Yalom on Approaching Death

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. Read more »

Monday, December 19, 2011

Seeing Double

by Gautam Pemmaraju

Thro’ the Heaven and Earth and Hell

Thou Shalt never, never quell:

I will fly and thou pursue:

Night and morn the flight renew’.

From William Blake's My Spectre Around Me Day And Night

Once I happened to see two brothers, tennis champions, matched against one another; their strokes were totally different, and one of the two was far, far better than the other; but the general rhythm of their actions as they swept all over the court was exactly the same, so that had it been possible to draft both systems two identical designs would have appeared.

4014356308_323c6365a8In search of the derelict details of his deceased half brother, V, the narrator of Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, offers these words while reflecting upon the mysterious cadences that seem to be mirrored between siblings. But here, the sibling in no mere blood brother, he is no mere adventurer who sought fortune in a distant land, reinventing himself in name, manner and consciousness, but is instead in some sense, a projected second self, a döppelganger, an adrift double of V. Sebastian Knight, the gloomy maladroit émigré, whose successful literary conquests of the English language, driven in part by his unsuccessful attempts to ‘out-England England’ as V observes, was the ‘other’ – a phantasmagoric illusion of sorts, who had walked the path before him. The path of course, is no clear or easy one; it is instead chancy and treacherous; it is at times, labyrinthine and inscrutable, but as V discovers in ‘following the bends of his life’: “I daresay Sebastian and I also had some kind of common rhythm”. A sense of déjà vu, of an ‘it-happening-before’ twinship, persistently accosts V as he journeys on to trace Sebastian’s meandering and desolate path, leading ultimately, to the circumstances of his death.

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