Three Soothing Perspectives on Death
I find death immensely difficult to comprehend. It is an eternal blackness, but “blackness” does not exist for the dead.
Death is terrifying and inevitable, and I prefer not to think too much about it. But then, my childhood friend died, and my grandfather died, and although they are not my closest relations in life, I dread the prospect of living on, never to see them again. It is not that I profoundly miss their limited presence in my life, but I feel sad for them not being alive anymore, regardless of whether their lives were involved with mine or not.
Death is deep sleep, except never to wake up to acknowledge that sleep. It’s like trying to imagine what might be outside the universe. Or before time. Or in a fourth dimension. Unfathomable.
How does this make sense?
I think there are two different sorrows when faced with death — the mourning of loss and the mourning of death. The mourning of loss is the grief of losing someone important in our lives.
It is missing someone who has been an important person to us — a parent, a partner, a friend, maybe even a child. I have not yet lost someone that close, and I can only imagine the excruciating emptiness that must come in its wake.
The second sorrow comes from that of facing the mortality of being. This is what I experienced. It is mourning the fact that a person who was so much, so complex, so alive, who has filled every second of their existence with their being, is now gone.
The reminder that we are limited, lonely, unable to fully appreciate each other’s deep existence, the tides in our soul, despite being so much. That we are so fully alive every second of our lives, share a fraction of that with the world, and then die.
I have no clear answers to how to deal with death, how to process grief, or how to come to terms with my own mortality. However, in the past funerals, a few perspectives soared into my mind time and again. I find them soothing, so I thought I would share them. They are on the second type of sorrow — the mourning of death.
Death is the final experience.
Life is an accumulation of experiences. To be alive is to experience. We constantly feel temperature and brightness and take in small sounds. Experiences pepper us, whether they be conscious or unconscious, long or short, “good” or “bad”. We are lucky to have these experiences.
The privilege of life is limited to those who were lucky enough to be born. Death is the final experience, and like being born and experiencing all this life, it is also a privilege to be able to experience death.
Yes, it is scary, but it is also intriguing. Religions and mythologies have been built around the notion. What might await? There is no other way of knowing without stepping into it.
There is this poem by the Norwegian poet Kolbein Falkeid that I think gets at this:
“Death is not as scary as it used to be.
The people I loved have gone ahead and marked the ski trails
They knew the forests and the mountains
I will find my way.”
Time is a construct for the living.
Mourning a death is to mourn finiteness; that time ticks, and eventually, we are gone. It can create a sort of aimless urgency. Being made aware of death can make every second feel painfully precious. What to do with them? How do we not waste them? The ironic part of this aimless urgency is that stress makes every second feel a little bit more wasted, which leads to more stress. Talk about an existential crisis.
Death can also create the feeling that time moves relentlessly forward, leaving everybody behind. When young people die, it can feel as if years were stolen from them. Death and time go closely together.
Yet, our modern conception of time is just that — a conception. In reality, time is very elusive. While Western culture views time as a line with a start and an end, many Eastern cultures rather conceive of time as a circle. Before the clock, time was not viewed as a resource like it is now, but rather as a part of life, like air, where the idea of there being too much or too little time would be ridiculous.
Moreover, how we experience time even makes the very concept unclear. The concept of there being a past and a future is only a construct of our thinking minds. The past and the future do not exist outside memory and planning — outside human activities. So, just like other human concepts such as money or authority, the existence of the past and the future is dubious. Possibly, they only exist to organize the lives of the living.
The only thing that actually exists is the now. The now is free of judgment, comparison, and evaluations because it is impossible to compare or evaluate something with no counterpart. Death is in this realm, the freeing realm of the now. It is the realm we came from and the realm we return to.
We think we know it all, but actually, we don’t
We tend to think that we live at the end of history. The relatively recent achievements of the scientific method in explaining things that religion had wrong — such as the Earth being flat or the center of the universe — have been remarkable.
Because of this method of empirically testing hypotheses to see if they match up with what we observe, human progress has been immense, enabling us to create astounding things such as penicillin and artificial intelligence.
Because of the scientific method, we have also had to face some bleak facts about death. There is no observable evidence that a soul exists. There is no empirical support for life after death. No systematic indication that anything awaits. If anything, it appears as the brain, the thing that actually is us shuts down, and that’s that.
Any atheist would subscribe to this idea, and in our modern world, there are many atheists. Yet, an atheist is not a non-believer; it is someone who believes in the scientific method, that we can believe only what we observe, in the theories we can reliably falsify. This is such a widespread belief that it can be hard to take a step back and question it.
Yes, the scientific method has given us many answers, but there are many answers it has failed to provide because it relies heavily on us being able to observe things. In the social sciences, we struggle to measure concepts such as “democracy” or “trust” because they are not directly observable.
Other concepts are even harder because they are so deeply personal — how can we observe another person’s consciousness, for example?
Moreover, measuring (or observing) these phenomena requires a set of assumptions that often make up a paradigm, which, when shifted, can change the way we look at the world.
This happened, for example, when the absurd but scientifically packaged notion that humans can be ranged according to race was debunked. Without stepping into too much philosophy of science, suffice it to say that science does not automatically mean answers.
So, the observable fact that the brain and body stop functioning and then there is no more might just be a step towards our understanding of the workings of the universe. Just because we live now and this is what we know so far does not mean that this is the final answer.
Maybe, in the future, our deep belief in the scientific method might seem as sketchy as a society encompassed by religious beliefs. What happens when we die may be far beyond what humanity has managed to understand so far.
This leads me back to perspective number one: The only way of really knowing what happens when you die is by having the privilege of experiencing death.
