We’re born with two powerful drives: a life instinct and a death wish.
The first one is stronger.
It’s what makes us fight or flee when faced with a threat.
It’s what makes us cling to life even in the most harrowing circumstances.
It’s what makes ordinary people endure the horrors of slavery or the Nazi death camps.
The death wish is weaker. It kicks in mainly towards the end of our life when we start to lose our physical and mental abilities. Then death seems less an enemy than a friend.
I know someone in Canada who worked for several years as a counsellor in hospices for the aged and chronically ill. Many patients, she told me, willed themselves to die. They’d simply had enough of life.
And that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Aging is the natural prelude to death. It eases us into what most of our life we’ve feared and shunned. The relentless loss of abilities pries us gently away from life and makes death not only less fearful but even inviting.
Unfortunately, the cult of youthfulness, on which vast industries depend, cajoles us into despising aging and fearing death.
Steve Jobs had the right take on death. In his commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005, just after he discovered he had pancreatic cancer, he had this to say:
“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to Heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life.”
Death is sad for those who lose a loved one. It’s tragic if the person is young or the manner of death horrific.
At the same time, life without death would be both boring and terrifying. It’s death that gives life closure and meaning. We treasure every moment precisely because it’s fleeting.
Yet, paradoxically, death seems to negate all meaning.
Humans have an insatiable hunger for meaning. Once we satisfy the needs of animal survival, our lives become entangled in a ceaseless quest for human meaning.
We seek love. We crave wealth, power or fame. We long to exercise a talent we’ve been gifted, or pursue a dream that haunts us. We seek immortality in our children. If we’re lucky enough to attain these goals, which invariably disappoint, then all that remains is the ultimate quest: does it all mean anything? Are we part of a larger eternal design within which humanity’s vast achievements (including our own) are not destined for oblivion?
Or is this a chance universe in which humans are a random outcome?
We have asked these questions since time immemorial. But there are no answers; at least, none that gives us certainty.
We therefore have to take a leap of faith – not just religious people but atheists too. There is a touching YouTube discussion between two famous atheists and scientists, Dan Dennett and Richard Dawkins, in which they show their ardent faith in the meaningfulness of life, a faith that does not flow in the least from anything they believe their own scientific work tells them.
In the end we’re all left with faith of one kind or another.
Poets have wrestled ceaselessly and beautifully with the angel of death. Witness the victorious acceptance of the 17th century English poet John Donne’s Death, Be Not Proud; the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’ raging defiance: “Do not go gentle into that good night”, or Derek Walcott’s superb meditations on death in his most recent and magnificent White Egrets.
But let the last words be those of the American poet Robert Frost:
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Peter Laurie is a retired diplomat and a commentator on social issues. Email plaurie@caribsurf.com
