by Marie Snyder
CW: As the title suggests, there will be discussion of death and dying and some mention of suicide in this post.
I thought nothing of following up my last post on Irvin Yalom on the meaning of life with Yalom on the meaning of death, until I started writing here. The very reality of being a bit wary of broaching the subject reveals the strength of societal taboos against admitting that we’re all going to die. Until it’s staring us in the face, we delude ourselves into thinking we will get better and better, mentally and physically, despite that our brain starts to shrink in our 30s, and our joints and organs will start to give out not so long after. We work hard to keep death clean and sanitized so the reality doesn’t seep in too much, and we try to do all the right things to keep death at bay: exercise, various special diets, wearing masks to avoid viruses. We can fix some evidence of erosion with meds and surgeries, sometimes miraculously, but some people even hope to keep their brain going long after their body dies.
A few recent shows and films have me thinking of death further. The final episode of How To with John Wilson explores the cryogenics world, which appears to be an incredibly lucrative insurance scam. The movie Mickey 17 lightheartedly explores what it might be like to regenerate over and over again, and it doesn’t look pleasant. But Lee, the story of photographer Lee Miller, who took famous photos of the holocaust, helps us feel the resolve it requires to look death in the face. Kate Winslet captures the instinct to turn away and then intentionally turn back to open that door over and over. The ending takes a slightly different path, exploring how little we might be known even as we live. In burying our past, we can end up hiding from life. Yalom wants us to come to terms with the endpoint of our lives, and points out that the desire to be fully known, which is impossible, is yet another defence against accepting the finality of death by remaining alive in memories. We look for any loophole to refuse to believe we’ll be well and truly gone.
In the documentary, Yalom’s Cure, Yalom explains that he started out working with a support group for people dying of cancer. One of the participants said that it’s too bad it took dying of cancer to learn how to live, and Yalom decided we need to figure out how to do that sooner. It was then he noticed how strongly we defend ourselves from any acknowledgement of death.
Yalom points out that,
“compulsive attempts to remain young, the hypochondriacal concern over health and appearance, the emergence of sexual promiscuity in order to prove youth and potency, the hollowness and lack of genuine enjoyment of life, and the frequency of religious concern are familiar patterns. They are attempts at a race against time” (197).
We can see this today in calling a crisis in the early 30s the very hopeful “quarter-life crisis” when not that long ago 35 was more realistically recognized as mid-life. He also sees death anxiety when we can’t accept our shortcomings in any arena, when we can’t complete things, and when we can’t get started. Any move to drag our feet and prevent time from passing is a way to protect ourselves from the truth about our very brief lifespan.
MONTAIGNE ON DEATH
Montaigne is one of my favourite writers for his lack of pretentiousness and acceptance of uncertainty. He’s just trying to figure things out. Yalom references Montaigne’s essay, “To Philosophize is to Learn to Die,” which Montaigne wrote at 39, noting that his was a longer life than both Jesus and Alexander. This was just a few years after he had been thrown from a horse, knocked out, arose feeling surprisingly tranquil despite his injuries, and “deduced that death must hold very little to be scared of.” In his essay, he lists many odd ways people have died, including several important men who departed “between the legs of women,” and his own brother, who died at 23 after being hit by a tennis ball. Here’s an extended bit of Montaigne as Yalom’s argument is very similar:
“It follows that, if it frightens us, death becomes a never-ending source of torment from which there is no relief. … If it frightens us, how can we take a single step forward and not be worried sick? For common folks, the solution is not to think about it. But what kind of primitive stupidity leads them to such crude blindness? … All leave life as easily as they entered it, even though there is not a decrepit old man who, picturing Methuselah before him [who, it’s claimed, died at age 969], does not think he has twenty more years still in him. …
Let us deny it its foreignness by getting to know it, taming it, and having nothing more often in mind than death. We must imagine it in everything, at all times. … We cannot know for certain where death awaits us, so let us expect it everywhere. Preparing for death is preparing for freedom. … In fact, chance and danger move us little or not at all closer to our end. So if we think about how much of our life is left, leaving aside this threat of a million more threats hanging over our head, we will find that, vigorous or sickly, at sea or at home, in battle or in bed, death is equally close to us. …
We have dug our cemeteries next to churches, and in the busiest places in town, so that common folks, women, and children learn not to be frightened by the sight of a dead body … and so that the neverending show of bones, tombs, and corteges reminds us of our condition. … Life is worth not its extent but its use. Some lived little who lived a long while. Pay attention to life while you live yours. Whether you have lived enough depends on your will, not on a number of years. Did you think you would never arrive where you were always going? But all paths lead somewhere!”
In his copy of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, Montaigne wrote in the margins: “Fear of death is the cause of all our vices.” If we weren’t so afraid, maybe we wouldn’t hoard resources and take far more than we need, leaving others to struggle. And maybe we could enjoy life more with less worry about how it might end.
ACCEPTING DEATH BY OVERCOMING DEFENCES
Accepting death doesn’t mean not grieving losses. When his best friend died of the plague, Montaigne said, “He is still lodged in me so entire and so alive that I cannot believe that he is so irrevocably buried or so totally removed from our communication.” Grieving others is a separate process from acknowledging our own finite nature, although it can help us get closer to it. Yalom mentions that, particularly when parents die, we feel the loss but also the recognition of our own death because there’s “nothing between you and the grave.” Accepting death also doesn’t mean taking more risks to get there faster. Don’t start playing in traffic! That would just be another defence, as Yalom explains, “Suicide was a mode of achieving some mastery over death because it gives one an active control of one’s fate” (198). Accepting death is the ultimate tier of accepting uncertainty in life.
Acceptance means to come to terms with its presence around us. At the very least, to enjoy the present without as much concern about leaving evidence of our lives, which seems harder to imagine in this era of selfies. Yalom has a lengthy section on the debate around what children should be told about death and when, but his main concern is that we carry our childhood defences into adulthood.
We handle death anxiety with repression and displacement, foisting it on top of other fears to better understand it, with because offering a sense of control over life: for instance, we might think, “I’m afraid of flying because of seeing a crash.” But finding this cause of a phobia doesn’t actually help us. The deeper thread we must untangle involves the fear of death itself. Yalom points out two directions of defences that adults use to protect themselves from this knowledge.
He first cautions,
“It is not possible to plunge into the roots of one’s anxiety without, for a period of time, experiencing heightened anxiousness and depression. … Death anxiety is inversely proportional to life satisfaction. A sense of fulfillment, a feeling that life has been well lived, mitigates against the terror of death. … It is because of an excessive death anxiety that the individual lives a constricted life — a life dedicated more to safety, survival, and relief from pain than to growth and fulfillment” (206-7).
Undoing defences can be an uncomfortable process, but it’s possible.
Yalom doesn’t discuss PTSD in his book, since the term was brand new at the time. But he does discuss the trauma caused by a significant loss at a young age:
“The death of a parent is a catastrophic event for the child. The latter’s reactions depend upon a number of factors: the quality of his relationship to the parent, the circumstances of the parent’s death, the parent’s attitude during his or her final illness, and the existence of a strong surviving parent and a network of community. … If, as is often true in Western culture today, a parent experiences severe anxiety about the issue of death, then the child is given the message that there is much to fear” (105-7).
Death doesn’t have to be traumatic. Lee Miller experienced PTSD that fueled her alcoholism, but the circumstances of the deaths she witnessed came at the hands of a shocking level of mass violence. We can accept death without accepting massacres and murders. And we can help the next generation with that by overcoming our own death denial.
DENIAL THROUGH BEING SPECIAL OR RESCUED
Yalom divides the death denial into two types: either, somewhere deep inside, we think we’re special and somehow above all this, or we are waiting to be rescued by clinging to others. Fifty years earlier, Freud’s friend Otto Rank divided people into those who have a fear of death, which is “the fear of getting lost in the whole, stagnating, being no-one”, and a fear of life, which is “the fear of separation, loneliness, and alienation”. I noted some specifics of the two sides in a chart as I read. The dichotomies of field-independent vs dependent and internal vs external locus of control emerged in the decades between Rank and Yalom. A recent handout from neuropsychologist Dr. Rick Hanson on avoidant and anxious attachment shows some clear similarities to these categories as well, and I wonder if we’re just renaming the same discovery every 20 years or so. However, only Rank and Yalom connect them explicitly to defences against death anxiety.
People who subconsciously think they’re special, separate themselves from others in a quest for individuation. Being attached feels claustrophobic and risks losing themselves as individuals. They’re affected by a culture that pushes them towards achievement. They have an arrogance and righteousness that enables them to think that dying applies to other people who didn’t live rightly. While society might see them as successful, they lack the comfort of feeling part of the collective humanity as they struggle to have authentic connections.
We might see this come to play in any suggestion that other people succumbed to an illness because of pre-existing conditions or because they didn’t eat enough macronutrients or lift enough kettlebells. These common ideas foster the sense that, as long as we do all the right things, we won’t be conquered. Yalom discusses a woman with a formula for happiness: “no friendships, no losses” (183), and a workaholic whose “work afforded safety not pleasure” (208). He had “invested so much in his belief in specialness that he dreaded facing his feelings of helplessness. … A life dedicated to the concealment of reality, to the denial of death, restricts experience and will ultimately cave in upon itself” (210). They might also be sexually compulsive as their means of feeling alive when at the center of the universe during brief encounters with others. For them, being sexual might be more about achieving and impressing instead of engaging in anything of meaning. Their detachment serves as protection, but then prevents connection.
People who subconsciously think they’ll be rescued, enmesh themselves with others in a quest for fusion. They only feel safe and secure when submerged with another and are terrified of being isolated. They’re affected by the promotion of superheroes who will save the day and are more likely to blindly trust authority-figures. They struggle against taking personal responsibility for their own actions, are more likely to feel they don’t deserve love, seek connection through their suffering, and try to remain child-like forever to avoid growing old. While society might see them as more people-oriented, they lack faith in their own strengths and abilities and struggle to grow on their own.
Yalom describes a patient who demanded precise answers and certainty, which is an “expression of his wish to be taken care of. … Problems of intimacy with others … were related to … his dismissal of peers in the hopes of getting a systems-oriented solution from authority” (184-5). And another who “presented herself as exaggeratedly confused and helpless. … She viewed herself as very vulnerable and very fragile. … She suspended living and growing, in the magical hope that death might simply overlook her” (199-201). She spent her life “around the search for an ultimate rescuer; therefore she had feigned illness during her childhood and stayed sick in adulthood. … In her effort to build up credit with the dominant other she submerged herself, she lost sight of her wishes, her rights, and her pleasure. … Because of the sacrifice of her own strivings, interests, desires, and spontaneity, she became a less stimulating partner.” Their enmeshment serves as protection, but then they lose themselves.
DEVELOPING AWARENESS
Yalom explicitly states that he’s not advocating for desensitization to death, which he calls “a vulgar phrase” (211), but the opposite: awareness. When we desensitize to a bad smell or noise, it’s in the foreground when we first notice it, then we acclimatize until it slips into the background. But Yalom calls for greater acknowledgement of death. If you’ve developed mindfulness to become more intune with your inner thoughts and feelings, now just add in your own mortality to the list of things to notice.
Yalom explains several ways of doing this:
“Many individuals are overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness in the face of death. … The major strategy is to separate ancillary feelings of helplessness from the true helplessness that issues from facing one’s unalterable existential situation. … There are other component fears, the pain of dying, afterlife, the fear of the unknown, concern for one’s family, fear for one’s body, loneliness, regression. In achievement-oriented Western countries, death is curiously equated with failure. Each of these component fears, examined separately and rationally, is less frightening than the entire gestalt” (212).
He calls for exposure to the fear in attenuated doses to help people inspect it from all sides. In one of his groups, the addition of a patient currently dying helped to detoxify death for the others. He suggests guided meditations imagining your own death or funeral, or writing your own obituary. In sessions, he will ask clients to draw a timeline with birth on one end and death on the other, and then have them mark where they think they are right now. He would have us pursue and attend to all reminders of death: markers of time like birthdays, moving days, retirements, and every separation from a loved one.
For people who lean towards feeling special, he advises to pay attention to connections to your surroundings and people and all the many small ways you depend on others for your very existence. Consider what you believe people are for. Facing death reminds us, “we were all united and equal in that way” (183). For those who feel safest when they’re enmeshed with others, look for moments of individual distinction. Allow yourself to feel the sorrow of loss of yourself and anger at all the restrictions put on yourself. Regret can help us revitalize the remainder of life. Develop first tolerance then comfort spending time alone.
Yallom quotes novelist John Fowles: “Death’s rather like a certain kind of lecturer. You don’t really hear what is being said until you’re in the front row” (178).
It’s a little scary, and maybe it feels impossible to really grasp, but we can try to put ourselves in the front row to better hear the lessons that death has for us.
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