Sitting at a bar eating pizza with my wife and chatting with a friend from an earlier time in my life, I learned that I was a likely candidate for a feature obituary when I die. The friend, who I hadn’t run into in years, oversaw the obituary department at the state’s largest newspaper, and the reason for this sobering candidacy was my 16-year tenure at a local private university during a period when the institution was growing fast and making a name for itself.

Dan King photo

A feature obit is when the newspaper writes and publishes those final words about your now former life, rather than surviving family members doing the work and paying for publication.

This news caught me off guard and warranted the order of a second beer. I guess it’s kind of an honor, a feature obit, but the knowledge of its possibility forces you to think about the unthinkable: Your glorious departure from this veil of tears, also known as your impending doom. Oy vey!

Interestingly, soon after that encounter I read a book with the bizarre title of “If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal” and subtitled “What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity.” The author argues humans would be better off, evolutionarily speaking, without our vaunted superior intelligence. Our unique gifts of language, art, science and philosophy do not make us any happier than other, less gifted species. In fact, being smart tortured Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher of the title. What’s so good about being super intelligent if we blow ourselves up with atomic bombs or cook the planet burning fossil fuels. Plus, adding insult to injury, we’re the only species on Earth we know of that’s aware of our eventual death.

This knowledge is called “death wisdom.” Fortunately, our brains are hardwired over millions of years of Darwinian evolution to compartmentalize (“I’ll just put that ugly little thought right over there for now”) and to focus on the present (“Today I will not be eaten alive by a saber tooth tiger”).

Knowing you are going to die can be a gift or a curse, depending on your personality and how you look at it. If you’re one of those “death gives life meaning” people that wakes up every morning with a carpe diem (seize the day!) attitude, death wisdom is a gift, of sorts. If you tend to dwell on the darker aspects of existence, like our Mr. Nietzsche (“If you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back at you.”), you’d be better off having been born a narwhal. Or a turtle or a cow. Pleasantly oblivious to the human curse of foreknowledge.

I must admit I’m torn here. I like being human. Pretty sure I’d prefer it to being a dung beetle. Or a banana slug. Or a sea cucumber. Even if those simple-minded creatures spend nary a second of their contented lives contemplating their eventual nonexistence. They also don’t get to read and write and walk and eat pizza and drink beer at a bar with my wife. Of course, I may feel differently in the years ahead, depending on how things go in this fragile, fragmented and often frightening world. These be troubled times, to be sure.

But for right now, I just won’t think about it.

Steven Price is a Kennebunkport resident. He can be reached at sprice1953@gmail.com.