The Antidote (20 page)

Ernest Becker's appointment with mortality came tragically early: a year before
The Denial of Death
was published, he was diagnosed with colon cancer, at the age of forty-seven. Two years later, Sam Keen visited him, literally on his deathbed, in a hospital ward in Vancouver one rainy day in February 1974. Keen was there to conduct an interview with Becker for
Psychology Today.
‘Well,' Becker told him, ‘now you'll have a chance to see whether I lived as I thought.' He had requested only a minimum of pain-killing medication, he explained, so as to remain ‘clear' in his final interactions with his family, and in his dying. The denial of death might have structured all human civilisation, but it wasn't the best way, Becker believed, for an individual to deal with his own death. ‘Gradually, reluctantly,' Keen wrote later, ‘we are beginning to acknowledge that the bitter medicine [Becker] prescribes – contemplation of the horror of our own death – is, paradoxically, the tincture that adds sweetness to mortality.' The interview was published a month after their meeting, in March. A few days afterwards, Becker died.

It may be hard to swallow the idea that we should spend more time contemplating death, but there are some powerful and pragmatic arguments for doing so. Consider, for example, the Stoic technique of the ‘premeditation of evils'. Death is going to happen, Seneca would say, and so it must be preferable to be mentally prepared for its approach, instead of shocked into the sudden
realisation that it is imminent. In any case, our subconscious strivings not to think about death are never entirely successful: long before your own death becomes a probability, you'll occasionally find yourself in the grip of that middle-of-the-night panic so vividly captured by Philip Larkin in his poem ‘Aubade': ‘Unresting death, a whole day nearer now … Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.' Better, surely, to avoid such horror by normalising the prospect if possible.

But how to go about doing this? The denial of death isn't like most other problems, which weigh on us so heavily that we may eventually be driven to find a way to solve them. The whole problem is that, most of the time, it doesn't feel like a problem at all. Subconsciously assuming that you're immortal makes for a much easier existence, so long as you can keep it up. How, then, to fight this instinct and choose, as a matter of daily living, to confront death instead?

Solving this conundrum sounded like it might be a job for someone who was both a philosopher and a psychotherapist, and so in search of answers I turned to Lauren Tillinghast, a woman whose business cards and website described her as a ‘philosophical counsellor'. She was part of a contemporary movement among philosophers who felt that they were returning the discipline to its Socratic roots, as a therapeutic practice intended to soothe the soul, not just an academic exercise in theory-spinning. Tillinghast did her fair share of such theorising; she'd published articles in philosophy journals with titles such as ‘What is an Attributive Adjective?' and ‘The Classificatory Sense of “Art”‘. But she also had a consulting office, in downtown Manhattan, a bright and neatly furnished room hidden inside an ageing office building that was home to a number of more conventional therapists, psychiatrists, and counsellors. She was in her early forties, and
had the practised, friendly neutrality of a woman accustomed to listening non-judgmentally to other people's problems. She poured me some mint tea into a white china cup, ushered me to an armchair, and didn't flinch when I told her I wanted to talk about death – and, specifically, how one might learn to choose to live with greater awareness of one's mortality. ‘Well, that's a pretty big topic,' she said. But we had to start somewhere, and we decided to begin with Epicurus.

The first step in trying to become more comfortable with your mortality involves attempting to reduce the terror induced by the mere thought of death. (If you can't manage that, you're unlikely to get much further.) Tillinghast explained that philosophers had often sought to achieve this by means of rational argument: if you can be persuaded that the fear of death is illogical, you're more likely to be able to let go of it. The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus – a contemporary of Zeno of Citium, the original Stoic – had made one of the earliest attempts. Before him, the philosophical consensus on death, broadly speaking, was that it wasn't really final: the best argument for not being scared of it was that a glorious afterlife might follow. Epicurus's argument is the mirror-image of this. If life
doesn't
continue beyond death, he points out, that's an excellent reason not to be scared of it, either. ‘Death is nothing to us,' he says, ‘since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.' You might fear a painful dying process. You might dread the pain of losing others to death; our focus here is not on the terrible pain of grief. But fearing being dead yourself makes no sense. Death spells the end of the experiencing subject, and thus the end of any capacity for experiencing the state we fear. Or as Einstein put it: ‘The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident to one who's dead.' The one great fear that governs our lives,
from this perspective, stands exposed as a kind of error. It's as if, instead of imagining death, we had all along been imagining something more like being buried alive – deprived of all the benefits of existence, yet somehow still forced to experience the deprivation.

One powerful counterargument to this position is that our fear doesn't come from imagining death
wrongly,
but from the fact that we can't imagine it at all. That was roughly Freud's view of the matter: that what we call ‘the fear of death' is really more of a horrified seizing-up in the face of something utterly inconceivable. But as the contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel points out, there's something wrong with this argument, too – because there's nothing about ‘unimaginable' states that is terrifying by definition. We can't imagine what it's like to be in a state of dreamless sleep, either, but we surrender to it every night, and very few of us do so with feelings of terror. ‘People who are averse to death', Nagel notes, drily, ‘are not usually averse to unconsciousness.'

Epicurus has a second, connected point to make about the non-scariness of death, which has become known as the ‘argument of symmetry'. Why do you fear the eternal oblivion of death, he wonders, if you don't look back with horror at the eternal oblivion before you were born – which, as far as you were concerned, was just as eternal, and just as much an oblivion? Vladimir Nabokov famously opens his memoir
Speak, Memory
with lines that drive this point home: ‘The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the pre-natal abyss with much more calm than the one he is headed for.' If you weren't traumatised by not having yet been born, it seems logical
not to worry about being traumatised by being dead. But of course, Tillinghast pointed out, ‘it's not very useful, for most people, to point out that a fear is
illogical.
It doesn't make it go away.'

There's another problem with all these efforts to make
being dead
a less frightening prospect, which is this: who says that being dead is the problem in the first place? When we contemplate our own personal mortality, the real sting is surely that we're going to
stop being alive,
and lose all the benefits we enjoy as a result of living. ‘People don't generally come to me because they fear the oblivion of being dead,' Tillinghast said. ‘But the idea of everything that makes life
lifely
drawing to a close - well, that's a much greater source of anxiety.' It is true, of course, that you won't be around to
experience
being deprived of those benefits, so fearing that deprivation is arguably unjustifiable. But as Nagel argues, in an essay entitled simply ‘Death', the fact that you shouldn't fear death doesn't mean that it isn't a bad thing. By way of analogy, he says, imagine an adult who suffers a severe brain injury and is reduced to the mental state of a three-year-old. He might be perfectly happy in his new condition, but nobody would disagree that something bad had still happened to the adult he once was. It makes no difference that the adult is no longer around. No matter how persuasive you find Epicurus's arguments against
fearing
death, it doesn't follow that death is not
bad.

This distinction is crucial, because it begins to make sense of the idea that a greater degree of mortality awareness might be part of the recipe for happiness. For as long as you're terrified by the idea of your mortality, you can't really be expected to swallow Ernest Becker's ‘bitter medicine' and voluntarily opt to spend more time thinking about your own death. On the other hand, trying to embrace death as a
good
thing would seem to be asking
far too much of yourself. It might not necessarily even be desirable, since it could cause you to place less value on being alive. But coming to understand death as something that there is no reason to fear, yet which is still bad because of what it brings to an end, might be the ideal middle path. The argument is a thoroughly down-to-earth, pragmatic, and Stoic one: the more that you remain aware of life's finitude, the more you will cherish it, and the less likely you will be to fritter it away on distractions. ‘Look at it like going to a really nice restaurant,' said Tillinghast. ‘You take it as a fact that the meal isn't going to last forever. Never mind if that's the way it should be, or whether you feel like you're owed more meal, or you resent the fact that the meal isn't eternal. It's just the case that you have this one meal. So it would make sense, wouldn't it, to try to suck the marrow out of it? To focus on the flavours? To not let yourself be distracted by irritation at the fact that there's a woman at the next table wearing too much perfume?' The psychotherapist Irvin Yalom, in his book
Staring at the Sun,
points out that many of us live with the dim fear that on our deathbeds we'll come to regret how we spent our lives. Remembering our mortality moves us closer to the deathbed mindset from which such a judgment might be made - thus enabling us to spend our lives in ways that we're much less likely to come to regret.

Truly to confront your own mortality, Yalom argues, is to undergo an awakening - a total shift in perspective that fundamentally transforms how it feels to be alive. And it is not necessarily remotely pleasant. He recalls the reflections of one of his therapy patients, a woman in her early thirties: ‘I suppose the strongest feelings came,' she told him, ‘from realising that it would be
me
who will die - not some other entity, like Old-Lady-Me, or Terminally-Ill-And-Ready-To-Die me. I suppose I always
thought of death obliquely, as something that
might
happen, rather than that would happen.' To make that switch, Yalom insists, is not merely to ratchet up the intensity with which you live, but to alter your relationship to life. It is a transformation he describes, borrowing the language of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, as a move from focusing on ‘how things are' to the fact ‘that things are' - on the sheer astonishing is-ness of existence.

This is the real distinction between mortality awareness as a way of life, on the one hand, and those clichéd slogans about ‘living each day as if it were your last' on the other. The slogans may be motivational - a reminder to get down to the important stuff before it's too late. But Yalom is talking about a transformation that redefines what constitutes the ‘important stuff'. When you really face mortality, the ultimate and unavoidable worst-case scenario, everything changes. ‘All external expectations, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important,' Apple's founder Steve Jobs once said, in a speech that was speedily co-opted by several gurus of positive thinking, though in truth its message struck fatally at the heart of theirs. ‘Remembering that you are going to die is the best way that I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked.'

Start thinking this way, Yalom points out, and it becomes a virtuous circle. Living more meaningfully will reduce your anxiety about the possibility of future regret at not having lived meaningfully - which will, in turn, keep sapping death of its power to induce anxiety. As he puts it, there is a positive correlation between the fear of death and the sense of unlived life. Live a life suffused with the awareness of its own finitude, and you can hope to finish it in something like the fashion that Jean-Paul Sartre hoped to die: ‘quietly … certain that the last burst of my heart would be
inscribed on the last page of my work, and that death would be taking only a dead man'.

After wrestling for a while with the ideas of Becker, Epicurus, Thomas Nagel and Irvin Yalom, I decided to take a trip to Mexico. I had suspected for some time that this would prove necessary if I was really going to understand the role of mortality awareness in daily life. I had often seen it claimed that Mexico had a unique attitude towards death. By common agreement, it was one of the few countries that still had an active tradition of
memento mori
- rituals and customs designed to encourage regular reflections on mortality - and, according to several recent international surveys, it was also one of the happiest; perhaps even the happiest or second happiest nation in the world, in fact, depending on the measures used. The most famous example of this attitude towards death is the annual celebration known as the Day of the Dead, when Mexicans toast those who have died - and death itself with copious quantities of tequila, and bread in the shape of human remains; people build shrines in their homes, throng city squares, and conduct all-night vigils at the graves of deceased relatives. But this way of thinking runs deeper than a national holiday each November. As the celebrated Mexican essayist Octavio Paz writes, in his book
The Labyrinth of Solitude:
‘The word “death” is not pronounced in New York, in Paris, in London, because it burns the lips … the Mexican, in contrast, is familiar with death, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it; it is one of his favourite toys and his most steadfast love.'