Passage by Connie Willis (2001)

I read this book at the suggestion of my friend, Clyde. He lent it to me about three years ago and it sat on my shelf until this week, when he asked for it back. So I spent every spare moment for the last two days reading this almost-600-page novel.

Though somewhat formulaic, this is incredibly intelligent and ultimately moving novel. It deals with death, from children with terminal disease to embalming practices, but its central concern is with Near-Death-Experiences (NDE’s), or, more precisely, with what NDE’s may tell us about the universal experience we will all participate in: death.

While I was expecting it to be a lot of sappy stuff about the “light at the end of the tunnel,” it turns out to be a far more convincing reading of the experience we will all face. The book seems intelligent in the way it deals frankly with NDE’s and neuroscience, giving us plenty of detail about both.

For me, the most powerful feature of the novel was the way the central character, Joanna Lander, experiences death as going down on/with the Titanic (the light at the end of her tunnel is the deck of the Titanic). The most chilling and abiding of those images comes as one of her old teachers explains how another character, a patient who dies in the ER at the hospital where Joanna works, speaks some cryptic words (and hear I’m going to spoil part of the plot) that suggest that he too was on the Titanic as he was dying. When she asks an old high school teacher what this means, he points out that the reason the Titanic holds such fascination for us, the reason we have produced so many books, films, and television specials on it, is because we all recognize it for what it is: an image of death. Alone on the ocean, confident in the ability of modern technology to forestall the inevitable, we hit something, we take on water, and we struggle as long as we can to keep the lights on, to keep playing music, only to sink, inevitably and out of reach of any help, we all sink, we sink to the bottom of the ocean. We die.

Though the book moves beyond this image to try to understand how NDE’s might be related to the chemistry of the brain at the time of death, it is the image of the Titanic, in fact, it is the notion of the possibility of images that unify for us the death experience, and the possibility that I will probably go through an experience myself, as my brain is dying, that resembles the sinking of the Titanic—the desperation, the “calls” for help, the attempt to “keep the lights on” as long as possible--that is haunting me.

Just a few years ago I had no worries about death. I had every confidence that I had it all figured out. Dying was nothing to fear. It was just stepping from one room into another, another room where I would walk streets of gold and be with all my loved ones forever. But now I am less sure. I hope for something. I hope for some Divine presence to spirit me, and those I love, into some other place, but, as Tolstoy said on his deathbed, when being urged to return to the (Orthodox) Church before it was “too late”: “even at one’s death, two plus two doesn’t equal six.”

So, last night I went to bed with Joanna on the sinking Titanic, and me, looking forward not to pearly gates, but to my own Titanic. I hardly slept. I’m exhausted.

It would be so nice to just believe the beautiful fairytales, but how does one believe something that doesn’t seem true? Jesus’ words, “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?” sound so much more real than any sermon I’ve ever heard on heaven.

Of course, at the end, Willis’ novel is just an imagining of what it is like to die (though a more compelling and realistic one than, say, Alice Sebold’s)—an imagining based on people’s last words, NDE’s, and neurobiology—nobody knows what it is really like, but we seem to know, when we see the Titanic, what it is we are seeing.