One frozen February night, when I was in my early twenties, I was driving back to New Jersey with a friend, from where I don’t remember, and singing along with the Stones’ raucous “Dancing with Mr. D.” We decided to stop at Niagara Falls. It was well past midnight and must have been about ten below. A chain-link fence descended an icy decline to the lip of the falls. Whooping and laughing, I crept hand over hand along the fence, down to the edge, and hung out over the thunderously gushing waters. One slip and it would have been adios. But no worries; back then I enjoyed pulling on the whiskers of the grim reaper. I felt immortal.
Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Camus, Heidegger, and other existentialists were always walking back and forth over their graves, always thinking about the meaning of death in life. When I teach existentialism, there is no topic that my eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds warm to more than death. Most of them have seen thousands upon thousands of people blown to bits or take bullets to the chest on screens and in video games, but most of them have yet to sit on the couch with death, close enough to smell its breath. They have not been bedside it in the ICU with those green lights bleeping, feeding a loved one ice chips as he fades out of existence. My students like to have pillow fights with death, just as I did when I was their age. Who knows, maybe it was because I felt dead inside, but even when I was in my midthirties, I wrote about death for my dissertation. Looking back, I think that even then, as a mature man and father, I was just jousting with the idea, although now I wasn’t hanging out over Niagara Falls; it was an intellectual game.
Things have changed; now that I have sat by my father, who with that oxygen mask and grotesquely distorted blown-up face, was being blasted by cancer out of the world he could never get right with; now that I have listened to my mother’s death rattle for a week before feeling her shins go cold and death creep up her body like a force; now that I have shuffled my feet and rubbed my palms together, waiting to find out the results of my wife’s mastectomy and whether or not the cancer had spread; now that I have had a stent in my heart and am in my seventh decade, I am not so much inclined to want to play hide-and-seek with “Mr. D.”
Though we don’t know the number, we know our days are numbered, or at least the rational part of us knows this. Death is the certain uncertainty that frames our lives. Certain it will happen; uncertain when.
These days, thanatology has become an area of academic specialization. There is an emerging science of how to die and deal with death, as if by turning death into a research subject we could control it. Often outlining the stages of grief and with mantras about “letting go,” psychologists and other lifestyle engineers have produced a mountainous literature on death and dying.
Psychology aside, there is a long and august tradition in philosophy of meditating on death. Medieval scholars kept a skull on their desk to remind them that it is dust to dust. Socrates believed that philosophy, rather than an art of living, was a practice in dying, a lifelong practice in separating yourself from the senses and emotions that he thought obscured the sidereal light of reason. Socrates was the patron saint of the Stoics. Buddhist-like, the Stoics took ataraxy, or peace of mind, to be of supreme value. They were convinced that there is no greater threat to inner tranquility than the dread of death. Marcus Aurelius and the company of Stoics believed that the fear of extinction made slaves of us all. They argued that as long as we are willing to do anything to remain aboveground, we might as well be in shackles. For the Stoics, death carried with it the positive aspect of escaping life when and if it became unbearable. As they were wont to say, “The door is always open.” I don’t think the Stoics would have been big fans of suicide hotlines. For them, there were fates much worse than death—like becoming a reprobate. If a Nazi-like regime takes control and you don’t believe that you can lead a virtuous and tranquil life with such brigands in power, then take your leave, just as Cato, Seneca, and many other Stoics did. And yet, for all their machinations on how to wrangle with death, the Stoics did not discern any great lessons from death.
In the late nineteenth century, Schopenhauer wrote of death as though it were the dividing line of consciousness:
The cheerfulness and vivacity of youth are partly due to the fact that when we are ascending the hill of life, death is not visible: it lies down at the bottom of the other side. But once we crossed the top of the hill, death comes in view—death, which, until then, was only known by hearsay. . . . A grave seriousness now takes the place of the early extravagance of spirit; and the change is noticeable even in the expression of a man’s face. . . . For towards the close of life, every day gives us the same kind of sensation as the criminal experiences at every step on his way to be tried.1
Schopenhauer’s observations hit the mark. Most of us feel invincible in our youth; then, when we discover that lump on our neck and we can make out the edge of our existence, we grow fearful and forlorn. A depth psychologist whom Freud carefully studied, Schopenhauer espoused the view that the highest achievement in life is to overcome the will to live. Still, like the Stoics, he did not expect any special wisdom to come from pondering his demise. Tolstoy, in contrast, did take instruction from his own mortality.
An officer in the Crimean War, Tolstoy was no stranger to death and carnage. Still, when he was in his early thirties and his beloved brother Nikolai died, the Russian giant sank into a withering depression. Tolstoy was known for his preternatural physical strength and energy. He labored long hours in the field and, at the same time, wrote the likes of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. And yet, for a couple of years after Nikolai’s death, the strong man was blanketed in depression. He could not absorb the preposterous fact that we are thrown into an existence in which we claw to survive, in which we bind ourselves to others so intimately that it feels as though our hearts were outside ourselves, only to have a few molecules move one way or the other and—poof—we pop like a balloon and all is over. Nicodemus stealthily came to Jesus at night. Jesus knew what he was seeking—life everlasting. In his Confessions, Tolstoy, another Nicodemus, sighed, “I cannot now help seeing day and night going round and bringing me to death. That is all I see, for that alone is true. All else is false.”
Freud, who famously taught that belief in God was a projection of a childish wish for protection, would chuckle at Tolstoy’s conversion to Christianity, but the devout Tolstoy came to believe in Christ because he believed that only Christ promised victory over death.
Downcast as he was, Tolstoy managed to compose The Death of Ivan Ilych. This lambent little book masterfully portrays bourgeois society’s nervousness, alienation, self-estrangement, and moribund spiritual life. Tolstoy was a close reader of the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), who remarked that if human beings could only learn to sit still with themselves, there would be peace on earth. Tolstoy agreed with Pascal, but in The Death of Ivan Ilych he connects the craving for diversion and our alienation from one another with our unspoken terror of death.
Tolstoy’s protagonist, Ivan Ilych, savors a life that, despite a few bumps, seems to all, including himself, to be going swimmingly. Throughout the novella, Tolstoy describes the promotions and acquisitions that are supposed to make the barrister feel as though everything was snug and safe in life. For the escalator class, new homes were essential markers of blessedness. After some challenging times, Ivan enjoys a stroke of luck and is appointed a judge. Naturally, he builds a fancy new home.
One afternoon, while hanging curtains, the judge takes a tumble and slams his side. A few days later, a mysterious and painful affliction develops. The pain, which centers near his kidney, comes and goes, then gradually moves in for good. Day by day, Ivan starts to wither away. He consults with renowned doctors, but no one can make a diagnosis and none of the treatments provide any lasting relief. Like a bright winter sunlight sweeping across a hardwood floor, there are moments of respite and hope that come and go. Gradually, however, Ivan grasps that he is pregnant with his own death. At one point, he overhears his brother-in-law lecturing Praskovya, Ivan’s wife, that Ivan is dying. And yet no one, not even the doctors, acknowledges that he is near the end. Ivan is as isolated as someone stricken with the plague. Laden with horror, sadness, and fury at the world and God, the poor man has no one to turn to and unburden himself: not his frivolous helpmate, not his equally superficial daughter, not his bridge-partner friends. At one point when he is in his bedroom listening to the chatter from a soiree that his wife has arranged, Ivan fumes, “Death. Yes, death. And none of them know or wish to know it, and they have no pity for me.”
The sole person able to empathize with the dying man is his servant Gerasim. As his pain crescendos, Ivan finds comfort when Gerasim takes Ivan’s legs and rests them on his broad shoulders. Late one night, as Ivan was sending the young man away and expressing his gratitude for his servant’s generous efforts, Gerasim offhandedly gave voice to the inconvenient truth that Ivan was dying, saying, “We shall all of us die, so why should I grudge a little trouble.”
It is obtuse to reduce a novel or poem to a message fit for an index or Hallmark card, as though if Tolstoy were really intelligent he would have stopped teasing us and just straightforwardly informed us what his novel meant. Yet the Tolstoy of Ivan Ilych wanted his readers to understand that, with its lack of authenticity and brotherly love, modern life is spiritual death.
As Ivan is slowly forced to crawl into the womb of his death, the chapters in The Death of Ivan Ilych grow shorter and shorter. Up until the very end, Ivan expresses his chagrin and perplexity at the fact that someone like him—someone who had done everything “right,” everything he was supposed to do—could be doomed to this dreadful fate of annihilation. It didn’t seem fair. But in his agony and throes of his death anxiety, the truth wafts up. Dying teaches Ivan the humanity that living could not. He begins to comprehend that he and his social set are a cast of soulless careerists whose only worries are their income, comfort level, and social standing.
The light of death illuminates the fact that he and his wife have long been estranged. As he lay dying, Praskovya approaches Ivan “with undried tears on her nose and cheek and a despairing look on her face.” In his final moments, Ivan escapes the lifelong orbit of his all-consuming selfishness. He thinks, “Yes, I am making them wretched.” And then, “‘it will be better for them when I die.’ He wished to say this but had not the strength. . . . With a look at his wife he indicated his son and said: ‘Take him away . . . sorry for him . . . sorry for you, too. . . .’ He tried to add, ‘Forgive me,’ but said ‘forgo’ and waved his hand, knowing that He whose understanding mattered would understand.”
The awareness of death that everyone was eager to repress was alone capable of producing the intimacy with his family that Ivan was not even aware that he longed for. It was only when the hourglass had run out that Ivan understood this, but maybe that was enough.
Tolstoy was friends with a Dane living in Russia, who was a fervent fan of his countryman Kierkegaard. Tolstoy’s Danish friend enjoyed translating fragments from Kierkegaard’s Enten/Eller (Either/Or) and reading them aloud to Tolstoy in Russian. Although Tolstoy was less than impressed with the disparate snippets, Tolstoy and Kierkegaard were kindred spirits. Both of them recognized the collision between reason and faith. Both underscored the individual’s relation to God over the individual’s relation to the ecumenical institutions mediating our relationship with God. Both accentuated action over creedal assent. Finally, Kierkegaard no less than Tolstoy, and for some of the same moral reasons, urged us to think death over, or rather to think our own death over.
Most of the writers classified as existentialists are critical of the aspiration to ponder the world and history from a perspectiveless perspective. They were doubting Thomases about the desirability of striving to think about the meaning of our lives from a passionless, objective standpoint. It was, they believed, an Enlightenment fantasy to imagine that we could have a disinterested understanding of matters that should be of infinite interest, most pressingly ethics and religion, as though we could or should try to answer the question of what kind of person we should strive to be through some cool and collected rational process. Whether or not to tether your life to God or brush the divinity issue off as nonsense is a resolve that partially forms what kind of person you will be. To respond to existential choice, as though you were a third party to yourself akin to an impartial judge in court, would, from a Kierkegaardian vantage point, be a contortion of what it means to be human.
As noted above, Kierkegaard prodded us to think about life from a first-person, inside-out vantage point. On his reckoning, philosophers from Plato to Hegel in their excogitations were guilty of living in theory, of “forgetting their existence.” Emphatic that death, like anxiety, has lessons for us, Kierkegaard warns that we must be willing to appropriate those lessons personally and passionately. In his philosophical magnum opus, The Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard deploys the example of death to highlight the difference between objective facts and the meaning of those facts, or again, between a general, impersonal knowledge and a personal understanding. He writes:
For example, what it means to die. On that topic, I know what people ordinarily know: that if I swallow a dose of sulfuric acid I will die, likewise by drowning myself or sleeping in coal gas etc. I know that Napoleon always carried poison with him, that Shakespeare’s Juliet took it; that the Stoics regarded suicide as a courageous act and others regard it as cowardice, . . . I know the tragic hero dies in the fifth act. . . . I know that the poet interprets death in a variety of moods.2
The Danish firebrand continues his catena of objective certainties, but then, in one dash of his pen, puts the problem in our inbox, “However; despite this almost extraordinary knowledge or proficiency of knowledge, I am by no means able to regard death as something I have understood.”
Kierkegaard prodded us to think about life from a first-person, inside-out vantage point.
I can know all sorts of general truths about death and still fail to understand what it means that I shall die. Again, objective facts and abstract theories are one thing; however, what those facts and theories personally mean to me are something else again. Personal meaning is the bull’s-eye of existentialist investigation; in this case, it helps answer the “What does it mean to me that I will die?”
In the previously cited “At a Graveside,” Kierkegaard urges us to put a figurative skull on our desks. In this discourse, he nods to the apparent contradiction of an existing individual thinking of him- or herself as nonexistent; nevertheless, Kierkegaard assures us that with a little imagination and courage, we can unite these immiscibles. We can think about ourselves and our death.
Imagining your own death is a taxing exercise. Kierkegaard observed that when it came to keeping company with this idea, our thoughts frequently miss the mark, tending instead toward being projections of current psychological states and, in that sense, of being either too heavy- or light-minded, too frivolous or depressive. Whether it be ghoulish or giddy fantasies, the idea of our own death easily becomes a kind of inkblot test in which we expose something deep about our life perspective, rather than actually confronting the fact that there comes a time when there is no more time, when all is over.
Many of the mistaken and misleading ways we have of thinking about our own demise are cataloged in “At a Graveside.” It is, for instance, common to hear death described as a sleep. But Kierkegaard jabs, “Look at the one who is sleeping in death; he is not flushed like a child in sleep; he is not gathering new strength . . . the dream is not paying him a visit in friendliness the way it visits the old man in his sleep!”3
Then there is the notion of death as the great equalizer. Maybe the maid who has been cleaning hotel rooms at the Ritz for the pampered class for twenty years is excoriated by a guest for failing to replace a sparkling water in the fridge. She grinds her teeth, bites her tongue, and apologizes all the while silently consoling herself with the bitter thought that everyone is an equal in death, the rich no less than the poor will be food for worms. Though not out of cruelty, Kierkegaard would deny her that comfort. “Death’s decision,” he comments, “is . . . not definable as equality, because the equality consists in annihilation. And pondering this is supposed to be alleviating for the living!”
“Eat, drink, and be merry” is another gambit, which Kierkegaard casts as a hysterical “cowardly clinging to life.” Epicurus taught, “Where I am death is not and where death is I am not.” Ergo, a rational person does not fear death. On this piece of logical legerdemain, Kierkegaard wryly remarks, “This is the jest by which the cunning contemplator places himself on the outside,” and it is “only a jest if he merely contemplates death and not himself in death.”
Kierkegaard recognized that when the hard rain starts to fall, many of us tend to curl up and withdraw into a feeling of hopelessness. We play possum. But the psychoanalyst—with religious categories up his sleeves—upbraids the longing for death, as the “cowardly craving of depression to want to become dizzy in the emptiness and to seek the final diversion in this dizziness.”
Unlike more rationalist pates, Kierkegaard had a deep appreciation for the significance of moods. In “At a Graveside,” Kierkegaard describes moods as a form of internal weather sparked by something external. Dark and light, moods come and go.
An old friend surprised me last week. We tossed back a couple of beers and, for an hour or three, I was immersed in the moment, the way I used to feel like as an athlete when a football was sailing toward me or a left hook in the boxing ring. All my regrets and worries seemed to seep away. The next day, I got a call informing me that another friend who had long suffered from the inexplicable sadness used a pistol to blow the bad thoughts out of his brains. Clouds of all-consuming sadness engulfed me, forked by the idea that life is as absurd as Camus and Cioran painted it. Kierkegaard, however, warns that the moods that sweep over us, no matter how powerful, are not to be confused with earnestness, that is, with a profound, personal concern about the sort of human being we are becoming.
Sometimes it seems as though God were playing tricks. Kierkegaard’s name means “churchyard” in Danish. As a young man, Kierkegaard made many trips to the churchyard. Before he was twenty, he had thrown a handful of dirt on the caskets of his mother and four siblings. And yet he insists that witnessing another person’s death, even that of your own child, is “only a mood,” an infinitely sad one that might buckle your knees, shake you to the core, and perhaps invite you to think that it would be best to jump in the grave yourself. Just the same, the feeling that comes with the news of a loved one’s death is still “only a mood” and not the relation to yourself that only an awareness of your own death can inculcate.
Kierkegaard, however, warns that the moods that sweep over us, no matter how powerful, are not to be confused with earnestness, that is, with a profound, personal concern about the sort of human being we are becoming.
“At a Graveside” begins with the plangent words, Så er det da forbid! (So it is over!). Fugue-like, the expression “it is over” is repeated a score of times in the score of pages that follow. Kierkegaard writes as though convinced that this mantra is the best caption to capture and focus our minds on death. One day and again, who knows when, all will be over. You won’t be able to change a sentence of the story of your life. Maybe a week ago you resolved to be a more attentive and loving husband. As you were driving home from work, a song drifts over the radio, an otherwise sappy pop tune, “You’ll never get to heaven if you break my heart.” Insight and wisdom can sift in from the strangest places. And for some reason, the song melts your very being so that you are overcome with a feeling of tenderness and newfound appreciation for the woman who is the mother of your children. The resolve hovers that from now until the end of your days, you are going to kiss your wife on the lips every day and remind her of your boundless love. You stop at a red light that seems to be dancing a jig in the gusty wind. You can’t wait to traverse those few extra miles home; home, where you will embrace her and trade stories of the day’s events, events that no one but you two would be interested in. It is as though this little ditty woke you up to what a divine gift intimacy is. Just then there is a rumbling explosion in your chest that feels as if it is blowing you into the stratosphere where everything looks so small and far away. You slink over; to everyone else, it will seem that your death was instantaneous, but there was a sliver of time. As the death of Ivan Ilych makes plain, a moment can last an eternity, and that second was long enough to anguish over having squandered the opportunity to be the loving spouse you always meant to be.
Today, and in Kierkegaard’s time, people long to die in their sleep, that is, to die without experiencing death; if not in their sleep then a quick death, one that affords the least amount of time, the minimal awareness that while life moves on for everyone else, it is over for you.
In his novel White Noise, Don DeLillo writes of a pill that dissolves the fear of death. Would you want to take it? Kierkegaard would never prescribe it, although Nietzsche might have celebrated such a pill. Perhaps Nietzsche would have judged all this intentional thinking about death to be a perverse waste of time. Rieff, a close reader of Nietzsche, once quipped, “You only live once . . . if then.” Nietzsche would have counseled—don’t be a fool and squander that one life, morosely pondering the end of that life. When you have the auriferous sunlight, bask in it, grow, take risks, be creative, dance above the abyss of your own impending death. Our Danish counselor would have read this Nietzschean attitude to be one of whistling in the dark; worse yet, for him it would amount to missing the point of life, namely, that of becoming a human being in the fullest sense. When we are in danger of forgetting what is most important, Kierkegaard advised that we should “summon the earnest thought of death” and that thought will give retroactive force to our lives.
The author of “At a Graveside” writes, “The merchant is correct in saying that the commodity certainly has its price . . . and when there is scarcity, the merchant profits.”
Time is a commodity, a commodity for which we can use our imagination to create a scarcity. Kierkegaard continues, “With the thought of death the earnest person is able to create a scarcity, so that the year and day receive infinite worth.”
Paraphrasing Heidegger, William Barrett, the philosopher who helped introduce existentialism to Americans, wrote: “This death, my death, the death that haunts me is the possibility that I shall lose that world. And as such an internal possibility, it pervades my existence now and at every moment. . . . It is the most extreme and absolute possibility, because it cancels all other possibilities.” Speaking for both Kierkegaard and Heidegger, Barrett adds, “Yet if we do not turn away in panic, this vision of our radical finitude brings its own liberation.”4
More than liberation, death resets our priorities. What seemed a matter of indifference before now assumes a new significance. The reset of our priorities might be from the trivial and external to central and enduring life tasks. For instance, now and again I might ask myself, Have I gone out of my way for anyone today? Have I even made an effort to think about someone else’s life from their perspective? Or let me be more concrete. As noted, my wife survived breast cancer and has now developed Parkinson’s. Though Parkinson’s makes her self-conscious and forces her to constantly think about timing her medications, for the most part she handles the disease as though it were just another bump in the road of life. On the other hand, her illness makes me furious at existence and/or God. Some nights, until her medication kicks in, her tremors are so powerful that the bed shakes. When she is in the middle of a bad bout, she often has to lie still for a while. One night, I was feeling needy and irritated that she could not be close, and I turned on my side away from her, as if to let her know . . . I don’t know what. Then the thought finally started ticking, One night in the not too distant future it will all be over—one of us won’t be here. Then I came to my senses. I turned over and gently stroked her head. That was a reset.
At the risk of being pedantic, the Kierkegaardian understanding of death might be this: don’t be careless with the people you walk through life with. Don’t have arguments and leave them unsettled.
For the devout Kierkegaard, death serves as a prompt to “recollect God.” The ever-present awareness of your death should give a fillip to faith. But once again, it is imperative to ask whether or not his insights have any traction for adherents of the “God is dead” gospel. Perhaps we could translate the wisdom that Kierkegaard extracts from death along secular lines. If you don’t believe in God, and yet love is a god term for you, you might surmise that there is nothing more precious in life than loving relationships. At the risk of being pedantic, the Kierkegaardian understanding of death might be this: don’t be careless with the people you walk through life with. Don’t have arguments and leave them unsettled.
When I get it through my head that the silent freight train of oblivion is barreling down on me, I might be less likely to be heedless in my relationships, to snarl at someone and not feel any urgency to repair the damage. Decades ago, I had an argument over the phone with my elder brother, Tom, concerning our ailing mother. Nine years older, he had been like a father to me. Sometimes I don’t think I would have survived the craziness in the battle zone that was our home without his love and protection. Tom was so deeply internalized that when I brought up my own boys, I could always detect his warm, playful voice in the way I bantered and romped with my young sons. Just the same, after we hung up the phone, we did not converse for a decade. Perhaps some instructions from death would have been a scarecrow to my pride; perhaps it would have prevented such carelessness on my part; perhaps it would have prodded me to drive the five hours to see him and attempt to settle our grievances. Half-consciously, I figured we would make peace someday, but I must have imagined then that nothing disastrous could happen to either one of us. In our case, my mother’s death brought the olive branch; we are once again as close as we were before, but both of us profoundly regret those fallow years when we were at the equator of our lives and did not exchange a word, much less an embrace.
There is much to recommend Kierkegaard’s counsel on death, and yet I think he neglects one aspect of it—namely, the plain and pure tincture of sadness. Three years ago, I sat with a dying woman in her late eighties. She happened to be a rather well-known evangelical author, and the flock of her admirers expected her to be eager to sit at the right or left hand of the table in the great beyond. She was a kind and honest woman, and while we were alone, I held her bony fingers and asked, “You know you are dying—are you afraid?” She bit her lip, shook her head, and answered, “Not afraid, but sad, very sad because I am going to miss everyone.”
Anyone who aspires to think earnestly about death must include the heavyheartedness that comes when the ties that bind break. The devout cross over that chasm with the belief that we will all be hanging out together again in the hereafter. But my octogenarian friend was faithful as could be and she was nevertheless shrouded in sadness. Even Jesus wept over his impending death in Gethsemane. Some will scoff that in death we won’t be able to feel the pain of the loss. But it could be gainsaid that conscious or not, the loss of a good thing—a loss of love, the best thing—remains a loss, and then to contemplate the agony of those who will feel your absence as though it were a continent breaking away is enough to make a person shut Kierkegaard’s book and push aside all thoughts about the end; unless you believe, as I do, that our capacity to absorb and tolerate the full weight of grief is part of becoming an authentic human being.