On Death

The Fear of Death

Conscience Makes Cowards of Us All

. . . that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death-that is, the devil-and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.

-Hebrews 2:14-15

Death is the Great Interruption, tearing loved ones away from us, or us from them.

Death is the Great Schism, ripping apart the material and immaterial parts of our being and sundering a whole person, who was never meant to be disembodied, even for a moment.

Death is the Great Insult, because it reminds us, as Shakespeare said, that we are worm food.

[We are] literally split in two: [Man] has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever.

Death is hideous and frightening and cruel and unusual. It is not the way life is supposed to be, and our grief in the face of death acknowledges that.

Death is our Great Enemy, more than anything. It makes a claim on each and every one of us, pursuing us relentlessly through all our days. Modern people write and talk endlessly about love, especially romantic love, which eludes many. But no one can avoid death. It has been said that all the wars and plagues have never raised the death toll-it has always been one for each and every person. Yet we seem far less prepared for it than our ancestors. Why is that?

The Blessing of Modern Medicine

One reason is, paradoxically, that the great blessing of modern medicine has hidden death from us. Annie Dillard, in her novel The Living, devotes an entire page to the astonishing variety of ways death snatched the living from the midst of their homes and families without a moment's notice in the nineteenth century.

Women took fever and died from having babies, and babies died from puniness or the harshness of the air. Men died from . . . rivers and horses, bulls, steam saws, mill gears, quarried rock, or falling trees or rolling logs. . . . Children lost their lives as . . . hard things smashed them, like trees and the ground when horses threw them, or they fell; they drowned in water; they sickened, and earaches wormed into their brains or fever from measles burned them up or pneumonia eased them out overnight.

Death was something that people used to see up close. To take just one example, the prominent British minister and theologian John Owen (1616-1683) outlived every one of his eleven children, as well as his first wife. Since people died where they lived, at home, Owen literally saw nearly every person he loved die before his eyes. The average family in the United States in colonial times lost one out of every three children before adulthood. And since the life expectancy of all people at that time was about forty years, great numbers lost their parents when they were still children. Nearly everyone grew up seeing corpses and watching relatives die, young and old.

Medicine and science have relieved us of many causes of early death, and today the vast majority of people decline and die in hospitals and hospices, away from the eyes of others. It is normal now to live to adulthood and not watch anyone die, or even see a corpse except in the brief glance of an open coffin at a funeral.

Atul Gawande and others have pointed out that this hiddenness of dying in modern society means that we of all cultures live in denial of the inexorability of our impending death. Psalm 90:12 called readers to "number our days" that we may "gain a heart for wisdom." There has always been a danger that humans would live in denial of their own death. Of course we know intellectually and rationally that we are going to die, but deep down we repress it, we act as if we are going to live forever. And, according to the psalmist, that's not wise. It is the one absolute inevitability, yet modern people don't plan for it and don't live as if it is going to happen. We avoid doctors out of fear, denying the mortality of our bodies and assuming they will just go on forever. And yet in the face of imminent death we then demand unrealistic and extreme medical procedures. We even find the discussion of death "in bad taste" or worse. Anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, in his essay "The Pornography of Death," argued that in contemporary culture death has replaced sex as the new unmentionable.

If people three thousand years ago had a problem with the denial of death, as Psalm 90 attests, then we have an infinitely greater one. Medical progress supports the illusion that death can be put off indefinitely. It is more rare than ever to find people who are, as the ancients were, reconciled to their own mortality. And there are even thinkers now who seriously believe death can be solved like any technological "performance issue." Many in Silicon Valley are obsessed with overcoming mortality and living forever. All this means that modern people are more unrealistic and unprepared for death than any people in history.

This-world Happiness

A second reason that we today struggle so much with death is the secular age's requirement of this-world meaning and fulfillment. Anthropologist Richard Shweder surveys the ways non-Western and older cultures have helped their members face suffering. They all did so by teaching their members about the meaning of life, the main thing for which every person should be living. Many societies believe that the main thing to live for is your people and family-children and grandchildren-in whom you live on after you die. Buddhism and many other ancient Eastern cultures have taught that the meaning of life is to see the illusory nature of this world and therefore to transcend it through an inner calmness and detachment of soul. Other cultures believe in reincarnation, or heaven or nirvana after death, and so one's main purpose is to live and believe in such a way that your soul journeys to heaven.

These all are quite different, and yet, Shweder argues, they had one thing in common. In each case the main thing to live for was something outside this material world and life, some object that suffering and death could not touch. It might be to go to heaven when you die, or to escape the cycle of reincarnation and go into eternal bliss, or to shed the illusion of the world and return to the All Soul of the universe, or to live an honorable life and be received at death into the company of your ancestors. But in each case, not only are tragedy and death unable to destroy your meaning in life, they can actually hasten the journey toward it, whether it is through spiritual growth, or the achievement of honor and virtue, or going into an eternity of joy.

Modern culture, however, is basically secular. Many today say that, because there is no God, soul, or spirit, no transcendent or supernatural dimension to reality, this material world is all there is. In that case, whatever gives your life meaning and purpose will have to be something within the confines of this earthly time frame. You must, as it were, rest your heart in something within the limited horizons of time and space. Whatever you decide will give meaning to your life will have to be some form of this-world happiness, comfort, or achievement. Or, at best, it might be a love relationship.

But death, of course, destroys all of these things. So while other cultures and worldviews see suffering and death as crucial chapters (and not the last) in your coherent life story, the secular view is completely different. Suffering is an interruption and death is the utter end. Shweder writes that for modern people, therefore:

Suffering is . . . separated from the narrative structure of human life . . . a kind of "noise," an accidental interference into the life drama of the sufferer. . . . Suffering [has] no intelligible relation to any plot, except as a chaotic interruption.

Modern culture, then, is the worst in history at preparing its members for the only inevitability-death. When this limited meaning horizon comes together with the advance of medicine, it leaves many people paralyzed with anxiety and fear when confronted with a dying person.

Mark Ashton was vicar of St. Andrew the Great in Cambridge, England. At the age of sixty-two, in late 2008, he was diagnosed with inoperable gallbladder cancer. Because of his faith and joy in Christ, he showed a great deal of confidence in the face of dying and even a sense of anticipation, despite his keen recognition of the sadness of his family. During the next fifteen months, he talked with virtually everyone he met about his coming death with ease, eloquence, and poise. But this unnerved many people, who found not only his attitude but even his presence difficult to take.

He wrote: "Our age is so devoid of hope in the face of death that the topic has become unmentionable." He made a trip to a hairdresser in Eastbourne, where he engaged in conversation as usual with the woman who was cutting his hair. When she "asked me how I was and I replied that I had been told I had got just a few more months to live," the ordinary friendliness and chattiness of the place ceased. No matter how much he tried to talk to her, "I could not get another word out of her for the rest of the haircut." Rather than accept and prepare for the inevitable, we only avert and deny it.

The Sense of Insignificance

A third reason modern secular culture has so much trouble with death is that, in redefining death as nonexistence, it has created a profound sense of insignificance. Ernest Becker, in the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Denial of Death, argues human beings cannot accept that all we are-our conscious self, our loves, our profound aspirations for beauty, goodness, truth-is going to cease to exist forever, in a literal blink of an eye. If death is truly the end-if we all die and eventually even the whole human civilization "dies" in the death of the sun-then nothing we do will make any final difference. If we come from nothing and go to nothing, how can we avoid, even now, a sense of nothingness? So he writes:

The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is the mainspring of human activity-activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying . . . that it is the final destiny.

That fear of insignificance in the face of nonexistence must be dealt with in some way. Becker cites anthropologists who tell us ancient peoples were much less afraid of death, that death was "accompanied by rejoicing and festivities." He rightly adds that, while fear of death is a human universal, ancient people addressed it through belief in life and meaning after death. They believed in eternity, so that death was "the ultimate promotion." The problem for us today, however, is that "most modern Westerners have trouble believing this any more, which is what makes the fear of death so prominent a part of our psychological make-up."

The rest of Becker's book is based on this thesis; namely, that modern, secular culture has a problem with death that no other society has faced. He makes a case that the outsize place of so many things in modern culture-of sex and romance, of money and career, of politics and social causes-are ways that contemporary people seek to get a feeling of significance in the face of death without having recourse to God and religion.

Late-twentieth-century secular thinkers were, like Becker, quite aware that, as religion and faith in God receded, death would pose a problem. The existentialists, such as Albert Camus in "The Myth of Sisyphus," argued that the finality of death made life absurd and to try to deny this fact by losing yourself in pleasure and achievement was wrong. An illustration may help here. Imagine someone has broken into your house, tied you up, and announced that he is going to kill you. For the sake of the illustration imagine also that you have absolutely no hope for rescue. What if he said, "I'm not heartless-tell me something you do that gives you a lot of happiness." You answer that you enjoy playing chess. "Well, let's play a game of chess before I kill you. Won't that make your final moments pleasant?" The only truthful answer would be that your impending death would drain all the satisfaction out of a game. Death takes away the significance and joy of things.

Becker goes further and says that this fear of death is something that is unique to us humans.

It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. . . . The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They [experience death as] a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days-that's something else.

More recent secular thinkers have not struck such dire notes. Drawing on the ancient philosophers Epicurus and Lucretius, many today argue that death is "nothing to be frightened of," and there is a constant stream of articles posted with that message, such as Jessica Brown's essay in The Guardian "We Fear Death, but What If Dying Isn't as Bad as We Think?" After all, the reasoning goes, when you die you simply don't know anything or feel anything. There is no pain or anguish. Why be afraid of it? But efforts to say that modern people should find death no big deal have not worked for most. Philosopher Luc Ferry says it is "brutal" and dishonest to tell people facing death, and therefore the loss of all love relationships, that they should not fear it. Dylan Thomas strikes a far more resonant chord with us when he says we should "Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

Becker is right. The human race as a whole can't not fear and hate death. It is a unique and profound problem. Religion gave people tools to help in facing our most formidable foe, and modern secularism has not come up with anything to compensate for its loss.