Thinking about Death and the Afterlife (again)

 

Thinking about death. First, I belong to the lucky ones. Even if I died tomorrow, I have had a full life. Just read of two twelve year-olds killed by a car while riding their bikes. Of course, countless others, victims of accident, disease, natural catastrophe, and war. Is the destruction of the state of Ukraine or Iran worth the death of one child? The blood those leaders have on their hands, whatever the logic of power, too terrible to contemplate. They must hope death is the end. Not because of the possibility of Hell only, but I believe we must all suffer the pain we have caused others in the next life, if there is one (Purgatory). I have a hard enough time trying to face my own Purgatory and I have have not caused the violent death of innocent children, among other people. As for the young who have had their lives cut short, one can only hope for a God who has made a place for them by his side.

  I love life. Not every part of life in this world, to be sure, but life itself. Intensely. So many things make life worth living for me, even sick as I now am. That up front. 

  I agree with people like Hans Küng and indeed the Church, east and west, that there are powerful anthropomorphic reasons why there should be an afterlife: the deep longings that nothing in this world can satisfy (C. S. Lewis’ joy), the horrible injustices needing to be reconciled, the need to face the pure truth of our lives, most importantly the belief that the loved one oughtn't perish, the inability to believe in the final annihilation of the loved one. I have written of my inability to believe in the annihilation of my grandmother many years ago at her funeral despite being an atheist-materialist at the time. I still cannot believe in the annihilation of my beloved father and other beloved relatives that are no longer among us. The point is not simply that I want this, therefore it must be true. Rather, it is that certain human responses seem woven so deeply into love itself that complete annihilation appears almost morally unintelligible to us. When one truly loves another person, one does not merely desire their continued biological functioning. One experiences them as irreplaceable, as having a reality and value that seem to demand more than disappearance into nothingness. And then the thought of the end of the earth itself, the thought that everything good and worthy of love will perish. Unbearable. Proves nothing, I guess, but why is this implanted in us and indeed goes with what it means to love someone at all if the hope thereby engendered is an illusion?

      And I try to cultivate an openness for dimensions of reality beyond our science. I am not completely without hope. That being said, I confess to finding it difficult to have complete faith in that hope. Despite my wishes, I have a hard time actually believing my embodied soul will survive the death of my body. Which I suppose means weak faith, if not a complete lack of faith. This faith presupposes a certain picture of God, an absolute, omniscient, and in some sense all-powerful God who knows us absolutely and has the idea of you and me in his mind, which is, I suppose, the basis of a possible resurrection. This idea is found in both Christian Platonism and thinkers influenced by it. If the deepest reality is not blind mechanism but mind, love, or logos, then perhaps the continued reality of the person would not depend upon the frail persistence of biological processes or even upon some naturally immortal “substance,” but upon being held in being by that ultimate source. In that picture, resurrection is less like magic and more like the refusal of ultimate reality to abandon what has truly existed and been loved. Still, I fear giving in to wishful thinking and sentimentality. And there is just too much in all this that seems like a fairy tale. Perhaps a limit in me.

    And I know death is terrible. It is more than hard to die, physically and spiritually. Few die peacefully in their sleep. Dying is  humiliating, frightening, bodily, fragmented. Simone Weil wrote that affliction reduces a person almost to a thing. There is no glamour in it. The modern image of dignity often depends on autonomy, control, competence, self-possession. This dying annihilates. But there may be another kind of dignity in remaining human even in weakness: in loving others while afraid, in telling the truth about suffering without bitterness, in enduring dependence without surrendering one's humanity. Some of the most dignified moments I have heard described occur precisely where worldly forms of dignity collapse: for example, in Primo Levi’s If This is a Man. I think of my mother caring for my father in his last years. 

    And I fear the last sparks of consciousness after the heart stops pumping, a Muhlholland-Drive-like nightmare. Here I have been close to death recently with a massive pulmonary embolism. While it was still touch and go and worrying about the fate of my children should I die, I remember having a strong feeling “whatever happens, things will be alright.” I was strangely not afraid. Another response I have had to a medical crisis: the desire to break out laughing in the midst of pain and physical crisis. The whole bodily thing seemed at that moment absurd to me. Still, when I have lost all conscious control, what will the last sparks of my dream-state do to me? 

    But of this much I am sure. I am required to accept my death so that others will have the chance of life, so that my children and grandchildren and their children whom I will never know and who will not know me will have a chance of life. We all have to make way for those that come after us. I first heard that thought from my favorite professor of German literature, Dr. Thomas Baldwin. That thought is what will have to give me the courage to die with some measure of acceptance. Should be think of our deaths as necessary sacrifices to make for those we love and the love of the world? We all have our cross? Indeed, to me the deepest part of the Christian story is the part many find the most absurd: idea that God shared our bodily life even unto the most terrible death on the cross.