Death. Herbert Fingarette
group, he joined in the mood and the ceremony. When the services ended they all began to leave. So did he. But one of his friends stopped him and said, “No, you can’t leave.” In that moment, he says, he realized that “to be dead is to be with one’s friends no more.”
This dream represents the phenomenon I’ve been describing—the pathos of death mistakenly apprehended as an eternal separation from those one loves, from the vibrance of life itself.
Mistaken though it is to view death as separation, the mistake can be productive. To imagine being separated forever focuses the mind on how precious the people and the activities of our life are, and on how vulnerable we are.
There are some elements of comfort in the conclusions I’ve been reaching here, elements perhaps of false comfort. I have said that in regard to oneself death is nothing to grieve over since one won’t exist. Is this too easy, too comforting? Is my reasoning here mired in its own subtle form of confusion and self-deception? It suggests that since I won’t exist, and therefore won’t be caring about my survivors, I needn’t have any concern now about their welfare when I will have died. That can’t be an acceptable conclusion.
Of course, it’s true that the welfare of my sorrowing family won’t matter to me when I’m dead. But it does and surely should matter now. My concern for their future welfare isn’t based on the expectation of my own satisfaction in that post-mortem future. There is satisfaction for me right now, life is more fulfilled for me right now, if I can think of them as faring well after my death. Surely such concern is part of what it means to love someone.
Then why wouldn’t a similar logic apply to my own future welfare? Isn’t it also rational for me to be at least as deeply concerned right now that I, too, should fare well in the future and not be dead? If one can rationally fear now for the future welfare of one’s loved ones, why not for one’s own future?
The analogy is valid. Certainly it’s true that I’m justified in being concerned that I should fare well, not ill, in my own future. I’m justified, too, in my concern that my loved ones should fare well. But while faring well is one thing, and faring ill is another—being dead is quite a different ballgame. As far as death goes, the same holds in each case. Once the person is dead, be it myself or someone I love, why be concerned for that dead person? There is no longer any such person to fare either well or ill. Grief over the death of a loved one, if rational, has to do with one’s own loss. There’s no reason to grieve for the deceased. They don’t suffer.
Someone we care for dies suddenly in the prime of life. What a tragedy! For whom? We answer instinctively: For the person who died. But why? That person suffers nothing. The tragedy is ours. We have lost what would have been a fruitful life. The thought makes us sad. But this comes from imagining a hypothetical future, a future that never was nor will be, but a future we wish would have been real. It is our loss. The person who is dead is suffering no loss. The fact is that there is no such person now. How can a non-existent person suffer loss?
It’s a strange thing to anticipate my death as my being separated from my loved ones, since in the actual event I will not experience any separation whatsoever. I won’t experience anything. I won’t exist.
Sleep
We find similarities and also differences when we examine another age-old metaphor for death: Death as sleep.
Can this be what death in the end means to us—going to sleep? The durability of the metaphor is plain to see. “There she met sleep, the brother of death,” says Homer. “To die, to sleep,” says Hamlet. Shelley muses on the prospect that “death like sleep might steal on me.”
The very self-evident aptness—and solace—of the metaphor induces one to overlook the important ways in which the metaphor is self-deceptive.
We have no word to describe the inner experience of falling asleep. I anticipate “falling asleep” while still awake; and on reawakening I discover what happened. I do experience getting drowsy as the preliminary to falling asleep. Nevertheless, we are never aware of the actual happening, the moment of falling asleep. What is it like, that transition from being awake to being asleep? There is only one correct answer: nothing. What is it like, subjectively, being in dreamless sleep? Nothing.
This point can be generalized to all the ways in which consciousness disappears, whether from sleep, fainting, anaesthesia, or death. These, by their very nature, do not feel like anything because neither the transition nor the condition is an experience. It happens, but it’s not experienced. It consists in the cessation of experience. In this rather strange and important way, sleep and death are surely alike. So dying is like falling into a dreamless sleep. However the two are radically unlike in the very obvious respect that we awake from sleep but never from death.
Why do these obvious features of sleep and death merit explicit attention? Because the metaphor of death as sleep is a comforting one. The point of the metaphor is that one should see death as welcome relief rather than feared catastrophe. After all, sleep is normally followed by awakening refreshed. The overtones of the concept of “sleep” are almost all positive and pleasurable. Death, too, may put an end to fatigue or suffering. But since there is no awakening, much less awakening refreshed, the picture changes radically It is in this way that the intended comfort of the death/sleep metaphor turns out to be false comfort.
In the end, what is it that we seek comfort for?—certainly not for the mere absence of consciousness. Deep sleep and anaesthesia show that there is nothing momentous about mere non-consciousness. However the prospect of death, unlike sleep, signals the cessation of consciousness for evermore. So it is not the prospect of non-consciousness in and of itself that is potentially threatening but the question of what came before and what will come after. In this respect sleep and death are radically unlike, and the metaphor of death as sleep becomes deceptive.
Immortality
Should one call the idea of an afterlife, of an immortal soul, an image that reveals the meaning of death? I see it, rather, as an image that denies death. Some form of this denial of death is ubiquitous among human cultures. Souls, spirits, ghosts—these are among the mythic notions that embody this idea.
The idea of immortality is characteristically embedded in a larger mythic or theological context. In Christian theologies, for example, bodily death is a portentous event. The soul leaves the body forever and begins an eternal spiritual life. The quality of that life is determined by the Divine judgment of one’s earthly sins and merits. However, in Asian reincarnation doctrines death takes on a radically different meaning. It is the moment when the soul casts off the old body, as we cast off an old garment, and takes on a new body and a new life on earth. The moral character of one’s conduct in earlier lives determines one’s moral fate in the current life, but the current life is in turn a chance to shape future lives. Each different mythic and theological doctrine has its effect in shaping the distinctive culture to which it belongs. But in spite of their notable differences, each doctrine in one way or another denies death as a final end by centering around a doctrine of immortality.
Much as I wish I could believe some such doctrine, I cannot honestly tell myself that I do. There is no doubt in my mind that, if taken literally, such doctrines are not only false but are incoherent. The idea of a non-bodily consciousness such as the soul makes no sense because it is our physical being that locates us in time and space. For this reason all such doctrines are compelled to reify the “soul”—to give it, in short, a kind of quasi-body, and thus a location in space and time. The soul is conceived as an ethereal kind of matter located at some point in space (or in Heavenly space). Or it is conceived as a ghost-like entity. It has to be located in space because this ethereal entity presumably sees and hears—and how could “seeing” and “hearing” make sense unless the one who sees and hears is located at some place in space? (What would a tree