In my birthday blog posts, I always mention that birthdays are both a good reason to celebrate life as well as a reminder of our mortality. Birthdays eventually lead to a deathday for us all. None of us are here forever.
Since my previous birthday, this fact has become even more exigent for me. Last October I lost two friends within two days of one another. One acquaintance died a few months ago. We lost my wife's aunt as well. I lost another friend just last week.
I miss them all deeply. I’m no stranger to grief. I’ve written a lot about losing my mom 25 years ago. That grief is with me every day and always will be.
Still, this year I can’t help but think that the friends I lost in the last year were close to my age. And my mom was only two years older than I am now when she died. Every year, my age provides less and less insulation from the realization that none of us are here forever, and I am no exception.
Not that youth, of course, is any guarantee against death. I’ve also lost friends younger than I am.
For that matter, I was never personally much insulated from death. I encountered death from a young age, and I put a lot of thought into it during the philosophically tumultuous time of late adolescence. Still today, death is never far from my thoughts.
Some might say I’m morose or morbid. And maybe I am. It’s an occupational hazard of being a philosopher, and a more general byproduct of being a thinking human being. Maybe contemplating our own mortality is the very thing that makes us human. It’s you weirdos who never think about death who scare me.
Oddly, I suspect thinking about death, both of oneself and of others, is a good thing. It may, even more oddly, be the only thing that allows for compassion and for our lives to have meaning at all.
I occasionally have reason to teach about the idea from Ernest Becker called Denial of Death. It came up this week in my Utopias and Dystopias class in an article by Brian McDonald on the “monstrous art” of the Capitol in The Hunger Games.
Denial of Death does not mean literally denying the fact of death. None but the most self-delusional among us would deny the most obvious truth about every human being who has ever lived. When it comes to avoiding death, the odds are not in our favor.
Yet consider the euphemisms we have for death. “She passed away.” “He kicked the bucket.” Or my favorite: “They bought the farm.”
We often talk as if we’re going to live forever. “If something were to happen to me…” “If I die…” Yet there is no if, only when.
Here in the US, we hide death in morgues (usually tucked away in hospital basements), private funerals, and the like. (The US is perhaps an unusually death-denying culture: many years ago I visited Varanasi, India, where funerals and cremations are out in the open for all to see, an experience that deeply affected me).
Denial of death can also be found when we harm and impoverish ourselves with treatments to make ourselves look young, to deny the frailty and vulnerability inherent to being human.
As the Buddha pointed out millennia ago, we do everything we can to avoid looking squarely in the face of the sickness, old age, and death endemic to what we are as impermanent beings.
Sure, maybe death denial is irrational, but some might think there’s something heroic about this denial, a Camus-style revolt against the universe.
But in denying our finitude and ephemeral nature, we also deny what makes us human. We punish ourselves and each other for the failures to live up to impossible demands.
If we truly, deeply contemplated the fact that each and every one of us is subject to illness, suffering, pain, aging, grief… all eventually leading to death… if we really, really let this sink into our bones while our bones are still whole, maybe we’d be a little kinder, a little more understanding, more compassionate in the face of the fact that we’re all in this together.
Or so I would like to think.
I recently came across, not for the first time, the cliché that the two main human emotions are love and fear. Cliché though it may be, I’m having a hard time denying it on this birthday.
If one chooses fear, denial of death ensues. We push away death. We fear it. And in doing so we push away our own humanity and the humanity of others. We end up fearing ourselves and our fellow human beings.
In choosing love over fear, one chooses to acknowledge our finite nature, our suffering, our imminent deaths as a source of compassion for all those who live and joyful remembrance of those who have died. We choose to take delight in the fact that we are all brief, beautiful eddies in the vast river of being that is this universe, a river into which we all must return.
On this birthday, I choose love. Another cliché, perhaps, but also, maybe, just maybe, the very decision that could save us all from ourselves, especially in this time when callousness, hatred, and soft-minded bigotry seem so insurmountable. Love may be the only thing that will get us through this time, the only thing capable of building a better future for those who come after us.
Happy birthday to you, dear reader, whenever your next birthday may be!
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PS: I love Weird Al. His song "Happy Birthday" is one of my favorites! Enjoy!
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