited sports.
My view of the final moments of life was like a 1950s black and white TV, just after you turn it off: The picture collapses into a smaller and smaller area until it becomes a single, bright white dot — and then slowly fades away.
I updated that view to incorporate reports from the Near Death Experience folks about the “very bright, all-encompassing, [warm, loving], white light” that beckoned them to accept Death — and from which they retreated to this life. Maybe the dot on that 1950s TV starts to fade, but then gets bright, bigger and ultimately all-encompassing white light.
My only other consideration of that final moment came from the finale of The Sopranos — when Tony is going about his day and the screen cuts abruptly to black and silence. Critics debated the meaning, but the one that made sense to me was that Tony simply had become the whackee, not the whacker. No more 1950s “fade to black” — just a digital flip switch to all black, instantly.
Does anyone else wonder what those final moments are like? What images or metaphors make sense to you?