Why We Never Die
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As a child, I was terrified of death. It was often in the twilight hours, between the moment of lying down and the imperceptible instant of slipping off to sleep, that the terror would arise. The thought of vanishing completely from the world, of being engulfed in ineradicable darkness, would seize upon me and crush with it the very existence of the world. It was not simply that I would no longer be there. It was that reality itself would collapse, devoid of any point of apprehension. Petrified before a void so vast that it could not be contained within thought, let alone a thinking being, it was impossible to know how long it would take to drift off into the abyss that silently beckoned me.
Religion and spirituality were of little or no solace. Even to my young mind, they struck me as fantasies that had been elaborately constructed and forcefully imposed in order to stave off the horror. Their power paled in comparison with the groundless vacuum that they sought to mask, and my restless mind would have nothing of consolation. As I grew older, the appeal of philosophy was that it opened vantage points to stare into the vertiginous face of death, and to ponder the meaning of living in an uncertain world precariously perched on the absolute certainty of death.Experience added material realities to these unsettling thoughts. I remember attending my first open-casket funeral and peering down on the docile, lifeless body of Everett, an old farmer whose summer straw scent and peaceful demeanor had left a distinct impression on my inexperienced mind. Then there were stories of others dying around me, and the profound sadness that accompanied them, ranging from Russian roulette suicides to horrific explosions of propane gas.Growing up on a farm brought with it, moreover, the omnipresence of death, from raccoon and coyote attacks to trips to the slaughterhouse, or winter diseases that had my brother and me chiseling shallow graves for animals into frozen earth as young children. I still recall watching my baby sister holding the lifeless body of a newborn lamb under warm, running water with the confused hope of somehow bringing it back from the precipice. Life was imbued with death.
Today, my eldest child, at the age of 6, has fallen prey to these same fears. With two fingers lodged in his mouth, he pulls down on his lower jaw as if he were trying to hold onto some self-supporting ledge of meaning. He looks up at me from bed in the twilight and asks if everyone will die someday. He wants to know when the scientists will develop a potion that will allow us to live forever. I tell him that I am not certain that it will happen, but I cannot help but subtly acquiesce to the consolation it brings him to imagine one day drinking from an enchanted glass and sharing it with the entire family. Yet the fears are still there, and he senses my uncertainty. He tries to calculate with his rudimentary arithmetic how many years he will have before he dies. Then he interjects that even his awkward sums might not add up because there could be an accident causing him to die before me.I hear him repeating in the dark, like an echo across the ages, the thoughts that I once silently had, including the conviction that I would die young. He returns me to those terrors, which have surprisingly receded with the years. Was it, perhaps, that I had merely survived a prolonged adolescent death drive? I certainly sensed at some point that I was already in the afterlife, since my existence could have easily ended long ago.
In looking back from this immanent afterlife on my earlier terrors, and how they have been slowly buried over time, I see now that they were overly fixated on my own biological death. Since I recognized eternal transcendence as nothing more than a comforting illusion, the only thing left was my finite life in the here and now, which was destined to disappear forever in an instantaneous blackout.
It is now patently unclear to me, however, that we ever actually die in this way. Our existence has numerous dimensions, and they each live according to different times. The biological stratum, which I naïvely took to mean life in general, is in certain ways a long process of demise — we are all dying all the time, just at different rhythms. Far from being an ultimate horizon beyond the bend, death is a constitutive feature of the unfolding of biological life. In other words, I am confronting my death each day that I live.Moreover, the physical dimension of existence clearly persists beyond any biological threshold, as the material components of our bodies mix and mingle in different ways with the cosmos. The artifacts that we have produced also persevere, which can range from our physical imprint on the world to objects we have made or writings like this one. There is, as well, a psychosocial dimension that survives our biological withdrawal, which is visible in the impact that we have had — for better or worse — on all of the people around us. In living, we trace a wake in the world.If biological death appears to some as an endpoint to existence, there is nevertheless a longevity to our physical, artifactual and psychosocial lives. They intertwine and merge with the broader world out of which we are woven. This should not be taken as a form of spiritualist consolation, however, but rather as an invitation to face up to the ways in which our immanent lives are actually never simply our own.Authentic existence is perhaps less about boldly confronting the inevitable reality of our own finitude than about recognizing and cultivating the multiple dimensions of our lives. Some of these can never truly die because they do not belong only to us. They carry on in the physical world, in the material and cultural vestiges we leave, as well as in the psychological and social effects we have on those around us.
It is in this regard that my twilight conversations with my oldest son take on a very different light. Although they might not bring consolation to either of us in any traditional sense, they certainly leave traces of an intense moment of sharing something that will carry on in both of us, as well as in my youngest son who “plays dead” in his bed next to us as he pretends to sleep while listening intently to our probing exchanges.