Death and dying: two nasty little words that send shivers down the spines of most people. The word dying means the declining capacity to make a mark on the world; it means growing isolation from others, pain, embarrassment, eventual extinction. The word death means the opposite of birth. It is the endpoint of dying, the moment at which the power of the living individual is finally extinguished — once and for ever. For most people, this endpoint of life is exactly as Thomas Hobbes described it more than three centuries ago — ‘a perpetuall and restless desire of Power after Power, that ceaseth only in death.’452 Death — in the Christian world at least — is a blackened and lonely event filled with sobbing, brave speeches, dirge, mourning, loss. Death is exhaustion, melancholia, sadness, guilt. Death is no laughing matter; it is solemnity, for around the dying and the dead wit and laughter are unseemly, if only because death means nothingness. There are of course many ways of dying. But from this conventional standpoint there is only one end result: you are no more, you are no longer to be found anywhere, you are dead.
The popular understanding of death as the extreme borderline of power is not quite right. It correctly grasps that the lonely process of disappearing from the face of the earth ends in nothingness. But by treating dying and death as a fact of life it overlooks their inescapably political dimension. All individuals, presidents and other authority figures included, are confronted with the task of coping personally with their own effacement through death. Dead people have no troubles, but dying and death are inescapable problems for the living. Their resolution requires more than simply working through the gentle and painful sadness of disappearance from the company of others. That is the easy part. The task of coping with death — as Havel’s friend Jan Patočka consistently taught — is much more and above all a matter of individuals cultivating responsibility for their own death.453 This follows from the fact that everywhere, and at all times, death stalks life. ‘Life as a self-respecting human being wouldn’t be what it is unless it was constantly accompanied [provázet] by death,’ Havel told a television interviewer curious about his recent introduction to the Czech edition of The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thötröl). ‘We know about death. We know that we all die, and that this [knowledge] distinguishes us from other beings,’ he continued, before drawing his key conclusion: ‘The individual must first of all think about if and why s/he either acts only within a given time on earth or tries to behave, as Masaryk said, sub species aeternitatis, that is, reckon upon eternity when acting, as if everything is being recorded and evaluated [zhodnocení], and as if each one of our actions may or may not be an event that can for ever change the universe.’454
Havel’s remark was astute. Death is indeed the constant companion of life, and never more so than during the act of dying, when a certain measure of freedom can be exercised\by individuals. They may choose not to exercise this freedom, but in every case they are called upon to take it upon themselves (auf sich nehmen as the philosopher Martin Heidegger puts it) to decide how they are to die and what their death means. Their death is always their own death — each is forced to speak in the first-person singular of ‘my death’ — which means that no one can step into their shoes and act out their role in the drama of dying. When individuals seek to do that — by passing on their powers to a doctor, for instance — they in effect refuse to explain themselves, to answer for their thoughts and actions before others. They act irresponsibly. They suppose or pretend that they cannot look death straight in the face. They stop ‘practising for death’ (as Socrates put it in Plato’s Phaedo). They give up wrestling with the basic problem of making judgements about how best to die. They do not receive the rich gift of death — the power to give life to the process of dying, to prove, in the face of impossibility and defeat, that it is possible to exercise vigilance over oneself in the presence of others.
From the time of his sixtieth birthday, when his health began rapidly to worsen, Havel found himself in the company of five of the country’s past presidents, each of whom was squeezed between the imperative to act responsibly in the face of bodily death and the choice to carry on as President of the body politic. There were moments, for instance immediately after part of his lung was removed, when death was much on his mind — so much so that he secretly instructed a friend to prepare a tombstone for him, to be placed when the time came in the family crypt, located in the fourteenth arcade in Vinohradský cemetery.455 There were other moments when he confided that his body was too worn out for the presidency. His friend Jaroslav Šabata recalled accompanying him on a flight to Berlin to meet President Herzog and German ex-dissidents in November 1996, just before lung cancer struck. ‘Havel was lying back one seat in front of us. He had a mild temperature,’ Šabata noted. ‘He thought it was flu — he didn’t yet know what was going on. He was free and relaxed with his thoughts, both personal and political. At one point, like a bolt from the blue, he leaned over to us and whispered, “I’ve had enough of this presidency.” He said it very expressively.’456
A similar remark, using different words, slipped out into public eighteen months later, thanks to a tiny microphone hidden by journalists within a forest of large microphones and television cameras. In early June 1998, the ill-looking, ashen-faced Havel was recorded as saying that he was ‘fed up with everything’ — including his lazy office staff, journalists, and the political situation in general. The faux pas caused him some public embarrassment. It even forced him to field questions on Czech television about whether he was giving consideration to his own ‘abdication’ (abdikace). ‘I can imagine that I would abdicate if my struggles against death, illnesses and operations went on indefinitely. But...’ He paused, breathing heavily. ‘I don’t think I would abdicate because I became fed up... A characteristic of democracy is that governments are changed through elections, and that means that the president sometimes finds it easier to work with elected leaders than at other times.’ Pressed by his television interviewers, he said that he had abdicated only once in his career — during the break-up of Czechoslovakia, when his role as the elected President sworn to uphold the country’s federal constitution prevented him from signing legislation that would split the state. He went on to reiterate that he could not see any ‘serious political reason’ why he should now abandon his post. ‘The only reason may possibly be my health,’ he added. Sitting in a golden chair, dressed in a smart summer suit and tie, speaking often with his hands, the double-chinned President went on to confess that he was greatly bothered by his decline, that he understood that the absence of health is the same as the acute consciousness of having a mortal body: ‘During the whole of my life, I’ve not been interested in my body,’ he commented. ‘I took it for granted that it was something like a natural carrier of my personality and spirit. It was in prison, when suffering from chronic pneumonia, that I noticed for the first time that I had a body. I was half-dead, and because of that they released me early. Since 1996, I’ve again had to realize that I have a body, and that I have to look after it. It’s a novelty for me. I admit that it’s hard to get used to.’457
Public and private confessions of mortality were not especially typical. Something odd about the early winter life of President Havel is that he preferred to sing swan songs into the ears of death. Words like dying and death seemed to get smothered in elaborate denials, or to have no meaning at all. The more laden with illness he became during the course of the year 1998, the more he appeared officially to presume death to be a distant, quite unlikely event. Perhaps conceit always works strongest in the weakest bodies. Perhaps he was simply unused to not getting his way. Or perhaps his life had become such a habit that he no longer knew or cared what death was, or even that he had become unsuited for death. One afternoon, he paced nervously in circles around his seated physician, demanding an instant cure for all of his aches and pains, physical and spiritual. ‘Would that I could change the weather, Mr President,’ replied the physician respectfully, mocking his conceit.458 Havel’s denials in public were equally forceful. When replying to journalists’ questions about his deeply uncertain health and political future, the President consistently brushed aside the implication that he may have to ‘abdicate’. In hospital, several times at the edge of the abyss, he reacted in exactly the same way. ‘Václav Havel seems always to be above his illness,’ remarked his Austrian surgeon, Professor Ernst Bodner. ‘Václav Havel is probably the only patient who cannot wait to have his next operation,’ he added.459 Less restrained before journalists than Czech doctors, the grey-haired, golf-loving Professor Bodner was unusually frank in describing Havel’s hospital behaviour. ‘Václav Havel has a very strong will, and that sometimes complicated life for us,’ he said. The impatient Havel always got upset when something didn’t happen at the right moment, but otherwise he acted like a man of iron fully prepared from within for everything. He insisted that stitches from his neck be removed without anaesthetic. Immediately after operations, after coming out from the narcosis, he always insisted on drinking wine, despite firm resistance and quiet protestations from the professor. Havel also clamoured several times against his confinement within the intensive-care unit. ‘I feel as if I am in prison,’ he grumbled. Professor Bodner balked. He explained that it was imperative that he stay in the unit. Bodner pleaded with Havel to help the team of doctors promote his full recovery. ‘How long do I have to stay here?’ snapped Havel. Bodner hesitated, then stated quietly, holding his breath, that it would probably be two days. ‘Promise!’ snapped Havel again. The professor didn’t have a chance, and two days later, when he came to examine Havel, he was greeted instantly with the words: ‘We’re moving today.’
Havel was discharged from Prague’s Central Military hospital on 28 August 1998, more than a month after undergoing yet more abdominal surgery, this time with numerous post-operational complications. After undergoing an operation on 26 July to remove a colostomy attached five months earlier to his lower intestine, he developed respiratory problems a week later while recuperating. Doctors performed a tracheotomy — the fourth in two years — that is, they inserted a tube into a hole made in the chain-smoking President’s trachea to enable him to breathe. The next day, Havel’s heart began to beat fast and irregularly. It took about two hours — using electrical shocks administered to his heart — to return his heartbeat and blood pressure to around normal. By then the beginnings of bronchial pneumonia had been spotted, and Havel was heavily sedated and forced to rest. Eventually, three weeks later, after slow but gradual improvement, the tube stuck in Havel’s throat was removed, and the incision (reported Havel’s personal doctor, Ilja Kotík) spontaneously closed. Everybody remained upbeat. Boris Štastný, one of the President’s medical team, told the news agency ČTK that the surgery to remove a cancerous tumour from Havel’s right lung in December 1996 had been completely successful, and that his lungs were now in ‘perfect shape’. The odd reassurance resembled a scurvied ship’s surgeon congratulating himself on sparing the whole crew from food poisoning. It was backed up with Professor Bodner’s verdict that the ups and downs of surgery had drawn himself, the President and his wife together like a family. Then came the slicker words of the President’s senior political adviser, Jiří Pehe. ‘He’s on top of things,’ said Pehe, adding that in preparation for his planned trip to the United States on 15 September, the bed-ridden President Havel had carefully monitored Czech and world events — and had even commented publicly on the thirtieth anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.460
Meanwhile, on the streets and around pub and kitchen tables, the spreading talk of Havel’s bodily demise proved that many Czechs were wiser and more open than their President about the subject of death. Many familiarized themselves quickly with new words like bronchopneumonia and arrhythmia and kept track of the latest medical reports and complex details of procedures like tracheotomies and the removal of colostomies. Most of the big medical questions: ‘Do his doctors know what they’re doing?’ and ‘Is he dying?’, and several large political questions: ‘Should such a sick man carry on as President?’ and ‘Is anyone talking about a successor?’ were repeatedly raised and dissected, answered and disputed before finding themselves relegated to a limbo of cautious indecision. Other citizens laced words with black humour that revealed the simple fact that nothing more than death was at stake. ‘Do you know why Havel ran for President again last year?’ went one of the most popular jokes. ‘Because if he weren’t at the Castle, he’d already be in Olšany cemetery!’
Dark humour often unnerves. It forcibly reminds individuals that they alone of all living beings know that one day they shall not exist as individuals. Dark humour plays on their sense of the uncanny. It exposes the familiar way in which individuals process their strong childhood anxieties about dying by imagining themselves to be immortal. Dark humour reveals that death and dying are not subjects that the living like to contemplate, even in the healthiest moods. This golden rule applies especially to politicians and heads of state. They happen to be busy beings who can rarely, if ever, spare a moment’s thought to the ‘meaning’ of anything that is basic, let alone to the process of dying. Always on the run, they often consider talk of their dying, or their need for urgent medical treatment, to be exaggerated, as Havel himself did when rejecting the advice of doctors to undergo further treatment.461 Politicians, and especially heads of state, are also prone to dismiss the subject of their own death because the considerable power they exercise over others seduces them into believing that they have full power over themselves. Like everybody else, they aspire to further life, to additional sums of being; but the thought that everything that individual human beings do and achieve ultimately turns against them seems far from their minds. Their lives are full of public attention and admiring glances. They swagger around their worlds; act self-confidently in the face of adversity; and often behave in defiant and domineering ways. Political success tricks them into presuming that the moment will never come when they will be unable to take a step in any direction, when literally nothing more will be possible.
That presumption is nourished by the certainty that simply by achieving the highest office they have achieved fame and therefore a certain form of immortality. They are treated as special beings endowed with god-like tendencies. Heads turn and bodies bow whichever way they walk. They reciprocate by playing the peacock to perfection. They bathe constantly in the halogen of televisual publicity. They appear on websites and — like Havel — have large and elaborate ones of their own. Print journalists write endlessly about them. Even the art of biography – one of whose many possible effects is to turn them into smouldering volcanoes, to lift them out of time and confer upon them a form of immortality by preserving their lives in words and pictures — helps them to forget that they live close to their skeletons. From time to time, famous political figures may wonder whether their fame resembles a gift of pearls that triggers self-doubts about their genuine or cultivated qualities. The wiser among them know that fame can be cruel by bringing loneliness, jealousy and dispute their way. But even those politicians whose fame proves short-lived feel their fame to be a glass that magnifies their power and rescues them from the oblivion of Vulgar death’.462 So they tend to become incapable of seeing themselves except from the inside. They think of themselves as necessary, even indispensable. They feel themselves to be an absolute reality, as a whole, as the whole... as therefore a being who is God.
Enter the compulsory fact that each individual must learn to be the loser, and the corresponding question of whether or not the individual chooses to act responsibly in the face of death. The undeniable misfortune of an ageing and unwell head of state like Havel was that despite all appearances and denials to the contrary he was forced to observe at close range the slow but methodical degradation of his organs. Each extra day of his life saw him lose ground. His body gradually gave him the slip. One by one, sometimes obviously and otherwise discreetly, his organs took their revenge upon his power by detaching themselves from his body. It was as if they escaped from him and no longer belonged to him — that against his own orders his heart and lungs and bowels turned traitors, committed acts of indefinable treachery that were impossible to denounce or arrest, since they stopped at nothing and put themselves in no one’s service. Such treachery threatened to turn him into a flesh-and-blood ghost and forced him in turn to reconsider his strong yearning to ignore death. Dying confronted Havel with the utterly personal problem of coming to terms with his own demise — with solving the insoluble problem of needing to reconcile the feeling of being everything with the evidence of becoming nothing.
The problem of how to square the power of dying sovereigns with the jagged fact of their own eventual powerlessness is especially pertinent in contemporary parliamentary democracies, including the unconsolidated Czech kind. Had Havel lived like a king in early modern times, the subject of death would have been much less troubling to him and his subjects. Once upon a time, say during the second half of the fourteenth century in Europe, sovereign monarchs like Edward VI and Queen Elizabeth I regarded themselves as immortal.463 According to the famous (originally medieval) formula of a rex qui nunquam moritur, a ‘king that never dies’, every regal head of state is at the same time a flesh-and-blood mortal and the indestructible embodiment and head of the political community. Just like the body of Jesus Christ, the monarch has two bodies. One of them is visible, individual and mortal; the other is invisible, immortal and collective. Within the single body of the monarch, that is to say, two forms of power are melded: the power to make marks on the earthly world by means of government, and the power of the body politic, which although it cannot be seen or touched consists of all the mechanisms of law-making and government constituted, for the sake of the people and the public good, to compensate for the imperfections of the fragile human body and thus to withstand the ebb and flow of time.
This formula of the indestructible power of the monarch implied that the body politic always lives on unharmed when the body of the monarch becomes terminally ill, or suffers death by accident. Even the hands of an assassin cannot harm the body politic or the monarch. For that reason, contemporaries preferred to speak not of the death of the monarch, but to use the word demise to describe the process of transferring and relocating the body politic in the body of a new flesh-and-blood monarch. When the natural body of the monarch suffered demise, the body politic was reincarnated, at once and without controversy, in the mortal body of the successor monarch. Yet in a certain sense the deceased lived on too. The incarnation of the body politic in the body of the monarch did away with the problem of death; the deceased monarch never really died but — like King Henry VIII who survived for many years after the death of Henry Tudor — lived on as an immortal superbody.
Definite traces of this doctrine of the immortality of the monarch and monarchy reappeared in the totalitarian and late-socialist regimes under which Havel lived most of his life; whether called Stalin or Mao or Fidel or Gottwald, the bodily figure of the omniscient, omnipotent great leader — the Egocrat, to use Solzhenitsyn’s term — towered over everybody and everything, like an invulnerable masculine body endowed with amazing strengths and talents, a mortal body which defied the laws of biological nature to attain immortality, precisely because it expressed and at the same time merged with, and drew sustenance from, the immortal body politic of the totalitarian system. So, for example, when President Klement Gottwald died in 1953, he was embalmed — like Stalin just before him — and put on display. Unfortunately, the Czechoslovak mortician, inexperienced in the techniques of embalming, bungled the job. The corpse began to rot, had to be replaced by a dummy, and eventually was moved from public view. Gottwald’s fate pointed to more democratic times. For under democratic conditions, the immortality of the political body and its leader is not presumed. The body politic is split asunder permanently by the separation between the institutions of government and the myriad organizations of civil society. Within both domains, positions of power are not associated with bodies laying claim to immortality. Nobody sits on thrones. Nobody supposes themselves or others to be angelic. Nobody pretends that positions of power are properly ‘merged’ with the bodies of particular actors. Nothing is sacred. Everything is publicly questionable. Compared to absolute monarchies, relationships of power are disembodied and lose their sacred quality. There are no thrones. Power is not exercised by angels; often enough (it is presumed) power is wielded instead by potential or actual devils. And those who exercise power over others are considered mere mortals who occupy offices and positions temporarily, subject to good health, election and public controversy — and to removal from office.
As the twentieth century ended, the Czech Republic found itself caught up in the throes of a transition towards a disembodied presidency. Although a majority of its citizens — revealing their not-yet-democratic habits — still found it hard to distinguish between Václav Havel and the role of the Czech President,464 the republic and its citizens began to live in the subjunctive tense. No one quite knew what was going to happen and details of the events to come were still unknown. How long he would survive, whether he might recover, how he would die and who would succeed him couldn’t be grasped. Yet one outcome was certain. The time of his state funeral was coming. A whole nation would fall silent, and so too would admirers within many other nations — from the United States of America and Canada to Russia, Japan and China. His corpse — its stubble still growing — would be expedited odourlessly and with technical perfection from his deathbed to the grave. But his death would be a global media event — on a scale much bigger than the state funeral of Masaryk.465
Prague would double in size. As he lay in state in the old Castle of the Bohemian kings above the city, a queue some miles long would spring up. Mourners would wait all day, and all night, to see his body for the last time. The day of the funeral would be a public holiday. Hundreds of thousands of people, dressed in black and clutching flowers, would be seen lining the route taken by the cortège on the way to his final resting place. Huge black banners would fly from every office; his photograph, draped in black, would crowd every shop and news-stand and public place. Shared feelings of embarrassment would hold words back. Half-buried or forgotten anxieties about death would collectively resurface; fantasies of personal immortality would temporarily weaken. Around the graveside a forest of microphones, tripods, cameras, pads and pens would suddenly spring up. Obituaries, many of them written long ago and updated several times already, would appear in all four corners of the earth. Millions of words would be uttered. Many hundreds of different and conflicting points would be made. The words of the dead man (as Auden said) would be modified in the guts of the living. It would be said that he was a good man, a great man, a hero of the century. Harry S. Truman’s remark that a statesman is a dead politician would be confirmed. Loud sounds of grinding axes would also be heard. His enemies would wish him good riddance. The wags would say that in democracies death is for some politicians a good career move. And through all the din of commentary and commentary upon the commentary, some wise voices would insist that one thing should be for ever remembered: that Václav Havel was a man who. had the misfortune of being born into the twentieth century, a man whose fate was politics, a man who achieved fame as the political figure who taught the world much more about power, the powerful and the powerless than most of his twentieth-century rivals.