The art of dying

Growth and wilting flower on a white background

Every so often, when a celebrity dies, followed by melodrama in the media, one loses sight of what exactly transpired. The more loved the person, the more we make efforts to obscure the physicality of death by building around that body a moat filled with meaning, portents, and lessons from that life. The reality of death is, of course, both shocking and disappointingly commonplace: a human body that laughed, cried, fought, gossiped, despaired and made love has now ceased to do all of the same. This much is easy to speak of coolly and objectively.

The idea of one’s own mortality

Yet, when the idea of one’s own mortality comes flashing by, like rains during the monsoon — all-consuming in its imperious urgency, brooking no resistance, granting no relief, shoving aside the mind’s other mute frenzies — there emerges a sense of witlessness, even an idiotic paranoia about the shapelessness of the world that waits. Like reflections produced when two mirrors face each other, the mind contemplating its own non-existence is both paradoxical and pregnant with infinities. At that singular moment, there isn’t much to do except let this idea wash over like a high tide, cleanse the remnants of thoughts that stick around on the beachhead of everyday living. Then, when this momentous but seemingly unreal possibility — after all, who can truly imagine his or her own death? — has receded, the mind is a curious place to observe. No different than a city after a flood. For many, this moment is the beginning of a lifelong battle with a sense of futility. For a few others, the recognition of one’s own mortality is a spur to live intensively, an opportunity to discover anew, as Albert Camus writes, “a will to live without rejecting anything of life”.

The recognition of one’s finitude — not as a premonition, but an ineluctable intuition that the sum total of life’s works has arrived at its logical end — encourages some to survey all that has passed. This recollection can slip into mawkish self-aggrandisement in most cases, but in rare cases, this self-awareness can birth works of unusual sensitivity. In the great French writer Marguerite Yourcenar’s magnificent novel Mémoires d’Hadrien, published in 1951, she speaks in the voice of Emperor Hadrian who lived in the 1st century CE. Her Hadrian announces to the intended reader of his words, the young Marcus Aurelius: “Like a traveller sailing the Archipelago who sees the luminous mists lift toward evening, and little by little makes out the shore, I begin to discern the profile of my death.” It is a sensitive mind’s declaration, after which Hadrian’s recollections sprawl outward, like some vast rain cloud over the Roman consciousness.

Death, to Hadrian, is a great liberator, a co-conspirator who eggs him to reminisce about his days as Emperor Trajan’s understudy, where he saw the brutalities of power up-close and eventually experienced the loneliness of the power for himself. For Yourcenar’s Hadrian, Death becomes an opportunity to conscientiously instruct the next generation and impose meaning on life that had trickled by. It is a roundabout way to acknowledge that it is not death that is rare; rather, it is living life meaningfully that is uncommon.

Speaking about death

But in our times, it is death — or more accurately, speaking about death — that has become rare. Death itself, as Philippe Ariès, the great French historian of family and childhood, noted underwent a transformation in the 20th century: “Death became dirty [associated with disease], and then it became medicalised.” Ironically, while we live in worlds where physical death is commonplace (how could it not be, we are six billion and ageing), an economy has sprung up to keep the reality of dying away from the fictional worlds of the ‘living’ in the form of old-age homes and end-of-life care providers. As a consequence, grief has increasingly been replaced by the aestheticisation of sorrow. Novels about the death of a spouse, the passing away of a child to a disease — these are now minor genres in bookstores, with writers on book tours speaking to eager (and ageing) audiences about how they came to this mountain of sorrow only to cross it. At the extremes of this theme, for terrorists and génocidaires, death is only useful as long as it is the natural outcome of a well-choreographed spectacle uploaded on social media.

The result of all this is an increasing inability as a culture to find the appropriate words to speak about that which death often is: a way to reclaim a natural dignity that life often denies to most.