“Oh yes, suddenly I realized what a good thing death can be, how just and fair, like a disinfectant, or a vacuum cleaner. — Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.
One of the great fears of our existential being is the fear of death. So much so that we don’t want to know or discuss about it until perhaps when we can no longer avoid its occurrence. Denying it is a coping mechanism, ever so hopeful for a longer life. If only there is a way to immortality. Thus begins the search for the Holy Grail popularized in the Arthurian literature and continues in our lifetime. This time, though, it is the religious notion of the after-life. To think that our non-material being (or soul) will live eternally makes the uncertainty and mystery of death palatable. Then we can go gently into the night.
Experts on stress and anxiety tell us that the best strategy for thanatophobia (the extreme fear of death or the dying process) is to confront it, to face and accept its inevitability. I seek to understand.
Arthur C. Brooks is a famous American writer and author on the science and philosophy of a well-lived life. To date, he has written twelve books and one of them is From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life. In Chapter 5 (Ponder Your Death) of his book, he says that our “fear of death has eight dimensions: fear of being destroyed, fear of the dying process, fear of the dead, fear for significant others, fear of the unknown, fear of conscious death, fear for body after death, and fear of premature death.”
The first element of fear, according to Brooks, “is uniquely human” because by observing the behaviour of our favourite pet, the dog “can feel fear when he’s threatened, but…he doesn’t understand the concept of not existing, because he doesn’t know he ‘exists’ in the first place.” This fear of non-existence drives us to find ways to live longer, such as healthy, active lifestyle. But no matter what we do, we still die. So the best thing we can do is to create our legacy. This is called the “Achilles effect” from the Greek epic story, Iliad written by Homer. When Achilles was confronted to make a choice whether to fight in the Trojan War or not, he described it as a sure death but a glorious legacy, or a long life but dying in obscurity:
two fates bear me on to the day of death.
If I hold out here and I lay siege to Troy,
my journey home is gone, but my glory never dies.
If I voyage back to fatherland I love,
my pride, my glory dies.
But Brooks doused our strong imagination of glorious legacy with the simple fact that people forget us and move on with their own lives. He quoted the Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius: “Some indeed have not been remembered even for a short time, and others have become the heroes of fables, and again others have disappeared even from fables. Remember this then, that this little compound, thyself, must either be dissolved, or the poor breath must be extinguished, or be removed and placed elsewhere.”
To start overcoming our fear of dying, Brooks recommended a treatment called “exposure therapy”. By desensitizing our fear with repeated exposure, sooner or later, it will make it seem “ordinary, prosaic, and certainly not scary.” This is not a new strategy. Brooks quoted Michel de Montaigne, the 16th century French philosopher, who said: “To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death.”
So as death is looming into our lives, Brooks recommended that we focus our energy into connecting with what he called the Aspen Grove, a metaphor of the “vast root system of families, friends, communities, nations, and indeed the entire world.” He explained further that “the inevitable changes in my life—and yours—aren’t a tragedy to regret. They are just changes to one interconnected member of the human family—one shoot from the root system. The secret to bearing my decline—no, enjoying it—is to be more conscious of the roots linking me to others. If I am connected to others in love, my decrease will be more than offset by increases to others—which is to say, increases to other facets of my true self.” The “Happy-Well” people live by the motto: Omnia vincit amor (Love conquers all); while the “Sad-Sick” individuals decry the human connection as just an impediment to their hard-driving ambitions for success.
William Durant was an American historian and philosopher. He was best known for writing The Story of Civilization, an eleven-volume work which describes in details the history of the Eastern and Western civilizations. He died in 1981 but as early as in 1975 he hinted that he was working on a book “that answers the questions of what I think about government, life, death, and God.” Thirty-two years later, his granddaughter discovered a manuscript in an attic trunk. It was published in 2014 entitled Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God.
In Chapter 5 (On Death) of his book, Durant describes “Death, like style, is the removal of rubbish, the circumcision of the superfluous.” Rather harsh words I think. I guess I understand where he’s coming from since our human ways treat old people with disgust and negligence. “Here is an old man,” Durant wrote, “on the bed of death, harassed by helpless friends and wailing relatives. What a terrible sight it is—this thin frame with loosened and cracking flesh, this toothless mouth in a bloodless face, the tongue that cannot speak and these eyes that cannot see!…For seventy years this man with pain and effort gathered knowledge; his brain became the storehouse of a varied experience, the center of a thousand subtleties of thought and deed; his heart through suffering learned gentleness as his mind learned understanding; seventy years he grew from an animal into a man capable of seeking truth and creating beauty. But death is upon him, poisoning him, choking him, congealing his blood, gripping his heart, bursting his brain, rattling his throat. Death wins.”
In the next chapter (Our Souls) of Durant’s book, he tackles the ultimate belief in religion, the continuity of life after death (the holy grail). Is there a soul? But before Durant answers the question, he wants to briefly examine the definitions of matter, space, time, sensation, perception, mind, self, and consciousness in few pages rather than following the effort of Immanuel Kant who took eight hundred pages to do it. I’ll skip the philosophical arguments and move to the last two pages of the chapter. Here I quote Durant’s answer: “Though I am fond of my unique soul, I do not expect it to survive the complete death of my body. Death is the breakup of the human soul…I am quite content with mortality; I should be appalled at the thought of living forever, in whatever paradise.”
If there’s no immortality of the soul, do we still need God? Apparently, the answer is yes because gods (not singular) are so ingrained in our human history. “The history of humanity,” Durant writes in Chapter 7 (Our Gods), “might be written in terms of the avatars of God—the repeated death of an old god to make room for a deity fitted to the rising knowledge and moral level of a race.
A list of the diverse gods that men at one time or another have worshipped would make quite a directory of the changing skies…Every people has in every epoch reinterpreted God after its own fashion, and has been willing to die, or at least to kill in defense of the passing conception.”
As long as there are gods, religion will continue to exist and remain popular. But aside from this co-existence, Durant’s justification of religion in the last paragraph of Chapter 8 (On Religion) reaffirms the prevailing notion that religion thrives well in poor countries. “Historically such ‘underprivileged’ nations and classes,” he writes, “have sought consolation in supernatural beliefs, dignifying themselves by association with mystic powers, and tempering the sting of poverty with hopes of a better fortune in another world. Chronic illness, deformity, or grief may serve like poverty to generate such creeds, and social heredity can sustain these, even in nations economically prosperous. So many are the functions that supernatural religion fulfills that the skeptic must learn to make his peace with it, only hoping that the love which radiated from Christ will overcome the fearful intolerance of empowered creeds.”
If there’s no after-life, then why not fast track death? At this point in time, only those who are brave enough will commit suicide. Usually, they find life unbearable or not worth living. We likely say they do it because of deep personal sorrows, incurable illnesses and unrelenting sufferings from depression. In Canada, we have legalized mercy killing or euthanasia in what is known as the Medical Assistance in Dying (or MAID). But the law is only for those who “have a grievous and irremediable medical condition”. It will take much longer, or perhaps never, when to choose death early becomes a right.
Albert Camus was a French philosopher and a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He wrote several books, including The Rebel, The Stranger and The Plague. He also wrote a philosophical essay dealing with the problem of suicide entitled The Myth of Sisyphus. In this book, Camus introduced us to the concept of the absurd, a state of contradiction between our strong need to find meaning in our lives and the cold logic of the universe which is indifferent to our existence. Suicide is our solution when the absurd has become intolerable. But, according to Camus, killing oneself because life is no longer worth living, though it can obviously be the truth, “yet an unfruitful one because it is a truism,” meaning that it doesn’t add anything of value beyond what is implied in that statement.
Camus then used the story of Sisyphus as a metaphor to the never-ending dreariness and futility of our existence. Yet Camus argued that Sisyphus was happy because “the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.” That we have been liberated from the hope of a better tomorrow; that we have been freed from the expectation of a paradise in the after-life; that we now have the full freedom to do anything with our life though it lacks meaning or purpose; that we can accept the trivialities of our daily tasks and routines; and that “what counts is not the best living but the most living.” So just live because this experience, whether enjoyable or painful, is essentially what it means to be human.