by Andrew Stark
*
Death is benign. Mortality gives us all the goods that immortality would. Immortality would be malignant. Life gives us all the bads that death does.
In the pages that follow, I explore these four broad consolations, and the different flavors in which each of them comes. My over riding question is this: Can one or more or all or none of them—or perhaps something else altogether—really and truly reconcile us, we early twenty-first-century bundles of ego and anxiety who love life, to our mortality?
A few words about some red herrings. One purported consolation for mortality is that we should welcome death because it puts an agreeable end to the degradations of aging—macular degeneration, arthritis, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s. I don’t buy this argument. After all, the reverse claim almost as often gets made: that we should welcome the degradations of aging—macular degeneration, arthritis, and so on—because they make death, which rescues us from them, easier to take, even seem like a blessing. Montaigne, who otherwise had brilliant insights to offer on the topic of mortality, said both of these things. But their circularity suggests that we’d simply be better off without either: without the death that ends the awful degradation, without the degradation that eases us toward accepting terrible death.
So my assumption, throughout, is that we are talking about whether mortality is a good or a bad thing for people who otherwise remain healthy. That of course is the toughest case. And we must bear in mind that medical science might continue extending the span over which most of us are able to remain well. True, for a separate set of reasons—population growth, strains on resources, the choking-off of opportunities—the fact that even the healthy aged die might be a good thing for the human species as a whole. But I am concerned here with whether mortality can be a good thing for the healthy person herself who dies.
Also: by a mortal life, I mean one that extends to whatever the normal human span happens to be at any point in time. I don’t discuss the merits of mortality when it falls short of a normal span. No one, in our era when a normal life span is approximately eighty, can say a good word about the premature death of an otherwise healthy and flourishing person, say a cancer victim in her twenties, or a six-year-old who is struck by a car and killed.
Nor do I discuss the merits of increased longevity, an increase in the normal life span, short of immortality. If a life span of eighty years is good, it’s hard to see why a life span of ninety or one hundred, or perhaps two hundred or two thousand or even twenty thousand or two hundred thousand years should necessarily be bad. I don’t know where the border between increased longevity and for-all-intents-and-purposes immortality can be found. As the geneticist Francis Collins says, “One man’s longevity is another man’s immortality.”4 An immortal life doesn’t literally have to be endless. But it must feel, to those living it, as if it were endless—and not simply a mortal life of vastly increased longevity.
This book, then, pits mortality against immortality while taking no position on how much longevity has to increase before mortality becomes immortality. Put another way, wherever one draws the line between an effectively mortal and an effectively immortal life, the consolations, based as they are simply on the ideas of mortality and immortality, will have the same relevance.
Finally, I will look widely at works of philosophy and literature, as well as at popular culture: film, sports, music, letters, memorial plaques, bucket lists, the musings of celebrities, and more. I come to them as someone with a question that’s been dogging me—whether I can reconcile myself to my mortality—searching our collective literary, philosophical, and cultural wisdom for insights that will help me find an answer. And I do so precisely from the perspective not of a philosopher or a literary critic, but of an everyday bundle of ego and anxieties who loves life and is looking to console himself about death. This book is written for those who might be on the same quest. And it offers a way of thinking about—a critical guide to—the main ideas on offer.
One last thing. I promised myself, when I began this project, that I would write the most upbeat book that I honestly could. I have kept that promise.
PART 1
Death Is Benign
one
ATTENDING YOUR OWN FUNERAL
Chulkaturin, the dying “hero” of Turgenev’s Diary of a Superfluous Man, believes that his life has left no mark on the world. He feels like a fifth wheel on a four-wheel cart. The lives of others, and events in general, would have rolled along in much the same way even if he had never existed.
But this is puzzling. For as Turgenev tells it, Chulkaturin collides spectacularly with other people, leaving their lives indelibly different. He spends hours, days, weeks in the presence of the woman he loves, Liza, alternatively garrulous and glum without ever pressing his suit, continually exasperating and finally alienating her. Upset with his own dallying, he then provokes a duel with the visiting prince who wins Liza’s heart, wounding him and this time antagonizing the entire community. Chulkaturin might be cowardly and conflicted, and he might have anger management issues. But his life doesn’t seem superfluous, like a fifth wheel on a four-wheel cart. It seems more like a reckless, careening cart itself, leaving a permanent mark on the world and everyone around him.
Chulkaturin records these events in his diary as he lies dying of a fatal illness, and his deathbed perspective is key here. He finds himself, even in these final days, languorously dragging his pen across the page much as he had lived his life, “without haste . . . as though I still had years ahead of me”: as if death were nothing to him. That’s why Liza slipped through his fingers. Never grabbing the moment with her, never bringing matters to a head—he thought he had all the time in the world—he awakens one morning to find Liza betrothed to another man. Not, as it happens, the prince (who has spurned her) but the local official Biz’menkov. “Biz’menkov had probably said to Liza exactly what I was going to say to her,” Chulkaturin thinks to himself self-torturously, and “she had given him the answer I longed to hear from her.”1
It is as if Biz’menkov had unhorsed Chulkaturin from the saddle of his own life, and Chulkaturin then had to stand on the sidelines and watch that life galloping on ahead without him. In fact, ever since he can remember, Chulkaturin has always felt this way: “Throughout my entire life, I have found that my spot [in it] was taken.”2 And herein lies Chulkaturin’s superfluousness. It’s not that his own life has been irrelevant to the lives of others. It’s that he, Chulkaturin, has somehow become irrelevant to his own life. Because he had banished death from his mind he dawdled and tarried, never seizing the reins himself. Now, as he is about to die, it seems to him that his life is going to continue on very nicely in his absence, albeit under new management.
But Turgenev’s Chulkaturin is not literature’s—in fact not even Russian literature’s—most famous superfluous man. That title goes to Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych who, although both famous and superfluous, is famous not for being superfluous but for something else. He is the most notorious death denier in all of literature. He refuses to believe that he will die. And yet Ivan’s lifelong unwillingness to face his mortality is, like Chulkaturin’s, intimately connected with his own superfluousness, with the sense he feels, as he approaches his untimely end, of being irrelevant to his own life.
We have, Ernest Becker famously argued in his 1973 book The Denial of Death, pushed death entirely out of our lives. We know on the most abstract level that we will come to an end. But we do not—and maybe could not—live our lives in the full face of that knowledge. We’d be paralyzed with fear or a sense of meaninglessness. And so we repress our awareness that extinguishment awaits us. We repress it also because it’s simply impossible to imagine our no longer existing. Freud saw death denial as a fact of our individual nature: “At bottom no one believes in his own death . . . in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.”3 The historian Philippe Ariès, along similar lines, diagnosed death denial as a social phenomenon: consider our mann
er of shuttering death out of life by confining the dying to hospitals and consigning the dead to undertakers.
In other words, many of us live our lives so as to make them fertile ground for Epicurus’s consolatory idea: the observation that as long as we are here death can’t be and so is irrelevant to us. We know this is true as a logical proposition. But we devote ourselves to making it psychologically real for ourselves by living as if we weren’t going to die—by living so that death can gain no toehold in our daily life and concerns as long as we are here.
This is what Ivan does. He thrusts his death out of his life, holds it at bay, so that it becomes as nothing to him. He exiles it to the fringes of his mind, continuously taking on new projects at work, home, and play as if he had no expiry date. A “current of thoughts,” Tolstoy writes—thoughts about tonight’s bridge game, his daughter’s marriage potential, his getting a leg up on his rivals at work—“had always screened the thought of death from Ivan Ilych.”4 The same with many of us. Think of the busy publisher George Weidenfeld, who, in his nineties and still juggling numerous enterprises on the go, conceded that “I think about death,” yet then quickly emphasized: “but I don’t think it through.”5 The more projects you have to think about, the less you will think about death. And the less you think about death, the less inhibition you will feel about continuing to take on new projects.
The result is that when Ivan does die, all of those schemes, plans, and hopes—all the major pieces and parts of his life—are nowhere near ready to come to an end with him. All the continuing loose ends of his life spill over far beyond his death. But since he no longer remains alive their fate now rests in the hands of others. Ivan himself dies. But because he has been such a proficient death denier his life continues on, showing him to have become superfluous to it.
In little vignettes, Tolstoy reveals what this means. At work, the bureaucrat Alexeev, contemplating Ivan’s mortal illness, daydreams that he will succeed to Ivan’s seat on the Court of Justice and take over his unfinished docket of cases. At home, Ivan’s friend Peter Ivanovich, paying his last respects along with a multitude of others, is damned if he’s going to let Ivan’s approaching demise ruin his bridge rubber that evening; the game will go on seamlessly with someone else playing Ivan’s hand. Ivan’s income stream too will flow on after him, in the form of a pension, except that now of course the money will be spent by his widow, Praskovya Fedorovna. Not long before Ivan dies, Praskovya Fedorovna, dressed to the nines, enters his chamber. She reminds him that, months before, they had booked a theater box to watch a Sarah Bernhardt performance that evening. But Ivan is now on his deathbed. So Praskovya Fedorovna informs him that their daughter Lisa’s fiancé, Fëdor Petrishchev, will be taking Ivan’s seat.
No wonder it “sometimes seemed to Ivan,” as Tolstoy writes, “that people were watching him inquisitively as a man whose place might soon be vacant.”6 And there was always someone available—Alexeev, Peter Ivanovich, Praskovya Fedorovna, Fëdor Petrishchev—to take that place: to take up Ivan’s own role in what would otherwise have been his own life. At court and at cards, at the marketplace and at the theater, Ivan’s life will continue beyond his death. After all, by denying death any place in his life, Ivan has lived—to borrow from Ernest Becker—in a “forward momentum of activity,” ever onward, never wrapping things up.7 And so as death creeps into it, his life is still going full force, quite capable of carrying on without him. Yet although his life will survive the moment of his demise, Ivan himself, in some ways, has already predeceased it, which is why others are already assuming his place in it.
Ivan dies of internal injuries at age forty-five, a few months after a freak accident. He falls from a ladder while hanging drapes. Perhaps you can’t fault Ivan (although Tolstoy does) for not thinking much about his death prior to the accident. He was, after all, a robust man in the prime of life. But his death denial persists into the period when, had he acknowledged he was dying, he could have wrapped up his life’s loose ends. Had he been frank with himself about his mortality, he would have completed his major cases so that they would have been decided his way, not Alexeev’s. He might have prevailed on Fëdor Petrishchev to marry Lisa while he was still on the planet. Perhaps he could have put his income in a trust, so that Praskovya Fedorovna would have spent it in accordance with his wishes, not frivolously but conserving an estate for Lisa and Fëdor Petrishchev’s children. And if he had said, “I am dying,” would his wife, daughter, and son-in-law-to-be have traipsed off to the theater that evening?
In fact there are two ways for Ivan to look at this reality—the reality that his life will continue on after he himself has departed. One of them is mildly comforting, the other miserably corrosive. Ironically, for all his attempts to anesthetize his mind against death’s sting, Ivan chooses to look at matters in the way that, unfortunately, brings the greater amount of pain.
One evening, lying in bed as the household bustles around him as if “everything in the world was going on as usual,” Ivan feels a stab of anguish. It would seem, heartbreakingly, as if he is not going to be missed at all: things will carry on very nicely without him. But then, does he feel any better on those occasions when the household comes to a full stop and his family’s mournful eyes all turn to him? No. Such moments bring home to him, heartbreakingly, that he really is about to die. Each path leads to heartache. His life and its affairs will continue on without him, meaning he won’t be missed, but he himself won’t continue on, meaning he will miss out on them.
A shame, because there’s another way to look at it. Since his life will continue on beyond him, as wife, son, and daughter suggest when ever they conduct themselves “as usual,” doesn’t that mean that a sizeable part of Ivan—all the cases, connubial plans, and card-game camaraderie that he commenced, that were so much a part of his life—will in fact cheat death? And shouldn’t that, in some way, warm his heart? He leaves a large, continuing imprint on the world; much of what he worked on and cared about survives him. True, he himself won’t elude the Reaper. But shouldn’t that fact, brought home whenever wife, son, and daughter show distress, confirm how important and irreplaceable he is to them? Why not the best of both worlds—a kind of survival through the ongoing stuff of his life, while feeling that he himself will truly be missed?
But unfortunately Ivan doesn’t see matters that way. He feels that he won’t really, viscerally be missed so long as much of his life—his projects and pastimes, his connivings and collusions—will be able to march along without him. And yet even though much of his life will survive, he himself won’t. He will die, and miss out on it all. That’s how he feels. The worst of both worlds. Tolstoy’s portrait—and I have looked at Ivan Ilych only for what it says to a nonbeliever, shorn of any of the religious messages or allegories Tolstoy intended—shows how disconsolate a life of death denial can leave a person at the end.
The denial of death leaves footprints all around us. So profoundly might we refuse to acknowledge that we will die, so expertly might we forge a life that barrels on long after we have departed, that our survivors, too, may feel compelled to deny our death—a process that Joan Didion has now irrevocably stamped with the term “magical thinking.” For a year following the heart attack that killed her husband, John Gregory Dunne, many of the signs of his life continued unabated. After all, his clothes, his chair, his office were still there—much of the wake he left in the world persisted. Didion says she kept these items and spaces around because of her belief that Dunne might return—that his life was still ongoing—and he might yet need them. But the reverse is also the case. She believed his life was still ongoing because all the signs of it, its objects and spaces, persisted. There was no difference between looking into his vacant office after he had died and looking into it when he had simply gone out of town. His death was easy to deny because so much of his life seemed to persist.
If Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking takes one view, there’s a passage in another magical volume,
Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, that seems to take the opposing position. As soon as someone dies, Mann observes, the world almost immediately begins to seal up around the space he left. This can happen quickly. So quickly that if he were to magically return but a few days later, even those closest to him would find it disconcerting and irksome. As if a guest from last night’s dinner knocked at the door the following morning to continue the revelry while we are puttering around the kitchen cleaning up.8
This thought might appear to jar with Didion’s. For Mann, it seems as if the world heals up seamlessly around the void you leave as soon as you die, while for Didion it keeps a wide berth (your shoes, your office) open for you. But the two thoughts actually dovetail. What Didion shows is that a person’s life—all its projects and pursuits as well as the infrastructure like offices and clothes that supported it—can continue on after his death. What Mann shows is how the person himself immediately disappears at, if not before, his death. If he were then somehow to return, it would seem a gauche intrusion—even into the remnants of his own life, which by now are in the custody and care of others. I used to think that the two magic books were in conflict on this point. Now I see that they are soul mates. Your life continues on after you, but almost immediately it no longer has any place for you yourself. If you were to return, you would be the skunk at your own garden party.
A final representative from literature’s gallery of superfluous dying men: Willy Loman. Willy, in Death of a Salesman, persuades himself that for his life to continue—for all his projects and pursuits to be realized, his sons Biff and Happy to succeed, his wife, Linda, to enjoy a stable income, his mortgage to be paid—he has only to remove himself from that life. He simply has to kill himself—kill himself in a car “accident” so that his insurance will provide his loved ones with an annuity. Willy’s choice isn’t “your money or your life.” It’s your “self or your life (with money).”
