On Death and Delusions

In Season 1, Episode 9 of Six Feet Under, carefree prodigal son Nate learns to accept that everyone must die, regardless of their age and status. This may sound banal, but his coming to terms with so self-evident a fact shows that in the mad to-ing and fro-ing of everyday life there is little room for truth.

I first became aware of death when I was still in kindergarten, a mere six-year-old whose world hadn’t extended beyond colouring books and plasticine models. Perhaps it was due to how everyone had been going on about a boy killed in an accident occurring on the main road separating my house and the kindergarten; perhaps it was the dead cat I had seen (and poked with a twig) by the pavement on the way to school; perhaps it was time – but I remember sitting in class (the teacher was showing us how to paint faces on eggshells) and having the most horrible premonition that my grandmother, who was the centre of my world at that time, was going to die. This upset me so much that I kicked up a row in class and was sent out to the garden to cool off. When school ended, I rushed home in a blur, near tears, fearing that the worst had come true. Imagine my relief when I found my grandmother alive in the kitchen preparing lunch. My gratitude that day was indescribable, but being a child who couldn’t see beyond “today,” I soon forgot the fear that had crippled me, and life, as they say, went on. 

As days turned into years, I began to see the ubiquity of death. Relatives and friends passed on; the news was always full of people dying tragic deaths. A mental numbness working like some spiritual anaesthesia curbed the fear. In adult life, death retreated to the shadowy background, as though it were aware of its taboo status, making place for the more practical elements of life: work, love, mortgage. We meet every new day with our thoughts squarely homed in on the day’s agenda: What time is the next meeting? How can I effectively pull off this project? Shall I call my parents to say hello? What should I have for dinner? Life sets its own priorities, and the living must obey its rules to stay alive. When Death does show up on the scene, usually on account of somebody we know, we treat it with aloof reverence, comforting ourselves with strategies we have devised over the years. There is religion. There is the security of work. There is (un)conditional love. There is the presence of our offspring. There is (the creation of) Art. Each “strategy” allows us to explain away the inevitability (and senselessness) of Death: religion feeds us the idea that there is another life waiting somewhere in the ether; work gives us a sense of continuity and achievement through repetition; our lover validates our existence and compels us to live “in the moment”; our children make us feel immortal; grandiose poets like Yeats and Rilke tell us that the Artist lives on in his work. But we can never permit ourselves to stop and think. That moment of hesitation, of introspection may let in the dark truth and destroy every single one of our strategies. We may never recover.

The dark truth, which Nate in Six Feet Under has learnt, is this: religion is a theory at best and, though capable of soothing troubled minds, falls apart when put under the microscope. Ask too many questions of religion and all you will get in return are rhetorical metaphysical questions. The ameliorating effect of work is overrated. We may lose ourselves in its mundane sameness, but when Death strikes, the bottom will fall out of that sameness and you will see that there is no safety net below. Lovers are not immortal themselves. They, like us, will have to face the same fate. In fact, every minute that we spend with them may just be our last. As for children, we collectively suffer from the delusion that children propagate life and ensure deathlessness. This is of course very, very far from the truth. Children, vulnerable little beings that they are, die every day. The elevated function of Art is at times exaggerated. The Artist may “live on” in future generations, but such coldly aesthetic reasoning is not necessarily a source of comfort to the Artist, who will eventually have to step into the grime of Death like all mortals.

How, then, should Death be tamed, you ask? Some prescribe Stoicism or Epicureanism. Be courageous! Be happy and live! But these prescriptions seem to underplay the randomness and the sheer awfulness of the endgame. The answer, I have always suspected, is confront and accept. Acceptance in this case does not mean simply acknowledging and going blithely on your way. It means living every day with an eye on the Enemy. For that is exactly what Death is. It is an ever-present Enemy that loves mankind and longs to embrace it. It is a terrifying phenomenon (Woody Allen famously said, “I’m not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”); but we can rest assured that at least there is equal, unbiased treatment for every one of us when the clock strikes for the last time.