Fixing Death

It will happen to all of us that at some point you get tapped on the shoulder and told, not just that the party is over, but slightly worse: the party’s going on but you have to leave. And it’s going on without you. That’s the reflection I think that most upsets people about their demise. All right then let’s – because it might make us feel better – let’s pretend the opposite. Instead, you’ll get tapped on the shoulder and told: ‘Great news: this party’s going on forever, and you can’t leave. You’ve got to stay. The boss says so and he also insists that you have a good time.’ — Christopher Hitchens

Could it be I'm the type of person who would read a book about being Happy and write a blog post about death? I'm not so morbid. But oddly enough, much of Derren Brown's book is about just that: coming to terms with our finite life in a way that gives us contentment in this anxiety-driven world.

But my point is not about death itself. It doesn't excite me all that much. We all know Woody Allen's classic quip that he wouldn't want to be there when it happens. Me neither (of course, we can also take that from the Buddhist not-self perspective). It's more that we live in a culture that doesn't acknowledge death, and wants to put it off as long as possible. 50 is the new 29. Please.

Transhumanists believe there is no point to life, just more of it. Why not live forever, or as close as we can get to it, because there is no afterlife or God or purpose to the cosmos. It's all frisky bits and atoms, that at best case for the secularist, we will get subsumed as worm food so that pieces of our matter can go on playing in the dirt.

Brown, although a secular humanist himself, offers a tad more nuance. He brings in Irvin Yalom's notion of rippling: where our lives create ripples (or influences) on the surface of water that can go on beyond the span of our life. 

While poetically true, at some point we arrive at our true death: “that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.” It would seem all for naught from a deep time perspective, but not as much if we had an eternal perspective.

It's not that ultimate meaning needs to go beyond our life, it has to go beyond life itself. Otherwise, we are just kicking the can down the road. 

Brown doesn't take this leap. But he does offer some practical existential insights. He notes near death some of the top regrets are: 

• I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. 
• I wish I hadn’t worked so hard. 
• I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings. 
• I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. 
• I wish that I had let myself be happier.

To this, Brown says, “Is it not potentially just as disastrous to live one's life of dying happily and without regret, just to find that our regret is that we did not live for the moment while we could?” And that, “our ultimate aim is maybe not so much to be happy as to live fully and make sure we are moving forward.”

And while living in the moment fully and moving forward are good reminders, we still need our moments and trajectory to be contained by some context. Maybe it is better to say, that we need our to lives to be about one thing while flourishing in the moment fully. 

Lives get meaning by their finitude, and death by the Eternal.

We don't know for sure what happens after we die: float around the bardo until we find a new body to incarnate into, arrive in the subtle realms of spiritual bodies, return to ultimate Source, meet God at the gates, haunt the new tenants that just moved into our old apartment, or it's just beyond our comprehension.

But I suppose I'll want to be there.