DEATH AS A SOCIAL EXPERIENCE
Each person's death is one's experience alone. But in how we die we may have something of great value to teach others.
A dear friend of mine died recently. She struggled with pancreatic cancer and survived for two years and five months after her diagnosis in January 2020. Pancreatic cancer is an insidious disease and the prescribed chemotherapy, which can do no better than extend life, is gruesome and brutal. She confronted her mortality with extraordinary equanimity, which is the subject of this essay. I will get to that further on.
There is no experience that arguably illuminates our fate as individuals more clearly and severely than death. Our death is ours alone. We cannot barter it off to others.
We are limited in our understanding, and death is inscrutable. It is sometimes noted that inasmuch as every experience requires a subject, and with death there is none, death is rendered incomprehensible. We are finite; in death, we contemplate the infinite. Our lives are a mere nanosecond in cosmic time; death is eternal. We only know our lives through lived experience. In death, there is no I, no we. We utterly disappear, and we cannot wrap our minds nor emotions around this most certain, most common, but least knowable of realities. For the most part, we contemplate our own death uneasily, and we often sidestep thinking about it altogether.
The individual character of death, I believe, frames the morality around suicide. No doubt owing to Judeo-Christian teaching about the sinfulness of suicide, (the religious presumption is that our lives are gifts of God and it is transgressive to dispose of a gift we did not create) persons who contemplate ending their lives have been upbraided in terms, I conclude, that are totally lacking in compassion. At times, ending one's own life is condemned as a cowardly act. What such glib condemnation overlooks is that those who prefer their non-existence over the preservation of their own lives are not only making a momentous choice that defies cowardice, but are most often in great pain and suffering overwhelming despair. I never understood death as a purported easy way out. Those who choose death are driven to it and feel they have no other choice.
In secular terms, suicide, it is argued, is wrong because it forsakes our responsibility to others. As social beings, we ought to stay alive to lend support to others, especially family and friends, who comprise our immediate social universe. Choosing to end our lives deprives others of ourselves.
I strongly concur that we are social beings who stand in obligatory relation to others. At the same time, I believe that in extremis, when life becomes unbearable and we were to contemplate suicide, as autonomous beings our obligation reverts to ourselves alone. The argument that one must remain alive for the sake of others has long seemed to me a rationalization proffered by those who oppose taking one's own life for other reasons. Only we alone maintain the authority to decide that our lives are no longer worth living. If a person is in great pain and despair and concludes that her or his life is no longer meaningful to herself or himself, it becomes imperious, indeed downright preposterous, for another, or society-at-large, to say to the sufferer, “no, your life is meaningful to you.” To be sure, we must err on the side of life, and we have a responsibility at first instance to attempt to dissuade others from self-destruction. But if personal autonomy is to be respected, which is correlative to respect for human dignity, then this ultimate decision must rest with the individual alone. That one must continue to live a life that has lost all meaning to be of service to others, again, is a vacuous, misapplied, and ultimately uncompassionate argument.
Death, however it comes upon us, is our experience to confront. To be sure, unless it is self-administered, and we cannot know the future with certainty, we cannot know how we will meet our end. Some will face death with crushing dread; others will confront their anticipated demise with resignation and tranquility, or a range of emotions in between. Given its uniqueness, and our inability to truly grasp our annihilation, I think there is no room for judgment or criticism here.
In my career as a professional leader in the Ethical Culture Movement, I have spent time with people who have been actively dying. Most in my congregations have been humanists and non-believers. My experience has taught me several things. One truth I come away with is that the adage “there are no atheists in a foxhole” is empirically false. In my experience, which has brought me into close personal rapport with scores of atheists and humanists whose death was imminent, I have not known one person who has undergone a deathbed conversion. Having lived without belief in a divine custodian and an afterlife, they die with their beliefs unchanged. Some may assume that those who affirm a divinity and eternal heavenly existence are better off than those for whom death marks endless nothingness. Yet those nearing death whom I have known have not thought that way, nor drawn sustenance from assumptions that their conscience cannot permit them to engage.
A second, and related observation is that the values that have served people well in life continue to serve them well as they confront their death. In short, people die as they have lived.
A third observation concerns a phenomenon that has manifested itself in some but not all cases. I have noted that many people are able to summon a specific sense of resolve and strength that enables them to confront the unsettling reality of their demise. It is as if the organism maintains a discrete resource set aside exclusively for this singular purpose that kicks in when the person realizes that death is nigh.
The prevailing point is that our death is ours alone, and more than any other experience, it cannot be shared.
But I maintain that however solitary our death, it is not devoid of a social nature. In the first instance, most people would prefer not to die alone, but in the company of others, especially those whom they have known and loved. We presume that the surrounding presence of those who know and care for us, in its own way, diverts us from the fears and apprehensions of dying and sustains us as consciousness fades.
In a broader sense, how we experience death is related to the cultural values that frame its meaning. Here I think our modern culture does not serve us well. As noted, death is a topic that is seldom discussed. It is avoided, and this absence amplifies our sense of confronting our deaths unaided by social values that could, at least in part, work to mitigate our felt isolation when engaging our demise. This avoidance further serves to augment death's strangeness and severs it from what could otherwise be understood as an integral element of the life experience. In short, individualism, which is a centerpiece of modern life, does not serve us well in our apprehension of death and how we relate to it.
There is a third way in which death has a social character, a realization that came to me in light of the death of my friend and how she related to her impending demise.
While we can never be certain of the innermost experiences of others, from all that she revealed, my friend engaged her process of actively dying with extraordinary equanimity.
My friend was a lifelongand award-winning foreign language teacher. Her teaching was a vocational commitment that involved her in creating a foreign language school, in pedagogical projects in foreign countries, in translation work, training teachers through university work, and much more.
My friend also lived the life of a progressive activist. She was a hardworking and devoted environmentalist and social justice advocate whose commitments ranged very widely. She read broadly, traveled the world to folk dance, and was active in myriad groups, some activist, others educational, and many social.
It was her character and her values that I believe were most germane to the way she confronted her death. My friend was highly intelligent and a clear-thinking rationalist. Her intellect was not one that adhered to abstractions, but I felt was warm, eminently practical, and well-grounded in dealing with life and its problems.
These characteristics served her well as she entered the last phase of her life. During this phase I called her every week to discuss with her the details of her treatment, the horrendous side effects the chemotherapy caused, and how she was handling it. She brought her intelligence and reason to bear in the service of making the best and most considered decisions at each step along the way.
My friend had no illusions. As she began her treatment, she noted that she would not emerge on the other side as she was before. Either the chemotherapy treatment or the disease would kill her first. This was to be the rest of her life. She was infused with highly toxic chemicals every other Wednesday and suffered horrendous side effects until early the following week. Among them were loss of appetite, severe weight loss, nausea, and others unmentioned. She would then have a week of relative normalcy, only to begin the cycle again. Throughout she was determined not to be a passive recipient of medical services, but to school herself as much as possible in the nature and course of her disease. As much as she could, she managed her life to maximize her experiences and to be as active as circumstances allowed.
Most important to my friend was to spend quality time with her three beloved grandchildren, who came weekly for overnights and went with her on excursions. She continued to folk-dance, advocate for the environment, engage her book groups, and entertain guests at her home. On several occasions, she joined me for a meal and some good conversation on the deck behind my house. Nearing the end of her life, her own mother died remotely in Florida, and my friend took up the role of executor and diligently completed the necessary work.
My friend had each phase of her life planned out. She managed her treatment, at times disagreeing with her oncologist when she thought prudent. She enrolled in a hospice program, anticipating it would become necessary. (It did.) Noting that New Jersey is one of nine states that permits physician-assisted dying, my friend completed the necessary paperwork to enable the ending of her life, if it would become necessary. (It didn't.) To complete the last phase, environmentalist that she was, my dear friend selected a cemetery, actually a forest in Connecticut, set aside for the burial of her ashes at the foot of a stately tree she had selected. She brought her grandchildren there for a visit and was pleased to show me photos of the tree, the foot of which is her final resting place.
In her final weeks, her tumor grew, and with it the associated pain. Her chemotherapy was no longer indicated. She went on morphine that she handled very well, and for a few weeks was pleased to be liberated from the side effects brought by her medication. But, as she clearly noted, she was not going to get better. My friend grew weaker, and a few weeks ago peacefully died at home.
She was a person who was very kind to me and I am very saddened at her demise. But my sorrow, I find, is mitigated by two factors. Death is inevitable. But by the stalwart way she confronted her dying, with absolutely no illusions, I am uplifted by the fact that she met death on her own terms. Death will have the last word. It will defy our desire to live, take away from us what we love, and will terminate our capacity for experience. But my friend taught me we don't, therefore, need to see ourselves as victims. Death does not make a victim of us.
Finally, I see a social dimension in my friend's handling of her looming fate. In the way she managed her dying, she set an example as to how to die for the rest of us – her children, her loved ones, and for many friends, of which I was privileged to be one. I do not know how I will respond when my time comes. None of us does. But the equanimity and sense of realism with which my friend engaged her final days, and how she affirmed life in doing so, gives me much substance on which to reflect.
Thanks, Joe
Beautiful tribute to "your friend" who set an example for all of us.