We had a bet

Another on matters of consciousness, and then some

Joe, Q-Dog, and Murphy (the car) many years ago

It’s been 3.5 months since Joe Riley, “my” Joe, died. For much of that time I avoided pen and paper, keyboard and screen. Writing about my experience felt at odds with being in it, and I needed to be in it all the way. Especially for the peaks, the troughs, the stories, there were no words.

Now there are.

Death is a threshold, a doorway, a ticket to a home we remember hazily if at all, a state and dimension to which we return when our bodies call it quits. Death is mysterious and magnificent, as close to the opposite of “ending” as I can imagine.

I mean Death itself. Dying--the often painful deterioration that precedes the shift from the physical body to something else--that I don’t look forward to at all. Death is what happens when Dying is done. That’s how I see it.

My friend Joe saw it differently.

He doubted there was anything outside the brackets of birthing and dying. He was sure there was “something bigger going on” in the realms within and beyond the body, but operated from the premise that awareness, “mind,” requires a physical brain. I.e., all sense of self ceases when the brain dies. With a PhD in neuroscience, he thought the living brain and the experience it makes possible were amazing enough to focus on.

Gifted with a bullshit-resistant mind, he poked holes in “proofs” of consciousness beyond life. He’d had a few psi experiences of his own, but viewed everything through the lens of the living brain. Mind/body connection while alive—yes. He understood for example that Tibetan buddhists of sufficient skill could regulate their own autonomic systems when meditating. But to him, energy healing was the placebo effect in action, and NDEs were examples of the threatened brain’s astounding ability to substitute imagination for reality.

I view the brain, the body, and the entire biofield as an expression of an omnipresent something—call it Source. Isness. The I AM. Creator. God Prime. Joe didn’t. With respect, though. Never in 24 years did he mock my conclusions or my experiences. He just considered my conviction that consciousness is more cause than effect unproven, and most claims supporting it, suspect.

Joe was a bottomless well of information. We talked about everything from primatology to politics (fields far less different than one might suppose), cosmology, history, ethics, poetry, physics, religion, evolution. Our shared excitement about the weirdness of quantum mechanics brought us close, but if I raised topics like the consciousness of water, telepathy, remote viewing, energy healing, morphic resonance, etc., Joe would either quietly sigh, show no interest, or challenge the evidence. When it came to consciousness, we stood on opposite sides of an unfinished bridge, close enough to swap ideas but not to leap across and stand together.

One day, out of sheer exasperation, I proposed a bet. I bet him that when he died he’d find out he wasn’t dead after all, and that only his body was. He bet that he’d disappear into the great nothing, the “That’s All, Folks” at the end of the story. Granted, if he was right, neither of us would ever know. But if I was right...

That was a year or so before Joe got sick.

Joe had a lot of experience with managing pain and physical challenges due to a catastrophic illness in his 30s that had eventually receded but had never entirely ended. He was, in the classical sense, a stoic. A compassionate stoic with an irrepressible sense of humor. So when a new set of symptoms prompted him to say, “this might be It,” I reminded him of the bet.

Months later, amid various side effects and cascading complications, and midway through a shared lament about the nation’s politics, Joe said, “What if I get over there and find out we’re both wrong?”

I couldn't repress my smile. “Think about it, Joe. If you get over there and there’s a you to realize we’re both wrong, I STILL WON THE BET!”

He “alerted" for a second, then groaned and laughed. “Okay. Yes. I guess I walked right into that one.”

Later, as Joe's condition worsened, we talked about how he could let me know if I’d won the bet. (“If” was his word. “When” was mine.) I said I didn't care how he did it as long as it was something unmistakable. Something that would cut right through my mind’s dust devils of doubt and grief—something perfect and intense that I’d know without doubt was from him.

He quietly said he still thought he’d win our bet, but hoped I would. For the umpteenth time during his illness, I tried to smile through tears.

Joe’s body gave up just before the winter solstice. Heart attack in his home, sometime in the wee hours of Thursday morning. I found out from one of his sons late that afternoon. It took me a long time to stop shaking. I felt like a shattered glass.

Friday and Saturday are a blur to me now. I remember a fetal position on the couch, fistfuls of tissues, a muddle of grief for myself, relief for Joe, hearing from family and friends. One friend said, “There's an angel next to you. It's waiting for you to breathe.”

On Sunday, Joe let me know I’d won the bet.

…to be continued…

Author’s note: Through these months I’ve also been watching my country lurch toward the future. This image from Dr. David Clements helps me keep my balance and faith:

If you pour a slow steady stream of clean water into a glassful of mud, the water eventually replaces the mud. First, though, the mud rises, overflows the rim, and makes an unholy mess. We’re in the unholy mess. Let’s make sure the water keeps pouring down.