Reflecting upon Death

Tom Heggie
EVWP Summer 2009


Try to spend as little time as possible thinking about death. Time spent thinking about death takes precious time from life, and that is what is truly important.

Death is not the worst that can happen to men. – Plato

What can be worse than death? Start with a life poorly lived. No matter what the meaning of life really is it must be lived and lived well. And a well lived life – that, however, must be defined by the person, just as the life poorly lived must, likewise, be defined by the individual. Riches and fame, failure and suffering are relative terms. But never forget there are worse things that can happen than death.

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.
– Marcus Aurelius

Death should never define the human experience because when it does, one runs the risk of avoiding life to avoid death. Life is inherently dangerous; nobody gets out alive. Live life and live it to its fullest.
Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here.
And when it does come, we no longer exist. – Epicurus

There is a beautiful passage in Jack London’s the Call of the Wild and the sum and substance of it is this: when we are most alive the thought of death is the furthest from our minds. After all, how could the soldier on the battlefield fight if this were not true? The surgeon in the operating theater is fully engaged in life – saving life, improving life. The adventurer explores the highest mountains, paddles the wildest rivers, and confronts the harshest environments all with the thought of living life to the fullest measure possible. Here where death is the closest, life is the fullest and most alive, the highest realm of existence.

The Greeks said grandly in their tragic phrase, 'Let no one be called happy till his death;' to which I would add, 'Let no one, till his death, be called unhappy.' – Elizabeth Barrett Browning

What could be farther from death than happiness? Saki’s allegorical short story “The Image of the Lost Soul” tells a story set amid the parapet statuary of some great unnamed European cathedral. There among the pious statues of kings and bishops, queens and seraphs, jackdaws, pigeons, and sparrows, a small bird brings happiness to a bleak, self-centered landscape. If we follow through to the stories end, the small bird, whose voice provided the metaphor for happiness dies and as the great cathedral tolls out its daily message "After joy ... sorrow," Saki invites the reader to ponder the alternative massage – before sorrow … joy and happiness.

If we don't know life, how can we know death? – Confucius

The invitation then becomes to know life in an effort to reflect upon death. Few people are bothered by the fact that life went on before their birth. The sun rose and set, people did what people do, history was being written by people whose name are as familiar as those of our contemporaries. It is not sad, painful or fearful to talk of the past, a time prior to our life. But at our birth all of that changes. Years marked on a calendar have meaning, Major achievements, minor memories they all add value, worth. This is the knowledge of life. The years that will occur after we die suddenly are not like those before our birth. Through the knowledge of life, we realize that that which happens after our death will be different. We know our present and our history; what will be the future? We know our family. We are aware of our ancestors, but what will become of our progeny? Now that we know life, its emotions, its experiences, its worth and maybe its meaning, death too becomes all too knowable.