A free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation of life, not of death.
SPINOZA, Ethics
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Some people believe in life in heaven after death because it is the only thing that makes the troubles and tragedies of this life bearable. In the absence of any proof that there is no heaven, they cling to the faith that there must be. If God is all-powerful and loving, He should be both willing and able to provide a happy ending to our all-too-brief and frustrating lives on earth. If God could create life out of nothing, why can’t He restore a life that was already there?
Benjamin Franklin, shortly before his death, penned his own obituary: “The body of B. Franklin, printer, like the cover of an old book, its contents torn out…. But the work shall not be wholly lost, for it will, as he believed, appear once more in a new and more perfect edition, corrected and amended by the Author.”
I would like to believe it. It would be a source of immeasurable bliss to think that when I die, I would be reunited with my son and make up for all those years of being together that I was denied when he died at age fourteen. But that joyful possibility is one of the things that makes me skeptical about the notion of an afterlife. I learned early that the world is not designed to make me happy. Books and movies can be manipulated by their creators to have happy endings; real life doesn’t always work out that way.
More than that, I am uncomfortable with a faith system that posits a definition of God and then decides “what God has to do” in order to live up to their definition. It sounds a bit like saying, If the facts conflict with my theology, I would rather ignore the facts than question my theology.
My colleague Professor Neil Gillman, in his excellent study The Death of Death, points out something I had never noticed before. The last line of the Passover Seder, when Jews celebrate God’s redeeming of our ancestors from bondage in Egypt, describes God destroying the Angel of Death, as if anticipating a parallel between the Egyptian Exodus and a deliverance from the enslavement to mortality that limits us. We may no longer be slaves to Pharaoh, but our bodies are slaves to the Angel of Death, who will one day come to claim us. On Passover, we yearn to be freed from that limitation.
My family and I will continue to end our Seder meal with that image, but as we do so, I am chastened by Gillman’s cautionary words: “The surest way to trivialize any eschatological doctrine is to understand it as literal truth, as a prediction of events that will take place as they are described in some eventual future.” To me, the vision of God destroying Death offers not the promise of physically living again or of living forever but a poetic expression of confidence that there are some things about a person who links his or her life with God — deeds of kindness, medical breakthroughs, great works of art — that permit that person to outlive even his or her own death.
A reality check would remind us that our bodies decay and return to the earth, but so many of our after-death fantasies assume that we will still have bodies, probably because we can’t imagine what it would feel like to exist without them. I have always been drawn to the vision of the afterlife offered by Maimonides, the great Jewish philosopher of the twelfth century. He posited that, after we die, the righteous are rewarded by having their disembodied souls spend eternity in the presence of God, and the wicked are punished by missing out on that reward. My only problem with that view is that it assumes a duality, an essential divide between body and soul, which is more of a Greek notion than a biblical one.
Let me then offer my own belief on the subject: We don’t have to be afraid of dying because it is not really death that scares us. We are afraid of not having lived. In my nearly fifty years as a clergyman, I have been at the bedside of many, many dying people, young and old, religious and freethinkers, successful in life and less successful. They taught me the profound truth that terminally ill people are not afraid of death. When you are very sick, when little by little your body stops being able to do the things it has always been able to do, death may be the only cure for what ails you. There are three things that terrify the very ill person more than the prospect of dying.
They are afraid of pain, they are afraid that people will abandon them while they are still alive, and they are afraid that they will die having wasted their lives, having never accomplished anything that will cause people to remember them when they are gone. For most people, the prospect of nullification, of having left no mark on the world, is more frightening than the prospect of not living forever. The real fear of dying, I am convinced, is the fear that we will leave this world with our tasks unfinished, and the best way, indeed the only way, to defeat death is to live fearlessly and purposefully.
When it comes to the fear, of pain and of abandonment, the best thing that has happened in my lifetime has been the emergence of the hospice movement. I was recently invited to address a conference of hospice workers and volunteers, and I began by congratulating them on having changed the average American’s definition of a good death. Had you asked the average person a few years ago for his notion of a good death, he probably would have said “to go to sleep and not wake up,” echoing Woody Allen’s words, “I don’t mind dying; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” Today, hospice has taught us to define a good death as one that sees us surrounded by family and loved ones, giving us the opportunity to say good-bye, to thank them for having cared for us and shared their lives with us, leaving no words unspoken that need to be spoken.
And hospice has persuaded doctors to let go, to forgo uncomfortable, invasive treatments that would only bring the patient a few more days or weeks of discomfort. Doctors no longer see assigning a patient to hospice as giving up or admitting defeat. As one doctor put it, when it comes to the terminally ill, medical care should usually involve more care and less medicine. American society has been slower, however, to recognize the need of the terminally ill for human companionship. Perhaps because we feel so inadequate to do anything helpful (“I never know what to say”), perhaps because it involves looking in the mirror and seeing a preview of our own mortality, we visit the terminally ill less often, we phone them less often, and we spend less time with them.
I remember a colleague of mine, an outstanding rabbi and pastor, who once confided to me, “I have a congregant whom I like a lot. He’s about my age, a good friend, an occasional tennis partner. He’s in the hospital with cancer and doesn’t have much time left. I know I ought to visit him, but for some reason I never get around to it.” I suggested, “Might it be because when you visit him, you see yourself one day in that situation and that’s scary?” David Kessler, author of The Needs of the Dying, has written, “We may never feel more alone than when we ourselves are dying.” Elsewhere, Kessler pictures the hospitalized terminally ill person saying, “You can talk to me, you can talk about me.: Just don’t talk without me, as if I weren’t here. I’m not dead yet.”
Recently, a close friend had to bury his ninety-seven-year-old aunt. He told me that when he visited her at the assisted-living facility where she spent her last years, the staff would comment on his frequent visits, telling him, “You have no idea how many people here go for weeks and months without a single visitor.”
I know from my own experience in hospitals and nursing homes that it is not pleasant visiting the seriously ill. We feel there is so little we can do for them. When we do bring ourselves to do it, we should realize that our presence, our caring enough to come, does a lot for the dying person. It may not extend her life, but it reassures her that people know that she is still very much alive. Kessler offers a beautiful image of what we can do when a loved one is dying. He suggests that we escort them to the door of death the way we would accompany a friend leaving on a journey to his or her gate at the airport. (Given today’s airport rules, we might think of accompanying them to the security transit point.)
But in case after case the dying have taught me that what frightened them more than pain or loneliness was the fear that they had wasted their lives, that they had used up their allotted time on earth keeping busy but never really having lived. Earlier, I cited the theory that the knowledge Adam and Eve acquired when they ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the knowledge that elevated them above the level of animals, was the knowledge that they would one day die, and I asked how that awareness of mortality could be called good and bad, as the Bible describes the fruit.
The answer may be that death is not good (except where it brings release from unbearable suffering), but the knowledge that we are destined to die can be good if it moves us to take our choices and preferences more seriously. If our time is limited, we realize that what we put off today, we may never get around to doing. It has been said that death, like birth, provides life with a temporal frame, a beginning and an end. Without them, there can be no middle. In the words of Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, who wrote so meaningfully on the subject, “It is the denial of death that is partially responsible for people living empty, purposeless lives; for when you live as if you’ll live forever, it becomes too easy to postpone the things you know you must do.”
Death does not negate the meaning of our lives. Death helps to define our lives. Remember, the word “define” means “to set boundaries.” Death marks the end of life in the same way that a period marks the end of a sentence. It doesn’t rob the sentence of meaning; it clarifies what the meaning of the sentence is. Your life is not meaningless just because it doesn’t go on forever. It is precisely because our lives do not go on forever that our choices and values have significance.
But what if we understand that we are mortal yet get the frightening feeling that we may be running out of time with a large part of our agenda unfinished? What if, as we grow older and notice changes in our health and vigor, as we read more obituary notices for people our age and younger, we find ourselves thinking less about life and more about the prospect of dying? To speak of death in the abstract, to speak of the inevitability of death for all mankind, is a philosophical-theological conversation. To confront the prospect of one’s own imminent death is an act of immense courage. My friend Forrest Church, a Unitarian minister in New York and author of a dozen books, recently sent me the manuscript of his next book. In an accompanying note, he told me that this book would be his last; he was dying of esophageal cancer. The book would be called Love and Death.
How does a man who has dealt with death professionally for years deal with the prospect of his own death? First, he overcomes the temptation to blame himself for contracting a fatal illness, not asking himself, “What did I do to deserve this?” whether in terms of unhealthy living or moral misbehavior. Too often, asking why either becomes an effort to find someone to blame or suggests that if we had never made any wrong choices in our lives, we might have lived forever. Church writes, “The hard truth is … we all die of something. Vegetarians die. Joggers die. Even people with low cholesterol die….However we may have lived, the ultimate culprit is not sin or squalor but life. Life draws death in its glorious train.”
Next, he realizes that his death will be a source of anguish for his family and friends, and it is his obligation to be aware of that even if he won’t be around to see it. He reaches out to them, articulating his fears so that they will feel free to express theirs, forgiving and seeking forgiveness. In that way, the loneliest thing any of us will ever do becomes just a bit less lonely.
And finally he draws comfort from his faith, not faith in a God of happy endings for good people and not faith in the certainty of a life in the hereafter but the faith that life is not meaningless just because it is not endless. “Everyone suffers but not everyone despairs. Despair is a consequence of suffering only when affliction cuts us off from others. The same suffering that leads one person to lose all hope can as easily promote empathy, a felt appreciation for other people’s pain.” It can also lead us to take pleasure in savoring one’s time with loved ones, knowing it will be brief and therefore all the more precious.
Over the years, my appreciation of the books of Philip Roth has been enhanced by the realization that he and I are about the same age. I could identify with his characters, from the randy adolescents of Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy ‘s Complaint to the rueful middle-aged figure of Nathan Zuckerman.
When, in his most recent novels, I find heroes who are his (and my) age obsessed with the prospect of growing old and dying, I can’t help feeling that this reflects issues with which Roth himself is grappling, and it saddens me that a writer of Roth’s immense talent should be focusing on how little he has left rather than on how much. It bothers me because I recognize that same tendency in myself as I grow into my seventies and have to make allowances for physical and mental things I can no longer do as easily as I once did. It is the plaint of Ecclesiastes, who finds himself in old age thinking, I have striven to do so much and now I am running out of time and wondering what the point of it all was.
In contrast with this obsession with the gathering darkness, I am drawn to the attitude of the artist Marc Chagall, who just before his death at age ninety-seven completed his last painting entitled Towards Another Light, showing a young painter with wings (as if ready for flight) working at his easel and an angel descending from heaven to carry him off. I would like to see a person’s last years (including my own) guided by the words of Spinoza that appear in the epigraph to this post, “A free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation of life, not of death.”
The sin of Ecclesiastes — to focus too much on the fear of death, to see it as canceling out everything you have done in your lifetime — gives death more power than it deserves. Death is not the final word. Your life is the story; death is only punctuation. We sin against life and against everything that is holy and valuable in life if we let the fear of death rob us of our freedom to enjoy as much life as we are granted.
I read Roth’s novel Everyman shortly after it was published, not realizing at the time that Roth had taken the title from a well-known medieval morality play and modeled his leading character after the hero of the play, a man who is terrified at the prospect of dying and dismayed to learn that neither friends nor family nor worldly success can postpone his passage. Happily, there is evidence that many people do deal with growing old and approaching the end of life more like Chagall than like Roth’s protagonists. After Roth’s novel appeared, two social scientists wrote to The New York Times Book Review citing the results of their research on middle-class Americans in their seventies. They wrote, “Only a small minority `worry about oblivion.’ Most accept their lives, including illness, loss and their many past misdeeds, and purposefully engage with the present…. Some despair, but they tend to be the same people who were also despairing in young and middle adulthood…. We share this note lest too many aging Americans take permission from Roth to dwell in the past and fear the future rather than seize the present.”
My own experience endorses theirs. People are living longer, and most of them are no longer spending their last years watching television in an empty apartment and waiting for the end. More and more of them are finding useful, creative things to do, mentoring young people, organizing book clubs, and keeping themselves vital as they do so.
I have two specific suggestions for those people (and I include myself in their number) who realize that the years behind significantly outnumber the years ahead, and for those who may find themselves looking forward to death because they find their current lives unsatisfying. We have to cleanse our souls of accumulated bitterness, envy, and resentment. We have to get over our anger at people who may have hurt, cheated, or betrayed us, most of whom may be long dead themselves or long gone from our lives. I would say to people, Why do you insist on carrying that heavy baggage into whatever is waiting for you? Why are you giving those people such power over you, to define you as a loser, a bitter, jealous person? Let go and travel light.
And second, we have to be able to focus on one or two meaningful things in our lives that we can feel we did well. A life doesn’t have to be remarkable to be meaningful. If you were not that successful in business, if you never earned a lot of money, you can focus on the fact that you lived and worked with integrity, that you were a good neighbor and earned the respect of your coworkers. If as a mother you are disappointed at the way your children turned out, you can still take pride in your ability to go on loving them and caring about them despite your disappointment. Love them because of who you want to be, not just because of who you want them to be.
If you worry that no one cares about you now that you are old and failing, find times to surround yourself with friends and family to give you the message of how much they care and to celebrate with them what your life has been about. Many years ago, when I was a young rabbi preparing to officiate at my first funeral (and only the third one at which I had been present), an older colleague gave me a valuable piece of advice. He told me, “Every life is a unique story, one that has never happened before. Your task as a eulogizer is to find that unique dimension and build your eulogy around it, so that friends and family will have that to remember.”
When Thornton Wilder wrote his novel in an effort to make sense of the death of innocent people, he had them die when a bridge collapsed. Why did he have them die that way? Why not in a fire, an automobile accident, a plague, or at the hands of a violent murderer? Wilder may have been using the image of the fragile rope bridge over a chasm as a symbol of the precariousness of all of our lives. Whether we understand the bridge as carrying us to a better world or just taking us to tomorrow’s problems and possibilities, each of us every day is making his or her way across a shaky bridge, aware that something might happen to us at any moment but at the same time realizing that if all we can think about is the fear of falling, we will never get anywhere in our lives. Feel the fear but cross the bridge anyway.
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, one of the dominant personalities in the world of Eastern European Hasidic Judaism was a man named Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlay. He enchanted his followers with his enigmatic stories and sayings, many of which are pored over to this day by theologians and psychiatrists alike. One of his many sayings became a popular song in Israel several years ago at a particularly tense time in Israeli society. This whole world, he said, is nothing but a narrow bridge, and for those who would cross it, the most important thing is not to be afraid.
We too, the only creatures who live with the daily awareness of our mortality, may feel that we are called on to cross that narrow bridge every day of our lives. If we let ourselves be paralyzed by the fear of falling into the chasm, we will never get anywhere or achieve anything. It will be the fear of death, not the fact of death, that will rob our lives of meaning. For us, as for Rabbi Nachman’s disciples, the most important thing to remember is not to be afraid.
