The Other's Death and Yours
An excerpt from something longer
[Fleury Richard, Comminges and Adelaide in the Trappist Monastery or Comminges digging his own tomb watched by Adelaide disguised as a monk]
I told him about something I’d seen only just a week or so before, in one or another of the online sites where such things get written, an essay that claimed that philosophers and artists fascinated by death were missing the point. Of course, it’s terrifying to realize you have to die, but the point is not to spend all your time worrying about it, it’s to get over it and get on with things despite the fact. Humor, the writer of the thing said, was the most effective response to death, in fact, the only way to really triumph over it. You still die, but in refusing to take it seriously to the point of obsession or emotional collapse, you win a kind of victory.
“I don’t see how that can possibly be supported or believed. Did you find it convincing?” There was a sour look on his face.
“Convincing? I don’t know. One thing he wrote seemed of some effect in my mind. He talked about Christopher Hitchens, when he knew his cancer was terminal, being asked by an interviewer if he had been touched by any thoughts of reversing course on God, and he joked about it. He said something like that if he did repent and give up his lifelong atheism at the end, it would only be because it was better that a believer die than an atheist. That does seem something, no? A healthy bit of spit right in the eye of the Reaper?”
“You think it worked?”
“Worked, in what sense?”
“Do you think it did what this guy thinks it did? What do you think was its effect on the person who said it?” His eyes were burrowing into me.
“It is a funny line, isn’t it? I mean, at least if you share Hitchens’ view of religion.”
“Oh, I suppose it could be funny for somebody like that, yes. Somebody else.”
“Somebody else?”
“Yeah, it might be funny for somebody who is not Hitchens. What he wrote or said to the interviewer there was for the interviewer or the reader, for you and me and the guy who wrote that essay. It was for all the people who weren’t going to die in short order, but who had time still to imagine it was a long way off. But what Hitchens said there wasn’t for him, for Hitchens himself. It wouldn’t have had the power on him that the writer thinks it had on him, or that it should have on me or you.”
“Why not?”
“Because Hitchens was going to die soon, very soon, when he wrote or said that, and he knew it. Right? He knew he’d be dead in weeks or months, at most. Knew it. In his bones, with the gravest certainty that you can know anything in this world. The people listening to him—the interviewer, the larger audience he imagined the statement would have, which includes you and me—we’re not where he is. We have not been given news recently that we have terminal cancer and that the horizon of our life is now fast approaching. We still think what Hitchens thought before his diagnosis, what we all think when we are living our lives. Which is that we are going to live forever, or that in any event, death is something to think about another time and another place, far, far from here and now. That makes all the difference.”
A pause, and then he went on.
“I assure you, inside his head, in his quiet thoughts, Hitchens was not repeating flippant lines like that, being the funny guy, flipping death the bird. Yes, yes, I know, he was irreverent, he was Christopher Hitchens, the devil-may-care atheist, always prepared with a barb for the fools who dream of God and his promise of immortality, too smart and too cynical not to know that that is all bullshit. But in his heart of hearts, and I would bet my life on this, my mother’s life, your life, the lives of everyone I care about, that’s how sure I am of it, in his solitary internal world, in the depths of his soul, he was so frightened of what was coming that the only thing he could do to keep from falling completely apart in front of that interviewer was to go on the auto-pilot of his ‘razor sharp wit’ character type and give the brave face. No one feels that inside. No one. Not Christopher Hitchens, not anybody. Honest people with that character, who have lived their lives like that, admit it. They acknowledge that in the face of death, when the thing is not just a theory or an idea but it has actually come into the room and it has sat down beside you and taken your hand in anticipation and you can smell its breath and you feel its clammy touch on your skin and you cannot hide from it in any way because it is there and it is there for you, when that happens, the jokes are all over. They don’t work anymore. They only work if you think you’re going to go on for a long time after you hear the joke. Humor facing death is not humor anymore, at least not for the humorist. After he tells the joke, he still has to go away and be with the thought that his death is imminent, that he has an amount of time among the living that is terrifyingly short. Joking in the face of death works only for those not actually in the face of death in the way Hitchens was. It works because you are still refusing to see the horizon. You are still pretending, even while you think you’re seeing. You’re pretending. You know you’re not going to die right now, or at least you hope that. You can of course never know. Maybe a plane crashes into the building while you’re listening to the dying man tell the joke and kills you both immediately, or a drunk driver runs head-on into you at 90 mph right after you leave the company of the jokester. But you never think about that as you’re laughing at the dying man poking fun at death. If you did, you wouldn’t laugh at the joke. It would be too clear that you are in the same boat he is in, objectively speaking. We all flee from that realization.”
His look grew still more intense.
“The Irish wake is a laugh and a good time, sure, but always and only for the people who are not dead or dying in the immediate future. Have a drink, have a laugh, put it off a bit more, don’t look at it. The drinks and the laughs will help, at least while you still think it’s not arrived for you yet. When the train pulls up and you’ve got your ticket in your hand, though, it’s another game altogether. All of our ritual in the face of death is completely ineffectual in the real task of assuaging our fear, really. It’s just the best we can do. But that doesn’t mean it suffices. The task is impossible. It’s too much for us, when we really see it. A clever line works, a death ritual is successful only when the reader or participant is not in possession of certain news that he will be dead in a week. If you know you will be dead in a week, all writing and all talk and all ritual about death amounts to nothing at all. Hitchens was doing the only thing he could do to keep from pissing his pants and weeping like a child, in helpless fear, anger, and despair. Those are the only true human responses to death.”
He could perhaps see how uncomfortable I was with his words, so he toned the intensity down a fraction.
“I don’t say any of this as a criticism of Hitchens. He seemed a fairly good guy, with faults as we all have. My issue is not with him. It’s with the absurd idea that we can make a joke in the face of the true standing before our own death. It’s foolish beyond any understanding to think that such a terror can be conquered by the likes of us, by anything we can concoct in our frivolous little minds. All of the philosophy that’s supposed to be training people to die well, to be here now in order to later be able to die contentedly and satisfied. What a mountain of bullshit. Such a thing can’t be done. No one has ever done it, I assure you. Do you know what we find in the journals of the great American Puritan theologians, the guys who stood on the pulpits and promised God’s judgment for all, who believed that God had predestined all of us for heaven or hell and that nothing we could do, including preaching God’s word in the effort to get those listening to crawl weeping before God, those men in the tall hats we have all seen in the movies and TV documentaries of the Puritan period, who exuded confidence in the justice of God’s decision-making, even if it included their own eternal damnation, of which they could only be radically ignorant until after their deaths? In those journals, these confident men witnessed to their utter terror in the face of the coming of that judgment with death. They admitted that it all but broke them, that it left them breathless and full of fear and uncertain of everything. Marcus Aurelius, author of all those brilliant, touching lines about how to be stoic in the face of death, I guarantee you, when it was there for him, I mean, there, right there, he was shitting himself in terror over it. Not when he was writing his aphorisms and still eating well and more or less healthy and convinced that he would not be dead in a fortnight. But when he passed over that threshold, once he was there, none of that nonsense would be effective. For his readers, it only works because we read him when we are not dying. If we are dying, we do not waste the time to read Marcus Aurelius on dying. We have other affairs to attend to. Mainly we have our terror to experience.”
He stopped because he knew I wanted to respond, and I did.
“I think I want to believe that what you are saying is not so. I don’t think I’m up to following what you are saying, to endorsing it. It’s too much.”
“Yes, it’s too much. All death is disaster, all death is the end of the world, the failure of everything, the unravelling of the entirety of reality for the dying person. How on earth could anyone be so stupid as to think he could master that? Can you master a redwood tree, a 100 story building, a mountain falling straight down on top of you? You lay down and cower and lose control of your bodily functions in the face of that. There is no other possible response. All the horseshit about ‘He faced it squarely with courage and serenity,’ that’s worse than nonsense. Silly children’s stories told by people who are still trying to convince themselves of the lie, and perhaps even believing it because when they are doing this work they are not themselves in the room with the thing, looking at it head-on and understanding that it is there to take them away, forever and finally.”
I had no clever thing to say in answer, but just stood there, half-gasping at the weight of what he’d said.
He took a deep breath. “How old is this writer?”
“I don’t know, exactly. Youngish, I think. Maybe 40 at the oldest?”
“Exactly. He thinks he’s got lots of time, and so Hitchens’ line is hilarious and triumphant. To him. At age 35. Come back and ask him if he still finds it hilarious at 75. Or at 80. Or, if he gets a cancer like Hitchens’ cancer, something that in the flash of the doctor’s communication of the odds you’re facing, reduce your time on the planet to some intolerably small number of years or months or weeks. Ask him then. Ask him “How funny is Hitchens’ line now, when you know you’ll be dead before Christmas comes again, and before your child enters the next grade in school? When you know that the springtime you are now experiencing in the world around you is the last one you will experience? When you understand that soon, very soon, your wife will be a widow, and your children fatherless, and all of the work you were planning and imagining will be unfinished forever, and your people will be left alone in this cold world and you can do nothing to stop it? Tell us about how it conquers death again. Let’s hear you laugh at it now, please.” He doesn’t know, the poor man. He’ll learn the truth, and God help him then.”