Fifteen minutes later from my mom:
It’s over. Rolf took the cocktail. He is leaving us.
Rolf is my younger brother, born a year after me in a small clinic in Jalisco, Mexico. The “cocktail” was the combination of end-of-life opiates he took, which usually ends a human life in an hour or two.
I called Kim, who summarized.
It was a bright morning with a blue sky. Rolf and Lucy [their fourteen-year-old daughter] sat outside and had a long talk in the sun. Rolf came in and said he was ready. He took it at three p.m. He wandered around the kitchen. Checked the fridge. Rambled. I told him it was time to lie down. . . . So we lay down in his bed. After a while he fell asleep. He’s snoring. Here, listen . . .
Kim put the phone up to Rolf’s mouth. I heard the deep, rhythmic vibration of his vocal cords—his death rattle.
My parents are here. Your dad and Nancy are on their way. Can you bring your mom?
We’ll get there as soon as we can, I replied. Thank you, Kim.
I picked up my wife, Mollie, and our daughters, Natalie and Serafina, in Berkeley, then my mom in Sacramento. We arrived at Rolf and Kim’s home in the foothills of the Sierras at ten p.m.
Rolf was lying in a bed downstairs, which he had retreated to in his last weeks. He lay on his stomach and right cheek, his head tilted slightly upward. My dad held his foot. I leaned in near his midsection. My mom was at the head of the bed, stroking his thin hair.
Rolf’s face was full and flushed. The sunken eyes and gaunt cheeks caused by colon cancer were gone; the tightened, sagging skin around his mouth smoothed. His lips curled upward at the corners.
I rested my right hand on his left shoulder, a rounded protrusion of bone. I held it the way I would the smooth granite stones we used to find near the rivers we swam in as young brothers.
Rolf . . . This is Dach . . .
You are the best brother in the world.
My daughter Natalie laid her hand lightly on his shoulder blades:
We love you, Rolf.
The cycle of his breathing slowed. He was listening. Aware.
Listening to Rolf’s breath, I sensed the vast expanse of fifty-five years of our brotherhood. Roaming Laurel Canyon in the late ’60s, spying on rock-and-roll neighbors and skateboarding through Volkswagen-lined streets. In our adolescence, walking the wild foothills of the Sierras, and playing Little League on the Penryn A’s, me pitching, Rolf, a long-haired lefty, on first, a mischievous light in his eyes saying Man, this is fun! As young adults, on wild trips to Mexico, dancing in clubs, wandering in the high Sierras. And then in graduate school, buying wedding suits and being each other’s best man, becoming teachers and fathers to daughters.
I sensed a light radiating from Rolf’s face. It pulsated in concentric circles, spreading outward, touching us as we leaned in with slightly bowed heads. The chatter in my mind, clasping words about the stages of colon cancer, new treatments, lymph nodes, and survival rates, faded. I could sense a force around his body pulling him away. And questions in my mind.
What is Rolf thinking?
What is he feeling?
What does it mean for him to die?
A voice in my mind said:
I feel awe.
My feeling in that overwhelming moment shared some essence with experiences of awe from my past, both big (for example, seeing Nelson Mandela speak after his twenty-seven years of captivity with fifty thousand other people) and small (seeing the dusk light on an oak tree, listening to my young daughters’ duets of laughter). Watching Rolf pass, I felt small. Quiet. Humble. Pure. The boundaries that separated me from the outside world faded. I felt surrounded by something vast and warm. My mind was open, curious, aware, wondering.
A couple of weeks after Rolf’s passing, Kim brought together friends and family to tell our stories of Rolf. We talked about his fascination with clowns and magic tricks, and how he loved to cook for crowds of friends and enthrall neighborhood kids with his over-the-top Halloween costumes. From his coworkers came stories of how he calmed the most difficult boys at a little mountain school where they taught. And then the stories tapered off and we fell into a silence. A church bell rang, stirring a spiral of blackbirds out of the trees, rising into a sky heavy with dark gray clouds. We shook hands and hugged and then walked quietly out of Rolf and Kim’s home to return to our lives, mine with a Rolf-sized hole in it.
In the grief that followed, I would regularly jolt awake before dawn, gasping. My body ran hot. I ached physically. I dreamed dreams unlike anything I’d experienced before. In one, I was walking up a dark, winding dirt road to an illuminated Victorian that resembled our childhood home in Penryn. Rolf burst around a corner in yellow shorts, running in his high school miler strides. He stopped, smiled, waved, and moved his lips, uttering words he knew I could no longer hear. I experienced the hallucinations that Joan Didion describes in The Year of Magical Thinking. I saw the outline of Rolf’s face in the shifting boundaries of neighboring clouds. On one walk on the Berkeley campus, I saw his chemo-exhausted eyes in the spiraling bark of a redwood tree. I heard his voice in the rustling of leaves, his sigh in the wind. On two occasions I was so convinced I had seen him that I followed strangers whose shoulders, foreheads, freckles, and jawlines looked like his.
Our minds are relationaclass="underline" we see life patterns through our shared experiences with others, sense life’s significant themes in the sounds of others’ voices, and feel embraced in things larger than the self through others’ touch. I saw the wonders of the world through Rolf’s eyes. With his passing, I felt aweless. And my companion in awe was no longer around to help me make sense of the vastest mystery I had encountered in my fifty-seven years of living.
A loud voice called out:
FIND AWE.
Knowing of awe’s many benefits, and that we can find it all around us, I went in search of awe. I took a moment each day to be open to the awe-inspiring around me. I sought out places of importance in the history of awe. I engaged in open-ended conversations with people I consider awe pioneers. I immersed myself as a newcomer in various wonders of life. These explorations led to personal experiences, memories, dreams, and insights that helped me make sense of losing my brother. They brought me to the conviction that awe is almost always nearby, and is a pathway to healing and growing in the face of the losses and traumas that are part of life.
There are four stories of awe, then, for us to consider together—the scientific, the personal, the cultural, and one about the growth that awe can bring us when we face hardship, uncertainty, loss, and the unknown. I have organized this book accordingly. The first three chapters traverse the scientific story of awe. We consider what awe is, the contexts in which it arises, how it differs from fear and beauty, and how it feels in our everyday lives (chapter 1). We follow how awe transforms our sense of self, our thought, and our relation to the world (chapter 2). And we take an evolutionary journey back in time to ask: Why awe? Jane Goodall, a hero of mine, believed that chimpanzees feel awe and have a sense of spirituality grounded in a capacity Goodall describes as being amazed at things outside yourself. Animated by this mystery, we will investigate where our chills, tears, wide-open eyes and mouths, and wows and whoas come from in our mammalian evolution, and what this tells us about the primordial meaning of awe (chapter 3).
In the second section of the book, we turn to personal stories of awe. We will hear stories about the transcendent power of others’ moral beauty and its place in prisons and more life-enhancing institutions like libraries and hospitals (chapter 4). About finding collective effervescence in ecstatic dance and professional basketball and in the collective movements of our daily lives (chapter 5). About nature and how it can help heal the traumas of combat, loneliness, and poverty (chapter 6).