Death

Todd May

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317488477
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

The fact that we will die, and that our death can come at any time, pervades the entirety of our living. There are many ways to think about and deal with death. Among those ways, however, a good number of them are attempts to escape its grip.

In this book, Todd May seeks to confront death in its power. He considers the possibility that our mortal deaths are the end of us, and asks what this might mean for our living. What lessons can we draw from our mortality? And how might we live as creatures who die, and who know we are going to die?

In answering these questions, May brings together two divergent perspectives on death. The first holds that death is not an evil, or at least that immortality would be far worse than dying. The second holds that death is indeed an evil, and that there is no escaping that fact. May shows that if we are to live with death, we need to hold these two perspectives together. Their convergence yields both a beauty and a tragedy to our living that are inextricably entwined.Drawing on the thoughts of many philosophers and writers - ancient and modern - as well as his own experience, May puts forward a particular view of how we might think about and, more importantly, live our lives in view of the inescapability of our dying. In the end, he argues, it is precisely the contingency of our lives that must be grasped and which must be folded into the hours or years that remain to each of us, so that we can live each moment as though it were at once a link to an uncertain future and yet perhaps the only link we have left.

1. Our dealings with death

DOI: 10.4324/9781315710280-1

In the spring of 2004 I took a flight from the airport in Greenville, South Carolina to New York’s LaGuardia. I was going to visit my step-grandmother, a woman I had become close to over the years. She was dying of cancer, and this would be one of the last chances I would have to see her. I had taken a weekend flight, as I had several times before, in order to have a couple of days to spend with her in her apartment in the Bronx. For several minutes of that flight, however, it was not her death that concerned me, but my own.

The approach to LaGuardia’s runway usually goes from east to west. When we fly up from South Carolina, the plane veers right over Brooklyn and Queens, then turns back around to the left towards Manhattan, and makes its descent. From the left side of the plane, where I usually sat, one could see the Manhattan skyline as one turned towards Brooklyn. On this particular day, that is exactly what happened, until we were about to land.

Then the plane began ascending once again, heading towards Manhattan. There was no announcement from the flight deck, but it was clear we were going to midtown. I could see the Empire State Building in front of us, a bit to the left. As we headed towards the Empire State Building, the cabin became very quiet. At first people were asking their neighbours what was happening. Then conversation petered out altogether.

From where I sat, the plane clearly seemed to be heading for the Empire State Building. It was an eerie moment. I remember seeing the building from an odd angle: the top was straight ahead of me. I could see the sky beyond it, and to my left was downtown. I almost felt as though I could look into the windows and see people at work.

In a way, all this angered me. I grew up in New York, and have always loved the Empire State Building. I had never had the same feeling about the Twin Towers, which (I guess this dates me a bit) seemed to me a bit pretentious: the newcomers who lorded it over the more venerable building on 34th Street. This might seem to be an odd thought to have at this moment, but, as people often say, time seemed to slow down.

My thoughts first went into business mode. I recalled that I had told my wife Kathleen where all the important papers were, and tried to remember whether I had them all up to date. I asked myself what my last interaction with each of my three children had been, and was relieved that it was a positive one. I had hugged each of my kids, and told them I was looking forward to seeing them. I noticed that my stomach was in a knot, and that my fingers were cold. I looked out of the window and saw the Empire State Building getting closer. I figured that I was going to die (there was no “we” for me at that moment).

And then I realized something that has never left me. I realized that I had not regretted my life. There had been disappointments. I had lived in South Carolina for many more years than I had planned to, more years than I had wanted to. I hadn’t had as much contact with my friends as I would have liked, and had not visited very often this city that I had grown up in and was about to die in. But I also knew, at that moment, that I would not have traded this life I had lived for another one. I would not have worked harder to get a more prestigious job at the expense of being able to spend time with my kids, or have a spontaneous breakfast with my wife here and there, or run a hard Saturday workout that left me spent for the rest of the day. The life I had lived was not the one I would have chosen, if I had been asked at some point early in my studies or my career. But, having lived it, I would not have traded it in for another one.

Of course I didn’t die that day. The plane gained enough altitude to pass over the Empire State Building (but not by much, it seemed to me). As it turns out, when we were about to land, a smaller plane decided it would be a neat idea to land at LaGuardia at that same moment, and our pilot had to make a quick move. He was concentrating on navigating us safely through airspace that, since 9/11, had become fraught, so he didn’t have time to announce what was happening until after it was over. Although I would have liked to know what was going on, I took this to be an exercise in good judgement on his part. And, in the end, it gave me a chance to reflect on my life in a way and with an urgency that I would probably not otherwise have done.

You’ll not be surprised that I have not forgotten that day. At least some of you who read these words will have had an experience like it, when you knew you were going to die but had time to ponder what it all meant. And I have carried lessons from that day. I keep in mind what emerged as important in those seeming last moments, and try to cultivate it. And I try, with more or less success, to keep perspective on the rest.

It might also seem that the fact of death, the fact that I am mortal, turned out to be a good thing on that day. After all, if I were immortal I would neither have had a chance to reflect on my life nor known what it meant to me to have lived this particular life. None of that would have mattered. Whatever mistakes I had made, there would have been all the time in the world to correct them (well, assuming that everyone I cared about was also immortal). And whatever joys I had had, they would have lost a bit of their lustre with my knowing that I might experience those same joys an infinity of times again.

But there is another side to that coin. I might have died. Planes, as we have learned, do crash into buildings. And if I had died – that is to say, if I had not been immortal – I would not have seen my wife or my children again. I would not have felt the righteous lassitude that comes with a hard workout, or the fascination of a new idea garnered from a book of philosophy. Those joys, which meant so much, which gave me the life I realized I did not regret, would be over.

To see both these sides of death is, I believe, to begin to reflect on it. Death is tragic, arbitrary and meaningless. At the same time it can, because of the particular way it is tragic, arbitrary and meaningless, open out on to a fullness of life that would not exist without it. What we shall investigate in this book, looking periodically at what philosophers and writers have said about death, is the role that death plays in our lives, as well as the ways we try to escape its power and what might happen to us or for us if we can face it squarely.

I would like to make a bold claim right here at the outset: the fact that we die is the most important fact about us. There is nothing that has more weight in our lives. This doesn’t mean, of course, that there aren’t other important facts about us. Human beings love, work, have sex, create friendships, embark on lifelong projects, undergo intense emotions, even watch others die. These are not insignificant. A life without at least some of these things would probably not be one worth living, at least to the person living it. (Maybe it would have been worth living in the eyes of others, for example, one’s parents.) For most of us, there is not one particular fact about us that is the only important fact. Death, too, is not the only important fact about us. But it is the most important one.

Why is this? Because it is the end of every other fact about us. It is the end of our friendships, our projects, every one of our involvements in the world. Although death is not the only important fact about us, it has the capacity, in a way no other aspect of us does, to absorb every other fact, to bring every other aspect of our lives under its sway.

One might say that a great love will do the same thing. A love that becomes the focus of one’s life seems to centre the world on the person loved. What matters is only to be with the beloved. Nothing else seems of account. The joy or sadness of one’s own life seems to hinge on small gestures of the one loved; a smile or an arched eyebrow take on outsized significance. And one’s own ultimate happiness is hitched to the happiness of the other. Many of us have at least had moments like this: small periods of great love. It is difficult to sustain such a love over a lifetime. But even if it could be done, even if it has been done, it is still not as absorbing as death.

Even when love is at its peak, we still eat. And we can enjoy the taste of food. It may taste better in the presence of the beloved, but its taste will, at least sometimes, not go unnoticed. We will read the newspapers, or at least check out the news on the internet. There will be events we will read about that move us one way or another. A war, a massacre, starvation: even in love, we are not immune to revulsion at these things. Even small joys, such as one’s sports team winning a game, register a tick on one’s emotional Geiger counter. (Except perhaps for fans, like me, of the New York Knicks, who wait in vain for such ticks.)

Nothing like this happens with death. Nothing escapes it. It encompasses us without remainder. And not only does it encompass us, bringing everything about us within its vortex, but it then negates everything it encompasses. A great love can make us see different aspects of our world through the lens of that love. The world remains there for us, but it looks different in all of its aspects from what it would look like otherwise. In death, the world is no longer there. It doesn’t look different. It disappears.

I taught a seminar on death once, to a group of upper-level undergraduate students. The first day I asked them to put their books aside and take out a piece of paper and a pencil. Then I asked them to write four or five of the most important things in their lives on the piece of paper, and fold it up. I promised them that nobody would see what they had written. When they were done, I asked them to pass the papers to me, folded over so that they couldn’t be seen. I assured them that I wasn’t interested in what they had written. What mattered was that each of them knew what he or she had on the paper, that what each of them had written was before their minds. When they had all passed the papers to me, I gathered them in a small pile. I asked them to focus on the paper, and on what they had written. Then I took the pile and slowly tore it into little shreds. That, I told them, is what each of them – each of us – needed to confront. That is what we had to understand, as best we could.

That is what makes death the most important fact about us: its ability to negate every other element of our lives. And there is more. There is another aspect of death, one that we will revisit later but is worth bringing into discussion now, in order to see death’s ongoing significance in our lives. To see it, let’s start with a counterfactual example. Let’s suppose, contrary to the way things really are, that death was something of which we were unaware until it happened. It would be as though death were a bolt from the blue. We lived our lives, engaged in our various commitments and involvements, and then one day we just stopped living. It’s a difficult world to imagine, since we would have to account for how we notice other people no longer living without our wondering what that might have to do with us. But let’s suppose we could do it. Would that change anything about the role death plays in our lives? If we had no awareness of it, would it remain the most important fact about us?

It would still, to be sure, be the negation of our world. But it would seem to play less of a role in our ongoing lives. We would die, but the fact that we were going to die would not have a hold on us. We would not be gripped by it. We would go about our lives as though we would live forever, or at least not considering that we wouldn’t, since, with death out of the picture, we would also probably not think much about living forever. It would just be natural. We would be living, and that would be that. Until, of course, it stopped.

But, of course, things aren’t like that. We are not unaware of death. It is always there, with us. It may not be present to little children, but it surely is present to grownups. My oldest son recently learned to drive, and my wife and I have done our level best to instil the fact of death into his consciousness. As we grow older, see people disappear from our lives or face situations where we fear our own lives are at stake, the recognition of death is always there. This is not to say that we always meditate on it. In fact, and we’ll return to this soon, we usually try to escape thinking about it. Even in escaping it, however, it is with us. It is with us because we are trying to escape it.

It may be that humans are the only animals with an ongoing sense of their own death. I don’t know. Surely, many animals have some awareness of their death, especially when it seems imminent. Animals will cower in fear, or lash out aggressively. Keeping oneself alive seems to be a mandate in the animal world, one that is wired in (which is not to say that there aren’t individual animals – human and otherwise – that lose the will to live. But these are the exceptional cases). To seek to remain alive when one’s life is threatened, however, is not the same as having an ongoing awareness of one’s death. It is more like the counterfactual case I just described, with the addition of an alarm of some kind going off when death is in the neighbourhood.

In order for death to be with us in the way that it is, there has to be more than an awareness of one’s demise in the face of a threat. There has to be some higher level awareness. In particular, there needs to be a recognition of one’s life as having a trajectory. There is a beginning, an end and the period in between. There also has to be, and we will revisit this point many times, a recognition that death could happen at any time. One is mortal, not only at the end of one’s life, but all throughout it. Without the awareness of the trajectory of one’s life and its ongoing vulnerability to death, death would have a less significant role to play in one’s life.

Are there animals that have the capacity for this higher-level conception of their lives and the role that death plays? It seems difficult to say. Given evolutionary history, there are surely intermediate stages between complete unawareness and full human recognition. How that more or less murky awareness works is difficult to sort out. But that humans, with our advanced capacity for memory, reflection and projection into the future, that we are attached at every moment to the fact of our death cannot be denied. We can seek to elude it, but it remains with us. As animals who are aware of where our lives are headed, and that we may not get there, our death is always with us.

We humans, then, are the creatures that are characterized, first and foremost, by the fact that we die. I have said that this is the most important fact about us. But some may want to deny this. They may want to say that we are talking at too abstract a level. By the term abstract here, I don’t mean difficult or complicated. I mean instead abstracted from the specifics of peoples lives. It may be easy to argue, at the level of generality we’re talking at here, that death is the most important fact about us. But it could well be that death, while in some sense the most important fact about human beings, is not necessarily the most important fact about each of us. It could be that there are particular lives that have more important facts about them than that they are going to die. It could even be that many particular lives are that way.

Here’s an example. A family undergoes the death of a child. It happens a lot, particularly in places where there aren’t enough resources to keep the population going. Let’s imagine the case in a little more detail. A child has a debilitating disease, one that resists medical treatment. His or her health slowly disintegrates in front of the family’s eyes. They have to endure this. The parents, in particular, have to watch helplessly as their child moves inevitably towards death. Wouldn’t this fact be as important, more important, to the lives of the parents than their own dying? Wouldn’t their own deaths pale in comparison?

In coming to terms with this example, we cannot take the easy way out. We cannot say that this example also involves death, so it has some similarity to the issue of death as we are posing it. It doesn’t.

As we have been speaking of death, it is not the death of someone else that is the fundamental fact of one’s life. It is one’s own death. As the philosopher Martin Heidegger reminds us, the salient fact about death is that it is for each of us my own death. We can hear about the death of others, go to funerals, even see someone die. These are weighty matters. However, they do not replace the singularity of one’s own death. It is not that one’s own death matters more in the grand scheme of things than the death of someone else. It is that one’s own death cannot be understood by coming to terms with someone else’s death. The silencing of one’s experience, including the experience of the silencing of another’s experience, remains intimately one’s own in a way that cannot be understood by analogy with anyone or anything else.

This returns us to the question then of how to think about the death of one’s child. I have said that death is the most important fact about us as humans. Couldn’t it be, though, that some traumatic event – or perhaps some glorious event, although this would be harder to imagine – would be more important to a particular life than the fact of one’s own death? Could it be that in light of this traumatic event, death loses its power? The end of our experience, then, becomes something less to be dreaded, and maybe even welcomed.

There are two responses to be given to an example like this. The first is easier and more straightforwardly philosophical. It may seem like a way of dodging the example, but it reminds us of something central to who we are. This response is to say that death is the most important fact about us as human beings. As particular humans, our individual trajectories may differ. Some of us have difficult lives that may not even appear to us to be worth living. (In 1988, I met someone in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. He was seventeen. He told me that he had confronted his father once, demanding to know why he would bring him into such a world.) For others of us, I suspect most, the difficulties of life do not override its meaning-fulness. But what we, as human beings, have in common is a death whose inevitability is coupled with uncertainty: a death that will end our experience and can do so at any time. Moreover, this inevitability and this uncertainty are aspects of death that we cannot escape; we are, ultimately, creatures who are aware of the end that awaits us. And finally, that awareness structures the way we go about our lives, even – perhaps especially – when we act as though we were never going to die.

Even if this is right, it doesn’t seem to answer the question of whether in cases like our example death is a more important fact in particular lives than some other event or fact about those lives. In order to address that question more directly, I want to distinguish two different questions. These questions are both centred on the importance of facts about one’s life, but unfold in two different ways. The first question is: what makes a life meaningful or worthwhile, or on the contrary saps life of meaning? The second question is: what is the most important fact about a life, the one that structures it more than any other? The importance of traumatic events lies in their role in addressing the first question. The importance of death has to do with the second.

Things can happen, good or bad, that lend life meaning or that steal it away. When each of us looks back on our lives, he or she will ask about those things. They will involve projects we have undertaken, relationships we have cultivated and events that have occurred. For some of us, one hopes very few, among those events wil...