Erik Soderborg

Let’s travel to Russia

It’s April 1st, 2008. I’m on an airplane, flying from Germany to Russia.

Rostov-na-Donu, Russia to be more specific. I’ve spent the past 3 months in the Missionary Training Center (MTC), a 39-acre campus owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints located in Provo, Utah.

It’s where newly-called missionaries spend between 2-12 weeks learning more about the church and how to do missionary work, among other things.

One of those other things is learning the language of the country to which you’re assigned and, if you’ve paid attention so far, you could guess which language I’ve been studying for three months.

Russian is not an easy language to learn for us English speakers. It uses a different alphabet with several sounds that our mouths struggle to produce. The average English word has 1.3 syllables. The average Russian word has 3.1. Much of that three months in the MTC involves my mouth and tongue muscles cramping while trying to make these ungodly sounds. Single words seem like paragraphs. I have a pounding headache most days from trying to remember vocabulary words and grammar rules.

There are entire days where we’re supposed to “SYL” – Speak Your Language. This means you try to spend the entire day speaking only Russian in my case, and no English. At the mature age of 19, after three months learning from Russian-speaking Americans and conversing exclusively with your fellow missionaries who speak just as poorly as you, I am ready to fly to Russia and talk about Jesus to the people of the country that produced the likes of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Mendeleev, Kasparov, and Anna Kournikova.

Piece of cake.

I feel confident. Why wouldn’t I? We all understood each other perfectly well in the MTC as we struggled through memorized phrases like:

“Hello, my name is Elder Soderborg.”
“What time is it?”
“How many people do you have in your family?”
“Chapstick.”

Chapstick? Why chapstick?

Well, the course that taught us this wonderful word translates it as – гигиеническая помада – in English letters – gigienicheskaya pomada…

English – Chapstick… 2 syllables.
Russian… see above… 10 syllables.

Remember how I told you Russian is rough. There you go.

But hey, surely people in Russia speak SOME English, so if I struggle with chapstick or any other Russian phrase, I can just explain it with really basic English said slowly and loudly topped off with elaborate hand gestures and they’ll get it. We’ll be fine.

Everything… will… be fine.

Speaking to my first Russian

So that brings me to April 1st, 2008. I’m on a plane from Germany to Rostov-na-Donu, Russia and I’m sitting next to my first real-life, genuine Russian.

I can tell he’s Russian. He looks different. He acts different. He smells different. And he’s definitely not speaking English to his wife sitting next to him. It must be some weird dialect of Russian. I can pick out a word here and there, but not much. He must not speak Russian very well…

I don’t remember his name. We’ll call him Boris, and after several minutes of me mouthing one of those memorized phrases I’ve learned over and over, I muster up the courage to speak Boris – a supposed Russian who speaks very poor Russian in my opinion – for the first time. I lean over to him and nervously force out (in flawless Russian) “What time is it?”

Boris: “Что?!”
Me: “What?”
Boris: “Что ты сказал?!”
Me: Uh oh… he sounds angry… “Uh… What time is it?” – Again, in flawless Russian with a hint of doubt sprinkled in my tone.
Boris: “асдфчаодичфаоисдйф” – At least, that’s what it sounded like to me.
Me: …
Boris: …
Me: *confused look
Boris: “You are American, yes?” (in English with a heavily Russian accent)
Me: “Yes. How did you know?”

He sounds just like the bad guy in pretty much every movie you’ve ever seen. He goes on to tell me that I speak Russian very poorly and he can’t understand me. He tells me that he realized I was asking what time it was, but I asked incorrectly.

“We don’t usually ask the time like that anymore. We ask it another way.”

I was asking the English equivalent of, “Of which hour do you have?” instead of “What time is it?”

He goes on to ask what I’m doing in Russia (all of this still in broken English still by the way. In fact, he and I struggle through our conversation entirely in English from here on out). I tell him that I’m on a church service mission and I’ll be there for about 21 months. He grunts and tells me I’m going to have a very difficult time because I don’t speak well at all.

“Not a lot of Russians speak English, and they won’t waste time trying to figure out your poor Russian. You must learn to speak better.”

Thanks Boris.

I’m not so confident anymore.

We spend the rest of the flight in silence as I try and cope with this man’s complete disregard for my feelings. Surely he understood my first question. Can’t he at least acknowledge that I was doing my best? Maybe mention that I sound alright for only three months of practice? Did he have to use the words “very bad” when describing my speaking ability? That wasn’t very nice.

This was probably just an elaborate April Fools joke he was playing on me. That’s got to be it. Maybe someone was filming this.

Wait, do they have April Fools in Russia?
(No, they do not)

Russians must not have a refined sense of humor like myself.

Russians are blunt

Your perception of Russians may be different than mine was before I went there. I thought that they were all angry, rude, stubborn, and drunk. Always.

Are there some that match that criteria? Sure.
Are there people in every country that match that criteria? Sure.

What separates Russians in my opinion is that they are unapologetically and brutally honest. They are blunt. They will tell you how they feel about you, your actions, your appearance, and your beliefs.

Marry or Murder?

Most of the conversations over the next three months follow the same pattern. I try saying something, I get head tilts, raised hands interrupting me, and the subsequent, “I have no clue what you are saying. You speak Russian very poorly, and I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

I am completely dependent on an older missionary who speaks and understands the language better. 99 out of 100 Russians in this area don’t speak any English. As in, they don’t know a single word of English. I quickly learn that my charades ability is nowhere near as good as I thought it was.

Imagine being surrounded by people who you want to find a way to help, who you want to speak with and get to know, yet you can’t express a single thought. You struggle pronouncing any word correctly, let alone stringing a sentence together. You feel completely isolated, despite being surrounded by millions of people.

No one understands you. No one wants to understand you. You can’t understand a lick of what anyone else is saying. You can’t tell a taxi how to get you home. You can’t order food at a restaurant. You can’t tell if the lady in front of you wants to marry you or murder you… but from her tone… you’re pretty sure it’s the murder one.

I check with the other missionary:

Me: I think I’m following along and I’m understanding most of what she’s saying… but I just want to make sure with you… did she just say that she wants to marry me or murder me?
Him: Neither. She said your neck is bleeding from when you cut yourself shaving.
Me: Oh good. I thought she wanted to murder me. Sorry for interrupting. Carry on. I’ll be over here.

It gets better with time
After about three months in Russia, I started understanding the language better. I started speaking better. The headaches weren’t as common and I was becoming much more comfortable.

The missionary that trained me was at the end of his mission and went home. He was German and there were cultural differences that added friction to my already-rough acclimation.

My new partner happened to be a childhood friend, and he made everyday life much easier to handle. We had the same humor, we knew the same people back home, we both enjoyed the same topics like music, movies, sports, and the craziness of our circumstances. He spoke marginally better than I did to start, which forced us both to have to learn even quicker.

The biggest change that happened was that I slowly started to appreciate the Russian straight-shooter mindset. Sure, it wasn’t pleasant to be told that your tie looked ugly or that Americans are uneducated, fat, and lazy, but at least you knew what that person was thinking. I don’t remember backbiting or gossiping about someone behind their back because they’d say it straight to your face. If someone had a problem with you, they’d tell you, and you could tell them how you felt as well.

Is it all rude?

At the end of my two years, I feel like I spoke Russian reasonably well. Maybe my Russian mission president will comment on this and say otherwise, but I felt very comfortable conversing on just about anything. The reason I felt that way is because, just as they will tell you if you speak “very bad,” they will also tell you directly if you speak well.

Compliments in Russia are genuine. They aren’t forced out of someone in hopes of padding your ego. They aren’t thrown in as an afterthought to break an awkward silence. Russians are absolute masters at paying genuine, thoughtful, blunt, open-hearted, unapologetic, specific compliments.

I need to include people from Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and other Eastern-European countries in this as well. They have this ability to be direct, both with good news as well as bad news.

And, may I be blunt?

I miss it.

The Invention of Lying

The Invention of Lying, starring Ricky Gervais and Jennifer Garner had recently come out around the time I was headed home. It was one of the movies I saw on the 10.5-hour flight from Moscow to New York. The premise of the movie is a world where nobody lies. Everyone is 100% honest. They don’t know what lying is.

Well, the character played by Gervais tells the first lie and things spiral out of control from there.

I love this movie. The thought experiment is interesting and fun and unsettling for me, and it reminds me of Russia.

“Now hold on Erik, are you saying that people in Russia don’t lie?!”

No. I am not saying that. They lie just like all of us. But in their conversations, they worry less about hurt feelings and more about getting to their truth and expressing what needs to be communicated.

It can come across as having a lack of tact. It can come across as rude.

American food has a lot of sugar

When I returned home to America, I experienced a culture shock once again, this time with food. Food here is incredibly sweet. Everything seems to be pumped full of sugars and artificial sweeteners. And I think that is a fitting connection to make. After being away for two years, I noticed that many of the interactions I had with Americans involved a ton of artificial sweetener pumped into every dialogue.

We have those knee-jerk phrases exchanged each and every day. It’s like a dance that we all know the steps to and have to stay in line.

“How are you?”
“Good, how are you?”
“Oh, we’re great!”

Meanwhile, they’re in the middle of a divorce, their dad just got diagnosed with cancer, and their dog died. But hey, everything is awesome! And when this person’s health deteriorates and their job performance suffers and they lose their job as a result…

“Hey, are you okay?”
“Oh yeah! I’m great! Hahaha! How are you?!”

That’s not healthy.

It’s a two way street

The problem in my little brain doesn’t sit solely with the respondent. I am guilty of asking ‘how are you’ without really caring to know the answer – keep reading for an example of when that went wrong. The asker and the askee both fall into this mold and mode of conversation, doing and saying what they are ”supposed to.’

Heaven forbid someone admit that they aren’t doing well emotionally. They don’t want to look crazy. And when you run into someone who breaks the script, it can be unsettling, abrasive, or sound like they are just being dramatic. And if this is how I react to a genuine, honest answer, why did I even ask?

For the first little while after I returned home, I was told on more than one occasion that I was rude. When asked if I wanted to go out with a certain group, I’d say, “No, I don’t want to spend time with that person.” When asked if I liked a certain meal or outfit, I’d share my honest thoughts. Certain former romantic relationships I had before the mission that I didn’t wish to pursue were handled poorly on my end based on the culture in which I now found myself. To be frank, I probably handled them poorly according to any culture’s standards.

I had to reacclimatize to the artificially sweetened mode of communication. I wasn’t intentionally trying to hurt anyone’s feelings, I had just become more blunt than normal. I could never attain Russian-bluntness-status, but I had to become “nicer.”

I think I did. Too much so, in fact.

But now, as I think about it and go back to my time in Russia, which is better? Being brutally honest – or being nice?

And really think about that for a second.

Would you want your spouse, friend, coworker, or server at a restaurant to feel comfortable telling you how they really feel? Or, would you prefer that they wrap their real feelings in sprinkles, glitter, and rainbows to the point that you never really know what they’re thinking?

Would you rather feel comfortable and safe to express your feelings and opinions more openly to these same people – your spouse, your boss, your in-laws – or walking on egg shells hoping that your beliefs on politics, religion, raising kids, or life choices don’t set someone off, get you fired, or get you cancelled?

You don’t know me, you don’t care, don’t ask

Come back with me to Russia, the city of Stavropol this time. I’m walking around on the streets with my missionary companion and I see a babushka shuffling along. She passes by and I stop and ask her how she’s doing. She stops. She looks at the two of us. She asks, “Do I know you?”

“No, you don’t.”
“Then why do you care how I’m doing? I don’t know you. You don’t know me. You don’t really care how I’m doing. You must not be from around here. Don’t ask strangers how they are doing. It’s not your business and you have no reason to care.”

She shuffles away.

That didn’t go how it was supposed to… she went off script. She was supposed to say, “I am good! What are you two handsome boys doing? We should talk about Jesus.”

Turns out, my script was not even close to the final version everyone else was using.

There were countless other times where I’d ask a stranger or acquaintance how they are doing.

“My life is bad. I’m in the middle of a divorce, my dad just got diagnosed with cancer, and my dog died.”

Oh… okay. That explains the sadness. That may explain the smoking habit. That may explain the drinking, the depression, the acting out, the poor job performance.

The cards were on the table. The good, the bad, the ugly, it was all out there and now both sides are making informed decisions about how to proceed with the relationship.

There are moments where I wish I could return to a more blunt culture. It isn’t bliss by any means. It’s uncomfortable and hard, but I still miss it.

Opinions are just that – opinions

We all know that person who walks around being a complete tool shed. You know the kind, insulting as many people as possible and offering their contrarian opinion on just about every topic, most of which they know absolutely nothing. Not to mention the fact that nobody asked for their opinion… and then they say,

“Hey, I’m just being honest.”
“I’m just speaking my truth.”
“I’m just being blunt, did you want me to lie?!”

No.
Stop it.
You’re just being a jerk.
There’s a difference.

It’s important to understand that while a Russian may disagree with you, he or she understands that it is his or her opinion. Just because you hold an opposing opinion doesn’t mean you’re bad person. Just because that person doesn’t like your outfit doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t like your outfit, or that it’s bad, or that you have an irredeemable character flaw that will send you to hell. Opinions are just that – opinions.

Most of the time (not always), their opinions came because you asked for them. Russia isn’t a land where everyone is riding around on bears and insulting each other about clothing choices. For the most part, they are reserved and keep to themselves (Russians… not the bears… do not feed the bears). But if you open the conversation and want to know what they think, be prepared to find out exactly that. No sugar-coating.

Honesty is kindness

I have a goal to be more blunt. I want to be able to express opinions and beliefs in an open, honest way. This has become most apparent to me in a work setting. As I work with vendors, colleagues, or clients, there can be important information that falls through the cracks because I’m trying not to hurt feelings rather than say what I’m thinking.

I have lucked into a company and culture where everyone has the ability to be open, honest, and blunt about topics while still staying polite and kind. In fact, I appreciate the fact that if there is a concern, it’s laid out on the table immediately rather than sweeping under a rug to fester and grow bigger than it needs to be.

I think that bluntness is kindness, as long as everyone is playing by the same set of rules, the opinions are applicable to the situation, and egos are set aside.

Remember Boris? The guy on the flight to Russia who told me I didn’t speak well? As I think back to that conversation, I realize that he was extraordinarily kind to me. Rather than dismissing me and swearing at me under his breath, he took the time to teach me how to ask people what time it is. He gave me a heads up around the pounding headaches I would end up getting. He warned me that people wouldn’t want to talk to me, or give me the time of day, or respect my opinions if I couldn’t express them clearly. It was the kindest thing he could’ve done for me under the circumstances.

Thank you Boris.

Easier said than done

Watch, I’ve just opened myself to criticism by proclaiming to the world, “Just give it to me straight!” and then, as soon as a comment comes back saying, “I really don’t care for your writing,” I’ll huff and puff and write a blog post about it.

I’ve asked for feedback before and been hurt when it wasn’t what I expected. I’ve been asked to give feedback and hurt others when it wasn’t what they expected.

“Sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same.”
-The Fray

I guess what I’m getting at is that I’m making a concerted effort to tell people what I think when appropriate. I’m going on a no-sugar diet. Not real sugar… it’s the metaphor from earlier… Remember? Artificial sweetener = dishonesty… never mind. Just know that I ate an entire sleeve of E.L. Fudge cookies last night so a real-life no-sugar diet isn’t looking too realistic. But a metaphorical sugar-free diet when it comes to how I communicate… I’m working on that.

Maybe not sugar free… maybe just a reduced sugar diet.

We’ll see how it goes and how many people I offend.

If you don’t hear back from me, well… don’t follow my lead.

PS – Have you had similar thoughts? I’d love to hear your story.

Want to know the ending to every real-life story?

I need to warn you though, and this serves as the most epic spoiler alert ever imaginable, so stop now if you want to hold onto any hope you may still have.

You’re still reading?!
Okay, I warned you.

The characters in every real story, every last one of them, no matter how good or bad, no matter how noble or vile, no matter how attractive or grotesque… they all… die.

Bummer isn’t it? We were all hoping for the happily ever after.

Now, your favorite book or movie may end before the chapter describing this final event is ever released, but nobody escapes this most-predictable of endings.

We all inherently know this. We all know that everyone dies, eventually. But we spend as much of our lives as possible trying to push that thought into the deepest, darkest, most remote recesses of our consciousness, hoping to bury the thought until reality reminds us that we can’t avoid it forever, no matter how badly we want to, or how much we exercise, or how much we pray, or how much hair dye and surgery we get.

So what’s the point in caring so much about the story when we all know how it ends?

The Gap

From birth to death, there is this interesting gap. We casually refer to this gap as ‘Life,’ and Life offers different things for each person.

For some, Life is full of fame, riches, and glory, opulence, gluttony, and luxury. Others are damned to poverty, disease, and tragedy, injustice, sacrifice, and pain.

Most, however, are somewhere in between, experiencing a little bit of everything. Life is as diverse as you can imagine, and a wise, fictional character who won over our hearts hit it on the head when he likened life to a box of chocolates. “You never know what you gonna get.”

We are so invested in this Life because, as far as we know, it’s the only one we get. Maybe reincarnation is a thing. If so, I hope to come back as one of my dogs. They have the life. Seriously, they eat all they want, the world is their toilet, endless love, affection, and table scraps from little kids dropping buckets of food on the ground, and the naps. Oh, the naps. But animals don’t treat it the same as we do as far as science can tell. 99.9% of living things simply eat, reproduce, and die. But we humans do more than just eat, reproduce, and die, right?

Our brains have evolved to plan for the future, postulate about a meaning to life, try to explore the stars, and search for answers to nature’s most difficult questions. We have Google and smart devices and YouTube celebrities… surely there’s a meaning to all of this. What is the point to all of the good and bad that happens around us?

Life’s ups and downs

Take the story of an expectant mother, for instance, who cried tears of joy in her bathroom after the brilliant piece of technology in the form of a little plastic device she peed on confirmed what she already felt to be true. She waited until her husband came home from work before she ran and jumped into his arms, and squealed in that high-pitched voice she does when she’s excited, talking so fast that no one can understand what she’s saying because 2, 3, 4 words are blending into one, and she shows him the the two parallel lines.

Phone calls, text messages, and social media posts avalanche from their phones to spread the good news. They have tried so hard, for so long for this day to arrive. Finally.

A few sick mornings later and the ultrasound pictures hang on their fridge with a recording of the heartbeat saved on a thumb drive. Later, a gender reveal celebration happens with blue everything – glitter, balloons, napkins. Congratulations and hugs and new ultrasound pictures with an appendage circled circulate among family and friends.

It takes days, no weeks for her and her husband to agree on the perfect name for their soon-to-be miracle. The classes, the showers, the clothes. The numerous close calls when she almost pees her pants because a baby is resting on her bladder 24/7 (only happened twice).

The restless nights because a baby is pressed against her spine. The super sense of smell and random cravings for any cheap Mexican food her husband can find at 11 PM. The go-bag, ready to be thrown into the car at any hour of the night once her water breaks.

The frantic drive to the hospital, the monitors and the beeping, the hand-holding, and the sweat, and the pushing (thank God for epidurals).

And then… Life begins – with a single, soft, almost inaudible puff of breath.

And then… time slows to a crawl. The seconds start to feel like hours. Her husband looks worried. Why does her husband look worried?! Why are the doctors and nurses crowded around her baby?! What’s wrong?!

She’s screaming, “What is happening?! Where is my baby?!”

Then complete and utter silence.

She is numb, both physically from the epidural and emotionally because it can’t be real.

The shock.

The tears.

She now travels through the darkest, most depressing black hole of despair and pain imaginable. It will follow her for hours, days, weeks, months, and years after she holds the now-lifeless miracle that was destined for something special. He was supposed to learn to walk, go potty by himself, go to school, get acne, learn to drive, have a first kiss, get a job, find love, get married, have kids… he was supposed to have a Life.

But this time, Life only lasted for one, single, short breath.

And now, every year, this mother visits a patch of ground with a polished granite stone inscribed with the perfect name for her perfect little miracle who at one point brought eternal joy and hope and tears of joy. But tears of joy are hard to come by these days. And the cold stone reminds her of the eternal sorrow experienced on that dreadful day.

Why?

How is that fair, or just? How is that part of some eternal plan?
“How come it had to happen to me?!”
If she had a dollar for every time she asked that question, she’d be the richest person alive.

But she goes on searching for meaning in that death because there HAS to be meaning, right?!

God? Helloooo? Are you there?!

What’s your secret?!

Then there’s the centenarian.

The groovy gal who just celebrated her 104th year of Life. She survived women’s suffrage, a world war, polio, civil rights, and climate change. Those major events were a struggle to deal with, but they were a walk in the park compared to watching cancer overcome her husband of 50 years. The chaos of the world is simple compared to the loneliness of living without him for the past 34 years.

She’s also outlived three of her five children, watching powerlessly as they lost battles with time and fought through varying degrees of physical suffering. She’s outlived four of her grandchildren, taken in a variety of ways at various points of their lives.

But now the local news station wants to crowd into her tiny nursing home room and interview her on her birthday. They bring balloons and cameras and enormous, bright lights. Goodness those are warm!

A 20-something year-old reporter throws a microphone into our 104 year old’s face.

The contrast is striking.

This girl, with perfect, smooth, tan skin, and perky assets that seem to defy gravity, and curves in all the right places, and bleached-white teeth, and a $300 haircut, and the scent of perfume engineered to arouse desire, and the eyes of every male (and some females) glued to her as she saunters by. This girl hopes to advance her career by nailing this interview, and asks our frail, wrinkly, saggy, stinky 104 year-old friend:
“How are you so lucky?!”
“What’s your secret?”

“Lucky?! What secret?”

She lives alone, and has for as long as some of you reading this have been alive. She has watched every friend she ever had pass away. Her best friend in elementary school, who would walk with her to school each day (uphill both ways) died 40 years ago of breast cancer. Her first date, who took her to get an ice cream cone and was too afraid to hold her hand until 2-weeks later, died in a car crash when he was in his 20’s (80 years ago). Her coworkers at the job from which she retired 50 years ago are all gone.

Lucky?!

She needs help changing her clothes and going to the bathroom. The food she chokes down every day would make you gag. Her only human interaction is with the nurse making the rounds and checking off the boxes so she can move onto the next room where the guy who “sees things” stays.

Lucky?!

She has almost forgotten what her husband’s laugh sounded like. All she has wanted for 34 years is to see his smile again, or smell his aftershave, or hold any one of her three lost kids on her on her lap and hug them, squeeze them, and reassure them that everything is going to be alright.

She has been ready to experience that final chapter of Life for a long time, but it taunts her menacingly by being close enough to touch, but never close enough grab ahold.

God? You are there, right?! You’ve got to be there.

My experience with death

Admittedly, I’v been sheltered from death up to this point of my life when it comes to family and close friends. The closest experience I have with death is when my dog died suddenly while I was in high school. One minute, I was rubbing her head and telling her goodbye as I headed to school. The next, she couldn’t move, the whites of her eyes were yellow, and my parents took her to the vet to put her out of her misery before I got home. When my dad picked me up from school, he asked if I felt anything in particular throughout the day.

“No, why?”
“We put Kenzie down. She was in a lot of pain and we couldn’t wait.”

I cried for 2 days straight.

Outside of that, I still have both parents, both in-laws, I have my wife, three kids, and two dogs. Not a day goes by that at some random moment, the thought flutters into my mind of – What if?

What if I get the call informing me that there’s been an accident. What if that most recent hug I gave someone really was the last? What if I don’t get a chance to say goodbye?

I’ve had friends and family receive that call. Their lives shattered in an instant. It happened this past year to my stepmom.

“Julie, there has been an accident. Your son didn’t make it.”

He was 27. He had 2 young kids.

It was a car crash. Four other people were in the car. Everyone else in the car survived. He was in the back seat and didn’t have his seatbelt on because he was helping his friend buckle her seatbelt first as the car was speeding out of control down the road.

Click. She’s safe. Crash. He’s gone.
It happened more quickly than it took you to read this sentence.

No goodbyes to parents, kids, and friends.

How is it fair?

Why have I been kept from such heartache while others have had to live through suffering, disease, children who have taken their own life, or other renditions of their very worst nightmare?

I don’t have an answer here.

Life isn’t fair.

It never has been.

What happens after we die?

I remember as a kid being scared to death when my dad went out late at night for his work. I was worried that he wouldn’t make it home. I’d stay up into the wee-hours of the morning, waiting for him to come home, certain that something bad had happened.

About two weeks ago, he and I went to lunch where we ate the most deliciously bad Mexican food. Remember the kind? The same Mexican food our pregnant mother loved for 3 months?

My dad and I reminisced about life and the memories we’ve built together.

While trying to fall asleep later that night, that same old thought that I had as a child slipped back into my mind:

“What if dad dies?”

This thought kept my mind racing again into the early morning hours. When he goes, where does he go? What if it really is just lights out, and all those memories, and the plans we’ve made, and the dreams and hopes and understanding of the universe just dies with us?

I’ve had a knee-jerk reaction to the question of ‘what happens when we die’ my whole life based on the religious system in which I was raised.

“They’re going to a better place.”
“They don’t feel pain.”
“They are happy, and cheering for you, and running around with your dog.”

Since I’ve been quite sheltered from death throughout my life, I hadn’t really thought about it that much.

Until I did.

And it unsettled me.
And it got scary.
And even with a belief or a hope in something after death, it made me nervous.

Beliefs around death

I went on a quest of sorts, researching what I could about death. I read several books and stumbled across a docu-series on Netflix called Surviving Death, which was fascinating and raised even more questions. Disney put out a cute little movie called Soul that addressed the topic. By the way, how can a light-hearted cartoon get me thinking so deeply?

I started asking people around me how their perspective on death has changed throughout their lives. Some have suffered tragedies. Some have experienced the routine loss of loved ones who just grew old. Some, like me, haven’t had anyone super close to them pass away. Others care for patients of all sorts at a hospital or medical facility.

Some hold deep religious beliefs that shape their perspective on death. Others take a more agnostic approach and believe that this life is it, so don’t plan for life after death, live in the now.

While the mode of death is different for everybody, the eventuality of it is the same. While the beliefs in what comes next are different for everybody, none of us can ever be certain that ours is correct.

What if none of them are? Or what if they all are in some way?

Not one of us really knows what happens after death, so I try not to attribute certainty to any of this, but there have been those that have died, according to a clinical definition of both heart and brain activity stopping, and come back. What do they have to say?

Near-death experiences

There are several books and movies about this and I’m not going to recount it all here. There are even studies where researchers have travelled all over the world, into different societies and customs, to document the experiences of those who have survived near-death experiences. There are remarkable similarities in these experiences.

Communication with thought rather than words. Separation from the body and viewing a different dimension of sorts. Time distortion. Warmth. Calm. The feeling of love and the presence of other beings who care about you.

The Light.

I’ve written about my mom’s experience with cancer and gall stones in a previous post, and when she was in surgery having a gall stone removed that had split in two with one section lodging in her pancreas and the other in her liver, she had a remarkable experience that she has shared with me.

I won’t share it here, but it was eerily similar to many other near-death experiences. After the surgery, she asked the doctor if something had happened. The doctor looked surprised and a little uncomfortable.

“Did someone tell you something? Who told you? Yes, actually. We lost you for a minute and had to bring you back. We thought you were gone for good.”

Is there something outside of our understanding of consciousness and Life as we know it? I think so.

I hope so.

So, what’s your purpose?

Where am I going with this?

I haven’t got a clue.

But, whether you have a few breaths left or decades, what is your reason for living? To quote 22 in the movie Soul, “Is all this living really worth dying for?” Remember, most of what you do while alive will be completely and utterly forgotten in 100 years (or less). Yes, even by your posterity. That’s kind of depressing, isn’t it?

Some people seem to have found their calling in life. Their spark (again from Soul), their purpose, their reason for existing. They move through life with this laser-like focus and they stiff arm distractions like Derrick Henry running through defensive backs.

But what if you haven’t found that calling yet? What are you supposed to do with the time you have left?

I’ve been struggling with this quite a bit recently. Every morning, in my drive to work, I speak to a being that I hope is real and I hope can hear me because I say it out loud,

“God, what am I doing here? What should I be doing with this life I have?”

HONK, HONK!

Some ass-hat is honking at me as the light turns green and interrupts my conversation this time. But the response is the same every morning.

Silence.

The main character in Soul had a similar thought:

“I’m just afraid that if I died today, my life would have amounted to nothing.”

Joe

I have no idea what my purpose in life is. I feel like I should be doing something meaningful for the world, even though I don’t know what meaningful really means. I chuckle as I write this, but maybe it was because my mom always told me I was meant for something special, which begs the question, is marketing insurance special? What about writing a blog that only a handful of people read? Or making seemingly every possible mistake trying to raise my kids? Is this considered meaningful?

I’m still working through this.

If you are too… you are not alone.

Maybe I think too much

Maybe I shouldn’t worry about any of this. After all, we don’t officially know. Even science works on faith sometimes.

Us humans like to find predictable results from “If/Then equations.”

If I ______, then _______ will happen.

The trouble with life is that we just don’t have very many predictable if/then truths that happen 100% of the time.

Take a seemingly easy one:
If you eat healthy foods, then you will live longer.
Well… not necessarily.

If you smoke, you will get lung cancer.
Nope, not always.

If you pray, you will get an answer.
Doesn’t always work out that way.

If you are the good guy, then you will beat the bad guy.
Sorry, not true.

If I die, then… what?

So why even try?

Good question. Your answer will be different than mine, and that’s okay. I find hope in the happiness and joy I get from wrestling my kids and making Caitlin laugh until she cries (happy cry), or hearing that someone read what I wrote and had the same questions. Of seeing my friends after weeks, months, and years and picking up right where we left off.

In 100 years, the name Erik Soderborg will likely be long-since-forgotten, and it’s not up to me to control that. There is only so much time I have in this life so rather than spend it worrying about things outside of my control, I’ll try focusing on what I can.

How I treat other people.
How I talk about other people.
How I treat myself.
What I believe in and what I hope for.
What I write and leave behind for my kids.

I hope that there is a higher power waiting for us on the other side with a super high-resolution TV and a killer PowerPoint that outlines this extraordinarily beautiful plan, which, when we finally come to see it, will leave us going,
“Ooooooh… okay… yeah, that makes more sense. I was WAY off, hehe.”

I hope that all the injustices and examples where Life just isn’t “fair” are put into context and we can see the beauty of it all.

Here’s the response from one of my closest friends when I asked him how his perspective on death has changed throughout his life. He is in his residency as a doctor (interventional radiology), a Christian, and one of the most humble and genuine people I know.

“Hey man, it’s interesting timing that you ask. I’m on pediatric surgery and had a particularly bad day on Sunday. We had a newborn born with a giant tumor that needed emergent resection, and she died on the table.

Another kid came in after a car accident and was taken for emergent surgery and died right after we finished. Three other kids came in from car accidents with relatively minor injuries, but had at least one parent die in the accident. It was a lot of sadness in one day, hard to see kids die, but probably harder to tell a mother her son died or watch a 14 year-old realize she’s an orphan.

It’s odd seeing so much death when the majority of my day is spent trying to prevent it.

It does, however, put into perspective the knowledge and power of God. I love biblical accounts of Christ healing because to me it just shows a perfect understanding of the pathophysiology of the human body He created.

I think if you spoke with most doctors, they’d reiterate how little we truly know about the body and disease. Yet we can make blind men see. We can make a dead man’s heart beat again. We can control some aspects of mental illness. If we, with our admittedly limited understanding can perform so called “miracles,” is it of any surprise that our Creator can do the same but on a much larger scale? That He can devise a way to make that same body in the Resurrection but devise a way for it to be free of disease and immortal?

I am in no way comparing a doctor to God or Christ, but if we are expected to become Gods ourselves and create life, at some point in our eternal progression, we will need to obtain the same knowledge God has about life, physiology, and death. It’s cool that I can start down that path, albeit at a snail’s pace, during this life.

Essentially, our inability to fully control death and disease in this life is a reminder to me of how impressive the knowledge and power of God is. I have become more confident in the reality of a Resurrection because I know it is possible.”

How’s that for perspective?

Those nightmarish scenes described by my friend may have played out in your life or in the lives of someone close to you. The weight of an experience like this is unimaginable and our healthcare workers are on the front lines of all of it.

The doctors like my friend who work 100 hour weeks trying to prevent these losses, but have to deliver the awful news to the families of those that don’t make it. Then, minutes later, try to put the sadness behind them and literally run to help another person whose life is on the line. Helping most and losing some, our first responders, doctors, nurses, and frontline healthcare workers see these tragedies each and everyday.

So thank you.

World(s) caving in

What I find troubling is that, in the case of my friend, in a matter of hours there were at least five families who, on that day had their worlds shattered. Their lives caved in on themselves as they lost one or several loved ones in tragic accidents. And scenes like these are playing themselves out every minute of every day across the world.

In fact, I’d be willing to bet that if a tragic loss isn’t occurring in your life this month (which I sincerely hope it isn’t), there is someone that you will interact with this week that is going through something unimaginable. They may not tell you, but inside, their soul is aching beyond belief. The thoughts and hopes and fears we’ve been talking about have crashed through their front door and made themselves at home in every room, every picture, every song, and every thought of the person or persons that have been left behind with sudden, unexpected, tragic, or untimely loss of the person who meant more than anyone else in the world to them.

Keep these people in your prayers or thoughts or whatever you believe brings hope and comfort and peace.

Death is still scary

Death still scares me. I am less afraid of the event of death itself (unless snakes are involved… because snakes are messed up), and more afraid of losing out on the time I would have with the people I care about. Should I die, I feel bad that my kids wouldn’t have their dad around and that Caitlin would have a period of time alone, left to deal with the fallout, and never being able to enjoy my sexual prowess ever again.

“Oh, come on Erik! That was a touching moment you just totally ruined! Gosh!”

Moving on… I guess the point is: focus on what you can control. And, unfortunately, odds are, we won’t be able to control how or when we end this Life, so use your time wisely… you never know how much you gonna get.

Speaking of which, it’s time for me to stop writing and go wrestle my kids.

If any of you have found the answers for yourself, share them for the rest of us. Remember, just because something works for you, doesn’t mean it works for everyone.

And that’s okay.

I like to write. Some of it makes sense, most of it doesn’t, but if you’re into that kind of thing, subscribe and you’ll get notified when I post something new.