Death is supposed to be just. It is part of life and therefore not to be feared. That is why the quote from Ecclesiastes, “There is a time for everything: a time to live and a time to die”, is interpreted to mean that thee is a balance in life so that what is made has to be unmade, when what Ecclesiastes is saying is simply that sometimes one thing happens and sometimes another and that there is no use getting all that bothered about it. The mistaken conception is brought closer to our own era when William Hazlitt wrote in 1815 that when people died they were prepared to die. Maybe he thought that because the people he knew who had died had suffered from long term debilitating illnesses which left them with ever less energy and concentration so that death was both a blessing and the continuation of a downward spiral which was inevitable, making a person into a different person from the one they had been when they had been actively engaged with life.
The alternative view is that death is like a mystery story or an inferior novel where a character has to be gotten out of the way and so is killed off so that the plot can move in a different direction. Mystery stories are notorious for considering who did it rather than the experience of what was done as that is impressed upon either the murderer or the murderer--Dostoevsky the noteworthy exception. I watch a lot of “Law and Order” and I still don’t know what it feels like to kill someone. All I know is that Lennie Briscoe is cynical about the motives of murderers and distances himself from them, including those who are mercy killers or, on the other hand, serial killers, or on the third hand, killers who are greedy. They are all stereotypes of kinds of killers however able are the actors who portray them and so infuse those characters with emotions not really in the scripts.
I can report on this matter from the vantage point of someone who has entered the age where friends and loved ones have gone dead or are suffering from debilitating and terminal illnesses, there also being among us people who seem to be doing rather well, health-wise, including me, at least for the moment. And what I can report is that for the most part people regard themselves as living the murder mystery view of death. It will sooner or later overtake them but for the meantime managing one’s health is just a circumstance that comes upon you in old age without it having any particular relevance to you, any meaning at all, much less any claim to be a just outcome to a life, or a preparation, in some sense, for being dead. Death is an irrelevance until it happens and then you won’t know what had happened to you anyway. (Most of my friends are atheists, but the religious believers I know do not have any more profound meaning for death other than that your soul will be gathered to God, which means incorporated with God, whatever that might mean-- whether a merely metaphysical idea or a practical one.)
I think that this sense of death as an irrelevance is possible because most of my friends, whatever their passions, engaged in cerebral occupations as professors or lawyers or doctors and so they could continue on with their lives doing what they did with their minds even if they were retired from their occupations. They could enjoy themselves thinking about things, whether politics or the state of American education or ecology, because the mind hangs on even as the body fails, except for those who indeed suffer from dementia or mental illness. For the rest of us, we can pass jokes about the fact that we cannot easily recall names, remarking that the name will roll around in our mind and then pop up if we are patient enough to wait, and so we are still able to do what we were mentally good at before we got old even as we are not able to do what we were never good at anyway. I was always terrible at calculus and I still am.
Baruch Spinoza, my favorite philosopher, said in his earliest work, “Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect”, that truth is all you are left with because lust, fame and wealth are temporary. My college philosophy teacher said that this argument was a leftover from medieval thinking. But the idea of comparing the transient with the permanent seems to me not at all a bad way to decide what is important. (I am still trying to fashion retorts to what my college professors said, even though I am much older than they were then and so should be, supposedly, wiser than they were. Engaging with my old professors is a way for me to remain who I am. It is unfair of me, however, to hold them responsible for what they said sixty years ago because I have had more time to think about what they said than they had time in their prior lives to prepare to say what they said.)
Think of all the things that get lost or seem to pale as age advances. There is pride in past accomplishments, and so we can identify with Edmund Wilson who, reportedly, spent his declining years reading the reviews that came out when his books were first published. Or a person can look back and think their career was at least a contribution to the maintenance or improvement of an organization. But retirement erases that except as a memory of the past. We live on beyond our accomplishments, all equal in that we have all fought through our professional or work lives. Another memory to cultivate is of a loved one from whom we have been separated by death. I know someone who was so committed to his sense that his life was defined by his relationship to his now dead wife, that he did not fight very hard to preserve his own life when he ran into health problems a year after his wife died. His life was a leftover and not to be highly prized. (I was so taken with his experience that my wife reminded me in a dream not to be a fool. As with many other people, loved ones and even work acquaintances who have died appear to me in dreams and fantasies. So I too see dead people.)
I know another friend who recovered from an illness that brought him to death’s door. I knew he was better because he was reengaged in politics the spectator sport that preoccupies him and me and many of my friends. I want to stay alive not only to enjoy a good meal but because I want to be around for the 2048 Presidential election, which will mark a hundred years since I began following elections. I still remember H. V. Kaltenborn declaring Dewey the victor and I hoping that Henry Wallace would at least win New York’s electoral vote. Every election is a fresh drama with new characters and its own plot twists. For someone like me, maybe death would be near when I ceased to care about elections.
So what is left of life after loved ones and work and interests are gone? What persists, to return to the Spinoza criterion? Perhaps nothing but having survived to enjoy the everyday experiences of eating and breathing and dozing. There is an old joke that whoever dies with the most toys wins, though it is a joke because everybody nowadays knows that you can’t take your toys with you. Update the joke to say that whomever lasts longest, assuming they have enough consciousness to enjoy the sensation of being alive, is the one who wins. I was reminded of this by the death of Elijah Cummings this week at the age of 68. He accomplished far more in his life than I ever did, but I have had ten more years, so far, of smelling the daisies. Maybe it is nihilistic to say of life that just living is all there is.
But I will give the wheel one more turn. My favorite Sophocles play is “Philactetes”, which is used these days to help veterans cope with their PTSD. I read it differently, and my classicist friends can correct my perhaps overly modern interpretation. The protagonist is living in isolation because his wounds make him smell bad. He has been deprived of companionship as well as of his health, a double whammy, however much it makes sense to say that he is offensive to his friends not just because of his wounds but because of the odor of war from which he reeks. How can he go on without companionship? Somehow, he earns the right to rejoin his fellow human beings and so is restored to life. Sophocles says:
Now, this is not an easy message to swallow. It is not about being reaccepted in a community that had done you wrong, and so you are naive or wrongheaded to enjoy a new acceptance among your old friends. The people around you, your fellow soldiers, are all what they always were: all too human in first rejecting and then reaccepting you. That is just the way it is and there is no use quibbling about who was in the wrong and who was in the right. You just need people because you just need people, and that is a possession or attribute that you cannot do without, any more than you can do without respiration and digestion and still remain alive. Sophocles seems to me clear that what he is presenting is not the condition of soldiers but the human existential condition. Ulysses says at the beginning of the play that “tis not the powerful arm/ but soft enchanting tongue that governs all”. The warriors have come to the island, after all, not out of compassion but to entice Philoctetes back to war because they need him as a bowman. So human life always has with it the possibility of deceit, and even so people need one another, the chorus in the play proclaiming:
Alas! I pity him without a friend.
Without a fellow sufferer left alone
Deprived of all the mutual joys that flow
From sweet society-- distempered too!
That does not make Sophocles a very happy fellow in that the wisdom he is offering is very bitter. Philoctetes is among the living dead because he has been separated from the unreliable companionship that is essential to make life worth living. For him to reject the offer to rejoin the war against Troy would leave him no option but to join his dead father. Whining about his fate, and that is what Philoctetes does much of the time, takes away from him his ability to be an actor in his own fate, which Sophocles has defined as the necessities of war or, more generally, the necessities of life. Man up, Philoctetes, man up.
Sophocles is suggesting that death is unjust because it is not a balance between forces nor is it a proper outcome for events, somehow a good death being a fulfillment, while bad people get their comeuppances. Rather, death just has nothing to do with life. It is a gratuitous ending to what for a very long time has been a pleasurable experience, and so is to be avoided if circumstances at all allow that.