Death Be Not a Stranger

By Pico Iyer

One of the liveliest topics of the moment seems, improbably, to be death, even as life expectancies increase. While many of the world's thinkers are worried about the proliferation of births, it is the knelling sound of death that keeps us awake at night. The best-seller lists are crowded, in fact, with titles such as How We Die and The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. Perhaps it is because aids and cancer have implicated us all in the abruptness of extinction, or merely that publishers see a killing in the most universal experience of them all. But that, in either case, may be a blessing: when we spend months, even years, learning to fix a car or speak Portuguese, why should we not try to learn how to die?

One reason, of course, is that death is the one great adventure of which there are no surviving accounts; death, by definition, is what happens to somebody else. Empiricism falters before death. Yet it is more certain than love and more reliable than health.

And its very reliability prompts us to find ways to domesticate it. Some of us try to take the sting out of mortality by talking of "passing away" or going to "the Great Dugout in the Sky" (while doctors, who have to deal with it daily, refer, even more coolly, to "coding" or "circling the drain"). Others try to romanticize it as the great escape, the best anesthetic outside of Prozac. Those who cannot countenance any hope in the world find it the ultimate (indeed!) confirmation of their grimmest fears. Death, after all, is the only reality that never lets you down. Yet that too can be an escape, a projection of our fantasies upon the dark unknown. Keats, who admitted to being "half in love with easeful Death," died at 25, penniless and spitting blood.

Others would try to outlast it, or at least outwit it, through cryonics, say (though it may be no coincidence that their most famous example is said to be Walt Disney). And others talk blithely of Dr. Kevorkian or 100,000 dead in Hiroshima, as if to avoid its more immediate implications for us. But the fact remains: this article will someday be posthumous. That face I touch will, in the not too distant future, be out of reach. Tibetan Buddhists meditate upon images of dancing skulls, and ancient Egyptians, during feasts, had skeletons brought to their tables, all to remind them of a single fact: the smile we love will soon be food for worms.

Perhaps the most common way of making peace with death -- getting over it, in a sense -- is by thinking of it as a way to "meet one's maker." Religions of every kind might almost be said to exist to help us deal with our extinction. They tell us that something is waiting for us on the other side, that death may be a pilgrimage and not a destination, that the afterlife is a warm awakening after the fretful dream of life. The huge best seller Embraced by the Light returns from the hereafter with the news that "all experiences can be positive." In my local bookstore, the Death and Dying section is right next to Recovery and Affirmations, and the titles themselves sound like holiday brochures: Death: The Trip of a Lifetime, Heading Toward Omega, Companion Through Darkness.

Not coincidentally, in William Osler's classic medical textbook of 1892, he recommended opium as the one great help for some diseases (words for Karl Marx to chew on), and that may be especially true now that our sense of the transcendent is diminished. The man who gave us "the death of God" also wrote The Birth of Tragedy; a sense of eternity is much less cold and abstract if linked to a sense of divinity.

Yet none of this helps us in the here and now. And thinking about death is useful only if it makes us concentrate on life. All of us, after all, are dying every moment, and, as Montaigne wryly remarked, "the goal of our career is death." The otherworld is relevant only in the shadow it casts on this one; or, as Thoreau implied upon leaving the woods, he didn't want to die feeling he hadn't lived.

Many of us -- this writer included -- have been lucky enough never to have had to face death close up, even in a loved one; it remains as remote to us as the other great challenges of Hunger and Poverty and War. Of course we have our dress rehearsals all the time: for as much as every death is a separation, every separation is a little death, and one that may be even harder because it is protracted and reversible. Yet still we would do well to recall that at least a fifth of all Americans die without warning (and the onset of fatal disease is equally unexpected): suddenly there is a knock on the door, a telephone ringing, a messenger in black.

There is nothing any of us can do about death, and there is no virtue in dwelling on it or trying to penetrate its mystery. In any case, philosophy is famously helpless before a toothache. But there may be some good in coming to death at least as well prepared as we go to our vacations, our driving tests or our weddings. If I were to die tomorrow, as the old saw has it, what would I wish to have done today? Or, as the Tibetan author Sogyal Rinpoche says, "If you're having problems with a friend, pretend he's dying -- you may even love him." Especially good advice if that friend happens to be yourself.