As a child, my son possessed an intuitive awareness of his world. While waiting in line for a movie one day long ago, he wandered away. Begging us upon his return to follow, we were led to a wall where clung a dead butterfly, barely unfolded from its cocoon. Its fragile yet brilliantly colored wings offered a fleeting glimpse of the majestic animal it would have become had it lived.
This mysterious object was little more than an inexplicable curiosity to my child who at that time was hardly “aware” of his own existence. Yet somehow this butterfly, who so valiantly struggled for life to the very moment of its death, touched in my son an existential chord; an appreciation for the gossamer thinness that divides life and death.
Children are natural existentialists. Attuned to their bodies, ever in touch with awe and brimming with truth, they live in the moment; their bodies are their homes. For them, home is not a place but a timelessness grounded in the ‘now.’ And in the endlessness of that ‘now,’ the complexities of what lies ahead—relationships, achievements, meaning, and even death—are insignificant.
Similarly, as we age we begin to acquire a greater appreciation for the moment. By virtue perhaps of having survived life’s vicissitudes—birth, death, love, loss—we too appreciate time and timelessness. Having travelled the decades, we have come to understand at the deepest level that home is neither where one came from nor where one is going; it exists only in the precious and fleeting ‘now’.
For the very young and the very old who inhabit these margins of existence, life and death merge, and in the merging, lose their meaning.
Psychiatrist and philosopher Irvin Yalom noted that “life and death are interdependent, they exist simultaneously; death whirs continuously beneath the membrane of life and exerts a vast influence upon experience” (Yalom, 1980). How can this be, that the idea of death can provide balance, comfort and a sense of home?
To this day my son recalls that moment of the butterfly with the same awe that gripped me when, as a child, I first became aware that life ends and death awaits all living things.
I have always been fascinated by mortality. Maria Nagy (1948) told us that as we grow out of the cocoon of childhood, a “mature” sense of mortality requires that we acknowledge the universality and irreversibility of death. Armed with this awareness that according to William Worden (2008) typically develops by late adolescence, we are able to soothe ourselves in the face of the inevitability of death and dying.
However, recent voices in the area of death studies (Neimer, et al., 2004; Russac, et al., 2010), suggest that death anxiety remains high throughout adulthood, and only wanes in the latter years. Even then, “acceptance” of our finality is tied for some to a number of factors including good health, emotional resilience and a sense of personal wholeness and integrity.
Perhaps then, it is no surprise that we continue to wrestle throughout life with our finiteness, struggle so with our aging, and as a society straddle a fine line between obsession with and phobia around death and dying. And while we may or may not win the battle over this anxiety, we will most definitely lose the war. As Woody Allen mused, “I am not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”
Up until barely 100 years ago, life and death were inextricably bound up in day-to-day existence. The rapid industrialization and urbanization that began in the mid-19th century gave rise to cities and with them, disease, danger and death around every corner. Infant mortality was high, and adults lived only to what by today’s standards would be considered middle age.
Fortunately, miracle drugs, medical technology, workplace regulation, and the health and death-care industries have contributed to a reversal of these previously dark and inevitable realities, and with it, a banishing of death and dying from our everyday lives. But is this really a good thing?
Was the ubiquity and imminence of death truly as dark, dismal and depressing as we, a generation who will live longer than any before, believe it to have been? Have we, who obsessively count calories, isolate the dying, relentlessly seek our own individual versions of immortality and collectively sanitize our psyches of all things death-related, deprived ourselves of invaluable opportunities to deeply appreciate and embrace the totality of life, which must invariably include an embrace of death and dying? Yalom argued that the physicality of life destroys us, but the idea of death saves us.
Burden Lundgren and Clare Houseman (2010) argue that “for most of us, the eventualities of death and dying [have come] to exist at the margins of our consciousness” and with it we have become “heirs to exaggerated optimism.” Psychologists, however, know this exaggerated and unrealistic optimism as denial! Perhaps our attempts to banish mortality from our consciousness and death from our everyday lives has replaced what was a century ago a very healthy relationship with this mortality with an obsession with aging, illness and longevity—a collective existential crisis, every bit as imminent and irreversible as death itself. Deprived of a sense of peace regarding our mortality, we suffer self-imposed existential homelessness.
I am the youngest in my family, and as such have watched those I love age and die. As long as my father, 40 years my senior, was alive I felt I had a good 40 years ahead of me…I felt immortal. When he died, my sense of future changed. It grew smaller. My mortality metric had been forever altered. And while my mother just reached 96, and her sister 100, the luster on my denial has worn. For the first time in my life I am fully aware that death lies ahead. Strangely (and perhaps of course, this may be denial speaking)…I am not terrified. I hold, as Susan Sontag offered in her 1978 “Illness as Metaphor,” dual citizenship…in the world of the living and the world of the sick [dying]. And it feels like home, a warm place to return at the end of the day, where I can shrug off the dust and grime of existence and hang my coat of worries.
At the very time of this writing, my wife and I have begun the conversation of where we shall be buried. Fully alive, we must ask ourselves and each other the difficult questions that bring us face to face with our unavoidable non-being. While the conversation pains me, it also liberates me because as Yalom offered, this confrontation with death can allow for a rearrangement of life’s priorities, a sense of liberation, an enhanced sense of living fully in the moment, and a “vivid appreciation of the elemental facts of life…the changing seasons, the wind, falling leaves” and perhaps the courage to take the risks required to be at home in the now.