ON DEATH AS A CONSTANT COMPANION

LIFE is too short. Perhaps no single force has worked so powerfully on man as his knowledge that he must surely die. Whole civilizations have been built in death's dominion: the Egyptians turned their land into a vast necropolis, and the Aztecs conquered Mexico not for booty but for human sacrifices to blunt the lethal appetites of their man-eating gods. Trying to cope with the dreadful and perplexing fact of death, man has erected great intellectual edifices; philosophers as far apart as Socrates and (2,300 years after him) Karl Jaspers have held that the essence of philosophy is preparation for death. Others have sought to exorcise death with magic. Or with reason. "When I am, death is not," said Epicurus. "When death is, I am not. Therefore we can never have anything to do with death." The vanquishing of death was Christianity's great enterprise. "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" cried the apostle Paul.

But Atropos with her shears, Time with his scythe, the Pale Horse and Rider of the Apocalypse, the grinning skeleton at the revels of Everyman--and the God of Judgment--have maintained their power on earth, to frighten man and elate him, to drive him to noble works and to dreadful deeds.

Today, throughout the Western world and especially in America, man's attitude toward the mystery of death is making a break with human tradition. Medically, death seems to be constantly receding, and some scientists think seriously about an almost indefinite life span for man (the late Norbert Wiener, for one, was horrified at the prospect of the overcrowded world this might bring about). Socially, the rites of death and mourning, except at those rare times when whole nations hear the muffled drums for a Churchill or a Kennedy, are growing more impersonal and grudging. Religiously, the promise of immortality has become dim and uncertain. Much of the fear and mystery that once attended death has been dispelled--but so has much of the meaning.

The "Management" of Dying

Instead of incorporating his mortality into his total view of what he is and how he should live, instead of confronting his finitude with all the resources of myth and hope and wonderment that are his heritage, modern man seems to be doing his best to dismiss death as an unfortunate incident. Carl Jung warned against abandoning the traditional view of death "as the fulfillment of life's meaning and its goal in the truest sense, instead of a mere meaningless cessation." Psychologist Rollo May feels that the repression of death "is what makes modern life banal, empty and vapid. We run away from death by making a cult of automatic progress, or by making it impersonal. Many people think they are facing death when they are really sidestepping it with the old eat-drink-and-be-merry-for-tomorrow-you-die--middle-aged men and women who want to love everybody, go every place, do everything and hear everything before the end comes. It's like the advertising slogan, 'If I've only one life ... let me live it as a blonde.' "

Half a century ago, the death of mothers in childbirth was commonplace, as was the death of infants. Happily, both are a rarity today. California Sociologist Robert Fulton estimates that the average American family can go for 20 years without encountering death, which is more than ever confined to old people. And the old people are more than ever out of the way, many of them in playpen "Sunset Villages." Their absence, and the universality of the hospital, means that dying is done offstage; gone are the hushed house, the doctor's visits, the solemn faces, the deathbed scenes that put death in life's perspective. Children of the TV generation are such strangers to natural death that on hearing that Grandfather is dead, they have been known to ask: "Who shot him?"

Physicians today write papers about the problems involved in "the management of death" and debate how to handle (in that most hideous of jargon phrases) the "terminal case." There can only be gratitude for the elimination of suffering--but "management of death" raises difficult questions.

One frequent problem is whether a patient "should be told." There is much medical opposition to telling him--mostly for good and sufficient reasons. But there may be other reasons not so good. Some psychiatrists have noticed that doctors tend to have a high degree of thanatophobia (fear of death). To them death is the enemy and its victory a personal defeat from which they naturally turn away. In addition, indications are that many doctors had above-average anxiety about death in their childhood, and Dr. Herman Feifel, psychologist at the Los Angeles Veterans Clinic, speculates that this is why they became doctors in the first place.

Patients often make it clear that they do not want to know the truth. Yet in a study of attitudes among the dying, Dr. Feifel found the patients eager to talk about the subject that was being so carefully avoided by physician, family and friends. Once the old liturgies asked God's protection from a sudden death; today it is expected that people hope to die suddenly. And they do. In automobiles and airplanes, through war or crime, death comes ever more abruptly, ever more violently. And after middle age, it comes suddenly through heart attack or stroke. There is hardly time to put one's life in order, in the ancient phrase, and to prepare for the end. In many a modern dying, there is no moment of death at all. Without realizing the momentous thing that is happening to them, patients are eased into the long, final coma. No matter how humane and sensible, this does raise the question of when and whether it is proper to "deprive a person of his death."

One doctor who devotes full time to giving people their death is Britain's Cicely Saunders of London's St. Joseph's Hospice, which cares almost exclusively for the incurably ill. The effort at St. Joseph's is to let each patient know he is dying and help him to live as thoroughly as possible during his last weeks or days. "This is the time in their lives when they can be emotionally and psychologically most mature," says Dr. Saunders. "You remember when Pope John said, 'My bags are packed. I am ready to leave.' We are helping patients to pack their bags--each in his own individual way and making his own choices."

Not every traveler would or could face this journey in this way. But it represents a compassionate frankness that has perhaps become too rare.

The Decline of Mourning

A decade ago, Anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer wrote a much reprinted article on "the pornography of death." Gorer's point, also made by German Theologian Helmuth Thielicke, is that death is coming to have the same position in modern life and literature that sex had in Victorian times. Some support for the theory is provided by the current movie The Loved One, which turns death into a slapstick dirty joke.

Is grief going underground? People want briefer funeral services, says Dr. Quentin Hand, an ordained Methodist who teaches at the theological school of Georgia's Emory University. "No one wants a eulogy any more--they often ask me not to even mention Mother or Father." Even those much scolded death-denyers, the undertakers, seem to sense that something is missing. Dean Robert Lehr of the Gupton Jones College of Mortuary Science in Dallas says that whereas students used to study only embalming, they now go in heavily for "grief psychology and grief counseling." Explains Lehr: "There are only 16 quarter hours in embalming now and 76 in other areas. We're in a transition period."

The outward signs of mourning--veils and widow's weeds, black hat-and armbands, crape-hung doorways--are going the way of the hearse pulled by plumed horses. There is almost no social censure against remarrying a few months after bereavement in what one psychiatrist calls "the Elizabeth Taylorish way" (referring to her statement six months after Husband Mike Todd was killed in a plane crash: "Mike is dead now, and I am alive"). Many psychologists who have no quarrel with the life-must-continue attitude are dubious about the decline in expression of grief. Psychology Professor Harry W. Martin of Texas Southwestern Medical School deplores the "slick, smooth operation of easing the corpse out, but saying no to weeping and wailing and expressing grief and loneliness. What effect does this have on us psychologically? It may mean that we have to mourn covertly, by subterfuge--perhaps in various degrees of depression, perhaps in mad flights of activity, perhaps in booze." In his latest book, Death, Grief and Mourning, Anthropologist Gorer warns that abandonment of the traditional forms of mourning results in "callousness, irrational preoccupation with and fear of death, and vandalism."

Whether or not such conclusions are justified, the take-it-in-stride attitude can make things difficult. Gorer cites his brother's widow, a New Englander, whose emotional reticence, combined with that of her British friends, led her to eschew any outward signs of mourning. As a result, "she let herself be, almost literally, eaten up with grief, sinking into a deep and long-lasting depression." Many a widow invited to a party "to take her mind off things" has embarrassed herself and her hostess by a flood of tears at the height of the festivities. On occasion, Gorer himself "refused invitations to cocktail parties, explaining that I was mourning; people responded to this statement with shocked embarrassment, as if I had voiced some appalling obscenity."

Funerals seem ever harder to get to in a high-pressure, commuterized way of life. But the social repression of grief goes against the experience of the human race. Mourning is one of the traditional "rites of passage" through which families and tribes can rid themselves of their dead and return to normal living. Negro funeral parades, Greek klama (ritual weeping), Irish wakes--each in their own way fulfill this function. Orthodox Jewish families are supposed to "sit shivah"; for seven days after the burial they stay home, wearing some symbol of a "shredded garment," such as a piece of torn cloth, and keeping an unkempt appearance. Friends bring food as a symbol of the inability of the bereaved to concern themselves with practical affairs. For eleven months sons are enjoined to say the prayers for the dead in the synagogue twice a day.

By no means all observers agree that the decline of such demanding customs is a bad thing. The old rituals, while a comfort and release for some, could be a burden to others. And grief expressed in private can be more meaningful than the external forms. London Psychiatrist Dr. David Stafford-Clark thinks that the new attitude toward death should be considered in the context of "the way the whole structure of life has changed since World War II, particularly the very different attitude toward the future which has arisen. It is a much more expectant attitude--an uncertain one, but not necessarily a more negative one."

The Fading of Immortality

In quantitative terms, the 20th century seems more death-ridden than any other. Yet mass death is strangely impersonal; an 18th century hanging at Tyburn probably had more immediate impact on the watching crowd than the almost incomprehensible statistics of modern war and calculated terror have today. In the last century, Byron, Shelley, Keats and a whole generation of young poets haunted by romanticism and tuberculosis could be "half in love with easeful Death," wooing it as they would woo a woman. Even before World War I, German Poet Rainer Maria Rilke could still yearn for "the great death" for which a man prepares himself, rather than the "little" death for which he is unprepared.

In today's literature there are few "great deaths." Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Conrad gave death a tragic dimension. Hemingway was among the last to try; his heroes died stoically, with style, like matadors. Nowadays, death tends to be presented as a banal accident in an indifferent universe. Much of the Theater of the Absurd ridicules both death and modern man's inability to cope with it. In lonesco's Amedee, or How to Get Rid of It, the plot concerns a corpse that grows and grows until it floats away in the shape of a balloon--a balloon, that is, on the way to nowhere.

"If there is no immortality, I shall hurl myself into the sea," wrote Tennyson. Bismarck was calmer. "Without the hope of an afterlife," he said, "this life is not even worth the effort of getting dressed in the morning." Freud called the belief that death is the door to a better life "the oldest, strongest and most insistent wish of mankind." But now death is steadily becoming more of a wall and less of a door.

For prehistoric man, everything he saw probably seemed alive; death was the unthinkable anomaly. The situation is reversed in a scientifically oriented world; amid dead matter, life seems an unaccountable, brief flash in the interstellar dark. Not that this has destroyed the power of faith to confront death. Beyond the doubts of its own "demythologers," and on a plane of thought beyond either denial or confirmation by science, Christianity still offers the hope of eternal life. Theologians are debating whether this means immortality in the sense of the survival of the soul, or resurrection, in the sense of a new creation. Either concept is totally different from the endless treadmill of reincarnation visualized by the Eastern religions; the Christian view of eternity is not merely endless time, and it need not involve the old physical concept of heaven and hell. It does involve the survival of some essence of self, and an encounter with God. "Life after death," said Theologian Karl Earth, should not be regarded like a butterfly--he might have said a balloon--that "flutters away above the grave and is preserved somewhere. Resurrection means not the continuation of life, but life's completion. The Christian hope is the conquest of death, not a flight into the Beyond."

The Fear of Nothingness

Admittedly, this hope so stated is more abstract than the fading pictures of sky-born glory, of hallelujah choruses and throngs of waiting loved ones. "People today could be described as more realistic about death," says one psychiatrist. "But inside I think they are more afraid. Those old religious assurances that there would be a gathering-in some day have largely been discarded, and I see examples all the time of neuroses caused by the fear of death." Harvard Theologian Krister Stendahl agrees. "Socrates," he points out, "died in good cheer and in control, unlike the agony of Jesus with his deep human cry of desertion and loneliness. Americans tend to behave as Socrates did. But there is more of what Jesus stands for lurking in our unconsciousness."

Alone with his elemental fear of death, modern man is especially troubled by the prospect of a meaningless death and a meaningless life--the bleak offering of existentialism. "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem," wrote Albert Camus, "and that is suicide." In other words, why stay alive in a meaningless universe? The existentialist replies that man must live for the sake of living, for the things he is free to accomplish. But despite volumes of argumentation, existentialism never seems quite able to justify this conviction on the brink of a death that is only a trap door to nothingness.

There are surrogate forms of immortality: the continuity of history, the permanence of art, the biological force of sex. These can serve well enough to give life a purpose and a sense of fulfillment. But they cannot outwit death, and they are hardly satisfactory substitutes for the still persistent human hope that what happens here in threescore years and ten is not the whole story.

"Timor Mortis conturbat me," wrote the 15th century Scottish poet William Dunbar, and he continued:

Since for the Death remedy is none,

Best is it that we for Death dispone.

That groan may be shared by all men. And perhaps it should be, as should the Christian admonition to be ready to die at all times--counsel more applicable than ever in a day of sudden deaths. For it is only in daring to accept his death as a companion that a man may really possess his life.

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