The forever moment of death

2. Confessions

The control stick of an F-18 Hornet has three pounds of breakout force. I can tell you that fact, but not why I remember it. The number is trivial, a stored image that crowded out something in my mind which could be more useful, more beautiful, or at least more joyous. I don’t remember when I learned it, except that it was probably in a windowless classroom at Navy Test Pilot School. I can still hear the shuffle of feet against the blue carpet in the schoolhouse, still smell the mold and jet exhaust that mixed with the cold air conditioned air on muggy summers, but I don’t remember what day or what instructor taught it to us. I don’t remember whose bald head reflected the overhead fluorescent lights while he drew a graph on floor to ceiling whiteboards. An impression of Richard Feynman sticks to mind, but mostly because of the way that nameless instructor would have reached high on the boards as he wrote equations and drew graphs. I can draw the graph from memory. Maybe I have a fuzzy memory of sitting in the plane, taping a cloth tape measure to the dashboard and holding onto the control stick as gingerly as my sweaty palms would allow while staring intently at the comically small dial that was supposed to tell me the stick first moved with three pounds of force. But then again, I don’t trust that memory; there’s no feeling in it. 

That lesson was a non-event, except that sometimes ideas are more important for what they mean than what they are. We never know which ones will be important until years later. Because I never gave a shit about how the plane used the breakout force, but these days I’m thinking a lot about the moment it represents. In the plane, it was the moment when the plane went from not moving to pirouetting through the sky, attacking imaginary enemies through feats limited only by my imagination and courage. First there was before, then there was after, but the breakout force was the meeting moment. In mathematical terms it's a discontinuity: a place where our understanding blows up to infinity. In spiritual terms it's the present moment: right now. In poetry it’s the whole world.

I’ve had two good friends commit suicide with a gun — another mechanical system. I shied away from talking about it. In my imagination, it always led somewhere bad, either a “how could we have known'' pity party or a moral judgment of their failures. I’m not interested. But I think about it a lot. A gun, like an airplane, has a breakout force. The breakout force of a Glock 19X is five pounds. When my friends were pulling less than five pounds of pressure, nothing happened. As soon as they hit five pounds, the firing pin sent the bullet exploding through their skulls. Before five pounds, their lives were raging with pain and despair and hurt. Bad enough to make them seek relief with a bullet. After five pounds, they were gone. And the rest of us try to decide if they were good people, if their honor is attached to what they did in life or how they chose to end it.

But I’ve been thinking about that moment in between. I wonder what exactly happened to them – to their selves. Did the moment pass like every other 1/1200th of a second (the time it would have taken for the bullet to end their lives), or did consciousness expand to make that fraction of a second all of eternity? When the weight of the trigger against their finger went from heavier and heavier to suddenly lighter, did they feel regret, relief, anything? Maybe they joined the lines of great warriors, from the Roman generals to the Samurai of Japan, who found honor in self-sacrifice. Or maybe the self-righteous are right and they’ve damned themselves for eternity. They’re the only ones that can know.

Some nights, I used to sit in my closet, engulfed in darkness and only feeling the weight of the FN HP9 pistol resting in my hands. The knurled metal against my palm felt good, the cold steel steadied my hand. It was even ennobling. I felt no shame sitting curled up; that came later. At the time, I felt intense curiosity, I felt courageous, free even, I felt alive. Isn’t it ironic that contemplating causing my own death made me feel alive? But I would be in control, or so I told myself. I could take action. I could choose to find out the truth (about who we really are, about eternity, about pain), if only for that singularity of a moment that would expand to all eternity.

But truth is scary. So is sharing this. Knowing that someone else can’t possibly understand the fascination, the curiosity, or if they did they are unlikely to admit it and offer a little bit of grace, I’m going to share it anyways. But then again, those memories are all a little fuzzy, overshadowed by the feelings that came later, unlike the engineering design of the airplane. And I’m still working on being open to that singularity. It’s something I work on every day.