We are all going to die. This seems obvious - after all, everyone who has ever lived has died, and still, societies have moved on, the world has moved on. It is a part of life.
Yet this simple truth holds much power over us. We live our lives trying to avoid death, trying to make ourselves and those around us safe. We worry and we panic, we make plans and try to prepare ourselves. We even try to become immortal in one way or another, we try to transcend death. In the words of Earnest Becker:
“This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression—and with all this yet to die.”
We are the living proof of the miracle of life, and we know it. At the same time, we know that we are going to die one day, never to appear again. One thing becomes evident from Becker's insight - it is not death that is the problem. It is our awareness of it that fills us with terror, that creates our anxiety and that forces us to act. Our self-consciousness, the greatest gift of humanity is also the curse that makes us aware of our own limitations and mortality.
"Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with."
Put in this way, it seems like we are trapped. To live means to act. However, each action carries the risk of pain and even death. And yet, in order to avoid death, we need to take action - we need to eat, we need to escape predators and natural disasters, we need to find shelter and be a part of society because society provides safety. At the same time, deep within us, we know that no matter what we do, death is coming. One day, we will be no more. If that is the case, why act at all? What is the point of doing anything? How do we escape this paradox? How do we overcome our own mortality for long enough to create anything in this world?
As humans, we have a secret weapon against death. We have the ability to live two lives simultaneously - one as creatures in a material world, and another in a symbolic world of our own making. Even though we are constantly reminded that no living matter is immune to death, we create symbols that transcend death itself. We create a whole world out of those symbols, a world we can inhabit, a world completely immune to death because it is immaterial. This symbolic world allows us to create what Becker calls an "immortality project" - that is, work on something, or become a part of something beyond us, something that will live on forever even after our human body has returned to the earth.
The simplest example of such an immortality project is the idea of leaving a legacy. Whether it is by raising children or creating something for future generations, we believe that a part of us lives on in the fruits of our labor - a part of us transcends death and achieves immortality. I believe this is the right place for a small clarification - a big portion of this mental process, sometimes all of it, happens on a subconscious level. We don't go about our daily lives constantly reminding ourselves that most of what we do is in order to escape death or to achieve immortality. The degree to which this drive is relegated to the subconsciousness varies from person to person but there is always a part of it that is not fully realized by the individual.
It is very hard to come up with our own personal immortality projects, especially while we have to deal with life all the time - we hardly have time to rest, let alone to plan for some grand plan that will save our souls. Luckily for us, we are not alone - everyone else is in the same boat, and this allows us to take coordinated action and create a world of shared symbolism, an immortality project that is transpersonal and allows everyone to transcend death if only they join. This is what we call society, as Becker perfectly put it:
"The fact is that this is what society is and always has been: a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism."
And going further:
"Society itself is a codified hero system, which means that society everywhere is a living myth of the significance of human life, a defiant creation of meaning. Every society thus is a “religion” whether it thinks so or not: Soviet “religion” and Maoist “religion” are as truly religious as are scientific and consumer “religion,” no matter how much they may try to disguise themselves by omitting religious and spiritual ideas from their lives."
Religion and society are not two separate things that exist in a vacuum. In fact, they are different expressions of the same phenomenon - humans trying to solve the problems inherent in living a human life. While Christianity tells you that living in the name of God and following his commandments will grant you eternal life in heaven, every single society tells you that dying a heroic death will guarantee you eternal life in the hearts of the ones that go on living. They are both recipes for immortality, worded in a different way and having different requirements but ultimately promising the same thing - immunity from death. They offer you stability in a universe that is inherently chaotic and constantly changing. This is way stronger than mere physical security because it does away with the problem that even matter is not immune to change. It alleviates the anxiety that torments every person from the moment they realize their own mortality.
Of course, this is not the only way to go about solving the problem of death. A guarantee of immortality is amazing, but it is the stability in such a promise which we are ultimately after. And there is more than one way to achieve that stability and security. Instead of trying to symbolically outsmart death, some people go the other way - the way of acceptance. One such case is Alice James. She lived in the second half of the 19th century and her existence was one full of pain and suffering. From a very young age, she was tormented by an undiagnosed disease, her body too weak to leave bed. The medicine at the time was powerless to cure her, neither could the doctors alleviate her physical pain to a sufficient degree. Shortly after she turned forty, she was diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer - incurable and terminal. The diagnose of cancer alone is enough to push anyone beyond their limits and break them, let alone someone who has spent most of their life bedridden and in pain. However, this was not the case with Alice. The terrible diagnosis had the opposite effect. Her response, captured in her diary days after the diagnosis shows a spirit that is not only unbroken but actually set free:
"Ever since I have been ill, I have longed and longed for some palpable disease, no matter how conventionally dreadful a label it might have, but I was always driven back to stagger alone under the monstrous mass of subjective sensations, which that sympathetic being “the medical man” had no higher inspiration than to assure me I was personally responsible for, washing his hands of me with a graceful complacency under my very nose. Dr. Torry James’s final physician was the only man who ever treated me like a rational being, who did not assume, because I was victim to many pains, that I was, of necessity, an arrested mental development too.
To anyone who has not been there, it will be hard to understand the enormous relief of the doctor’s uncompromising verdict, lifting us out of the formless vague and setting us within the very heart of the sustaining concrete. One would naturally not choose such an ugly and gruesome method of progression down the dark Valley of the Shadow of Death, and of course, many of the moral sinews will snap by the way, but we shall gird up our loins and the blessed peace of the end will have no shadow cast upon it."
She also writes:
"It is the most supremely interesting moment in life, the only one in fact when living seems life, and I count in the greatest good fortune to have these few months so full of interest and instruction in the knowledge of my approaching death. It is as simple in one’s own person as any fact of nature, the fall of a leaf or the blooming of a rose, and I have a delicious consciousness, ever-present, of wide spaces close at hand, and whisperings of release in the air."
The terrible diagnosis did a miracle for Alice - it conflated what was abstract and unknown into a very real fact - she had cancer, this is how she was going to die. However, in pinpointing the exact manner of her death she was suddenly free - she no longer needed to look for answers or prepare for the unknown - death was certain and that very fact allowed her to experience every other aspect of her life more fully, without any reservations.
I understand that this essay has painted a rather grim picture - that life is somehow just one prolonged evasion of death, filled with anxiety and terror. While this certainly is a part of life, it is absolutely not the full story. Human beings are moved by deep drives, and not all of them are different forms of fear. After all, transcendence and self-realization can be achieved in many ways - as many as there are people. As humans, we have the uncanny ability to find meaning even when the recipes provided by our societies fail. We are able to make a path through life even when one is not present. When the answers provided by society and religion are not enough we are able to find our own answers and become our own heroes. Probably no one has put this better than Soren Kierkegaard:
"Man breaks through the bounds of merely cultural heroism; he destroys the character lie that had him perform like a hero in the everyday social scheme of things; and by doing so he opens himself up to infinity, to the possibility of cosmic heroism, to the very service of God. His life thereby acquires ultimate value in place of merely social and cultural, historical value. He links his secret inner self, his authentic talent, his deepest feelings of uniqueness, his inner yearning for absolute significance, to the very ground of creation. Out of the ruins of the broken cultural self, there remains the mystery of the private, invisible, inner self which yearned for ultimate significance, for cosmic heroism. This invisible mystery at the heart of every creature now attains cosmic significance by affirming its connection with the invisible mystery at the heart of creation. This is the meaning of faith."
Maybe death and suffering are not to be avoided at all costs. Maybe they are part of life, serving as a background, allowing us to appreciate everything else. After all, in a world of complete security, there will be no change. Why strive if you are already given everything you want? We are form and form is always in a process of change. This might seem like a problem but it is just a fact of life. As the saying goes "The problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude towards the problem."
If you want to do some further reading on the topic, I recommend Earnest Becker's book "Denial of Death". Also this essay by Maria Popova from Brain Pickings, thanks to whom I found out about Alice James and her extraordinary life.