On Death

Some philosophers are obsessed by death, seeing it as some kind of defining event in the human condition, but more than that, as a kind of swindle. Death steals life from us. Just when we got it all figured out and are no longer driven by tyrannical hormonal urges (either ours or the childrens’) - bosh! The Grim Reaper comes along and spoils our fun.

Or something like that.

The death of healthy young people is theft, a moral flaw in the Universe. They really have had their lives stolen from them. Old gits like me, not so much. I’ve had my life, made what little of it I could, and my time has passed.

Suffering is another thing. I regard death, mostly, as a release from suffering, and especially the suffering of injury, disease and old age. A young person who lives in paid and has to spend an hour a day on some machine is being released by death, not cheated.

Death was a release for my friend Terence last year, my friend Chris died in his early sixties from the after-effects of prostate cancer, after almost ten years of a second-chance after the first operation that gave a happy family life in those years. Another man I knew, Richard, fell over in the bath after a seizure. He was in his mid-forties. Outwardly his life looked just fine, but his emotional life was something out of a 1950’s black and white English movie, the ones with the domineering mother. Richard’s death was unfair: he still had time to change. My father died peacefully in his sleep after a post-operative blood clot hit his heart.

It’s not death that’s scary. Either nothing happens, you go to heaven, or come back as a donkey, depending on your religious belief. Our death, as Wittgenstein remarked, is not an event in our lives. It’s an event in other people’s lives. In our lives we are immortal: we are only mortal in the lives of others.

It’s dying that’s scary. The pain from the fatal injury or the terminal disease. The fast fading of our health and powers. The sense that we are becoming irrelevant, and maybe even a burden, we who only a few years ago carried the burdens of others. I’m sure there are pathological states (see those 1950’s English movies) best left unexamined.

Death is, ultimately, a release from dying. Our dying does happen in our lives, we do experience it, and we’d rather not.