It wasn’t that I wanted die, I just didn’t care if I did. Life and death were equally
meaningless to me, equally neutral—two sides of the same coin that I would’ve happily passed by
on the street without picking up. I was raised Lutheran protestant.
My parents and whole family were extremely strong faithed. It was the centerpiece to everything.
We did it all—all the sacraments, the traditions, the rules, the beliefs—from top to bottom. When
I was young, the protestant doctrine was just another truth of the world. It was
as real and as true as why you look both ways before you cross the street. As a young child,
your family is your only real snorkel to the universe. What else are you supposed to believe
other than what the people who taught you how to talk and act and tie your shoes and everything
else say? As I got a bit older, though, like most teenagers do, I started to question everything.
Most of my friends weren’t nearly as strong faithed, if they were at all;
and some that were, were of an entirely different faith that fundamentally contradicted mine.
It all felt increasingly strange to me, increasingly hard to make sense of as the reality
of my family and childhood collided head-on with the incompatible reality of the world.
At its core, it was hard to disagree with many of the moral ideals of Protestantism
and Christianity—the ethical righteousness, the communal kindness, the forgiveness,
and discipline. But even at this age, a lot of this stuff just seemed like common sense to me.
And as I got even older, it seemed like these parts didn’t even really need faith at all. It was
only the obscure, big-picture stuff that really needed faith—the parts about God’s will and grace,
salvation, what comes after death, and what the point of all this is. By the time I was seventeen
or eighteen, I had pretty much realized, that all of these parts, all the parts that depended on
faith, were nonsense. Soren Kierkegaard wrote, “…faith simply means: What I am seeking is not
here, and for that very reason I believe it.” But I didn’t believe anymore. I didn’t believe
one could believe in something they didn’t know for any good reason other than desperation or
lack of authentic alternatives. I didn’t believe in the scripture or God. I didn’t believe there
was any purpose to life. I didn’t believe in an afterlife. I didn’t believe in anything.
Following this period of my life, I lost all concern and became fairly reckless.
I just wanted to do anything that would potentially numb the nothingness of being.
As far as ways to potentially go, I have to believe this might be one of the most interesting.
To realize you’re in your last moments of life while in freefall must be one of the most poetic
sensations to intersect the human mind. Initially, when the main parachute failed,
naturally I panicked a little, but with the backup parachute, it felt more like the panic
that would come from falling off a rock-climbing wall while wearing a rope. I just needed it to
catch me. After gathering myself a little, I pulled the cutaway handle and disconnected the
main parachute. This immediately sent me spiraling out of control, though. I managed to restabilize
myself enough, and pulled the reserve handle for the backup parachute. Nothing happened. I pulled
at it again. Still nothing. I don’t know how many times and different ways I pulled on it from here,
but I was essentially just violently and desperately yanking at nothing. There was
nothing there to catch me. The feeling at this point was so beyond describable. Your brain just
can’t comprehend what is happening. It panics itself into an almost psychedelic state of mind.
There must have been just forty or fifty seconds or so between me and the ground.
I know it probably sounds like the most cliched thing one could say here,
but those forty or so seconds lasted for what felt like hours. I don’t mean to say that just as some
sort of expressive hyperbole, but I literally mean they felt like they slowed into hours or even a
whole day. Perhaps a more accurate way of putting it would be that time seemed to almost stand still
or no longer even really exist at all. In the past, I’ve read various works philosophers who
argued that time is a feature of the mind and not actually a property of objective reality itself.
An experience like this really makes you take that seriously.
Merely because of my state of mind, time changed and almost disappeared.
I wouldn’t say my life flashed before my eyes during this, but in some impossibly strange way,
items from my life seemed to fly past me, as if they were floating up from Earth’s surface
into the sky as I approached the ground in super slow motion. I saw my dog, my brother,
several of my current and old friends, my bike, my ex-girlfriend, my computer, my favorite pillow,
my phone, my car, random pieces of clothing, sentimental possessions I’ve held onto,
things I have hanging around my apartment walls, items from my kitchen, some of my favorite foods,
alcohol bottles, I saw dollar bills and credit cards, paperwork, and other miscellaneous
items—they all flew up and passed me into the sky. At first, as I watched these items drift up and
toward me, I found myself thinking about what I had already known now in my adult life.
With death approaching millisecond by millisecond, inch by inch, its impending nature elucidated by
this immediate physical exemplification, all these things that were passing by were about to be gone
forever. Not literally, per se. Of course, they would outlast me physically.
But in the sense that they existed in their form as I knew them exclusively inside my head. And
since my head was about to be no longer, neither would they. And so, all of these things, my life,
the way I saw and understood everything, in but seconds, would ultimately not matter at all.
It would all go nowhere for nothing. But yet, despite this, as these things
seemed to drift passed me, I watched in agony. I had the sudden awareness that the distance
between me and the ground was the distance between me and never seeing my dog again, never seeing my
friends again, never meeting a new friend again nor girlfriend or spouse, never entering into
my apartment or a home at the end of a long day again, never walking down a street again,
never tasting food again, never experiencing any item or person I had ever known again.
We all know, as a concept, that eventually we will do everything for the last time.
There’s no surprises here. But knowing this as a verbal construction verses staring its truth dead
in the eye as it approaches you from mere feet and seconds away is a totally different thing.
In this moment, I not only felt the survival instinct of my unconscious mind kick in,
but I also felt an immense despair and desire for life on the conscious side of my being, as well.
This may seem less than interesting to you, but to me, seeing as how for the prior several years of
my life, I was convinced that life didn’t matter, and I didn’t care if I died or not, the fact that
everything mattered so much in this moment, even something as simple as just the kitchen spoon I
preferred to use, was revelatory. I realized in all of this that the significance of these items,
the significance of my life, was not about what it all meant beyond me or beyond this life.
Made clear by the clarity of death, even though none of it was coming with me into the ground,
it all still mattered. The meaning, the significance, came from me while I was alive.
It was around this moment that I sort of came back to. Definitely not fully,
but at least more than I was. In perfect irony, though, I realized simultaneous to realizing that
I actually wanted to live, that it didn’t matter that I now realized this. There was no hope. I was
falling at 200 feet per second toward Earth’s ground. But yet, despite this, I tried anyway.
I flattened my body and tried to slow my descent as best I could. I scanned the area around me and
located a nearby lining of trees and aimed toward it. More and more the trees grew from what looked
like one large mass of moss on Earth’s surface to individual, separate objects growing in size and
detail. Without even thinking, I positioned myself upright, put my legs forward, back straight,
shoulder ups, hands on my head. Then, black. It felt like I was passing over to some other
realm of existence. I remember thinking to myself in one burst of dimmed consciousness,
perhaps I was wrong, perhaps there is an afterlife. But in another subsequent burst
sometime later, I realized, unless they carry you to heaven on a stretcher in a helicopter, I was
either hallucinating, dying, or somehow surviving. It was mostly all black again for a while.
I awoke in a hospital bed several days later. How could I have possibly survived such a thing,
you’re probably wondering. Why did I? What does it all mean? Admittedly, I wrestled with all of
these sorts of questions for a period of time after. But one of the many things I realized
from this whole absurd incident is that things don’t have or need grand reasons or explanations
beyond themselves. Why did I jump out of an airplane? Why did my parachute fail? Why did my
backup? Why did I survive? How did I? Why did I think about sky diving in the first place?
Why was I born as someone who became someone who did? Why was I born someone at all?
Why was the world and universe? These questions ultimately get you nowhere with nothing.
But that’s just it; you don’t need them to go anywhere with anything as long as you are here.
That’s where all questions and answers ultimately start and end, anyway—you, here, and now.
The leap of faith in life, I now believe I’ve discovered, is not in believing that some meaning
or point exists beyond you or this life. There is likely is nothing to hope for or believe in
after the moment of impact. But the real leap of faith is in believing that what exists down here
on the ground, right now, what you can know and experience while you can know and experience,
is enough. “I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether
I can live with what I know and with that alone.” wrote, what has since the incident
become one of my favorite writers, Albert Camus. I have not become naïve. I know there is no hope
for any grand gesture or reconciliation of life. I know it is all for nothing, everything
made futile, mocked ultimately by death’s approaching supremacy. But the question is,
can I survive in the face of this hopelessness? Can I care and try anyway? I did it once already.
I leaped from the abstract realm of the heavens, 15,000 feet up, and landed down on the material,
earthly grounds of reality and survived—and with reason to. My story is a hymn for the absurd.