The Promise of Death
An eschatology for the living
I think about my own death multiple times every day. However, this thinking does not stem from fear—I have intentionally cultivated this attention to the matter. Death is the most important tool I have ever worked with. It has radically reshaped my life, and the vibrancy of my every moment is enhanced through its acknowledgement. Let us look death in the face, and let us use what we see there to instill meaning into our lives while we still have the time—while we are still here, alive in the world. Importantly, this essay is not to be taken as an ode to death itself, but rather as an ode to the concept of death—a concept which I believe can be used for the betterment of human lives.
Developmental psychology reports that at around age eight most humans have their first reckoning with the concept of death. From then on we live the rest of our lives understanding that something called ‘death’ sits on the inevitable, (hopefully) distant horizon. But there exists of course a wide range of interpretation as to what death actually signifies. Some (the non-religious) see it as an end, while others see it as but a gateway. Essentially every major religion on Earth is a system of thought built around denying death its finality—a conceptual way to bypass our earthly fate. The three Abrahamic faiths have an afterlife, whether it be heaven or hell; the Buddhists and the Hindus have differing forms of reincarnation. Those five religious persuasions together represent the vast majority of the world’s population. I argue that those who see death as but a gateway into something that lies beyond miss out on life’s most important insight. And that is coming from someone who was once deeply entrenched within the religious view of things. I grew up Catholic, and was in fact devout—by far the most religiously devout of my family and of many of my Sunday school peers. I had a personal relationship with my God; I prayed often on my own juvenile accord, and I was firmly oriented within the eternal conception of life that the Catholic church espouses. I call it an eternal conception because in the Abrahamic framing of things after we “die” we pass on to either a blissful or tortuous everlasting life. Regardless of its quality, conscious experience after death is taken as a given, and although far different from the life we lived here on Earth, it is seen as more or less a continuation of the life of the mind onward into eternity. This perpetuation of mind, be it reincarnation or the afterlife, is unsurprisingly the default position that the world’s main religions have all settled upon. Mind, of course, cannot fathom its own demise.
Aptly called by Marx “the opiate of the masses,” religions answer confidently to life’s tragic riddle and obscure from view the hardest pill life gives us to swallow. Death of course should scare us, but need our eschatologies be shaped by such fear? Where is the eschatology for the living? Where is the worldview that keeps this world in view? Plenty of wisdom has come down to us from the religious scriptures, but the core eternal framing they nearly all share is an easy rather than wise take on life. The idea that we live on forever in some form is a message suitable perhaps for young children, but far from appropriate for adult minds. This is not to say that I think accepting death is easy, nor that I myself have truly done it the ultimate justice it deserves. In fact, I’m inclined to doubt that one can ever truly embrace the idea of death fully—human psychology has its limits—but I know that we can at least work productively towards its embrace so as to avoid living purely in delusion. The idea of death is a tool powerful beyond belief for those willing to try and work with it. It’s ultimately a kind of sorcery on account of how deeply it can revolutionize one’s everyday experience.
I was probably around 16 or 17 when I lost my faith in the Abrahamic God. For a few years thereafter I maintained a sort of naive agnosticism. I no longer thought there was a caring God out there who had some sort of special concern for human beings, but the full implications of my irreligiousness had yet to settle out. That is, I hadn’t yet confronted the full worldview of the atheist. At some point around my 20th birthday, however, that confrontation finally came to pass and the most important insight of my life took place. I don’t remember the day, the location, or the nature of the moment itself; I just remember the old mental landscape and how drastically and vividly it all shattered, only to piece itself back together into a far vaster expanse. The intensity of that shattering still resonates in the background of my every moment—at least those moments in which I’m clear and quiet enough to notice it. Leading up to that point, although I had already internally renounced the Abrahamic framing of eternal life (i.e., heaven & hell) for all the obvious reasons, my mind hadn’t yet truly formed its own replacement of that model. Some lingering eternal sentiment was still left in the hollow space that the Abrahamic view had excavated within my mind at a young, impressionable age. As I said, I had already denied God, but in this moment of revelation the true repercussions of denying the other main component of the Catholic package—eternal life—came bearing down on me with all the pain and blessings that such a denial, once fully embraced, logically entails.
The story in the fewest possible words is that a denial of the afterlife is simultaneously an intense affirmation of life. In a single moment I went from seeing a human lifetime as being but an interesting prelude before some mysterious next chapter to seeing a human lifetime for what it really is detached from the eternal timeline, with all expectation of an afterlife dashed. When that eternal frame is removed from our conception of life, we are left with no choice but to develop an intense religious awe for being alive in this world. Our gaze focuses. We see instantly that this is it. This is all there is. We are here in this world today—the lights of consciousness are on, and won’t always be. I feel I must write that out once more—it’s easy to glance over a few words in a newsletter. But these words burn thousands of years of muttered prayers and comforting ideas. These words are poisonous to the dogmatic and exhilarating to the awestruck: We are here in this world today—the lights of consciousness are on, and won’t be forever. Some day the tide of nothingness will reclaim these sacred shores of experience.
For those who find it hard to imagine how consciousness could possibly cease to be, just think back to your earliest memories. They appear like stepping stones materializing in a void that gradually become firmer and more aware until uniting into a more or less constant stream of conscious experience. Our first memories appear out of nowhere, like the first few stars to show up as dusk falls. We stepped into life out of nothingness; why is it so hard to imagine that we will someday fuse back into it? Like invisible bookends propping up the collection of life’s moments, nothingness surrounds life—as far as we can tell when being intellectually honest. Life is like a blinking open into experience out of a perfect nothingness and all the scenes of our sacred time here flash before that open eye staring out into space, until some day the great lid slams shut, never again to open. How can one possibly see life for what it is if they live under the spell of the idea that consciousness is granted to us for all time? As I see it, the greatest error one can make while living their single, ephemeral life is to take for granted the gift of conscious experience. If we acknowledge death as impending and final, which I grant is no easy task, only then, I believe, can we see the true immaculate beauty of having been here at all. Life is not ours to toil in forever. The loved ones we shared this world with are not ours to hold forever. But what a miracle that in the transient blinking open into life, before nothingness again takes hold, we got to look around and craft meaning with the other fleeting passengers rocketing through a lifetime that none of us asked to be given.
For all those I’ve been blessed with knowing: there is nothing more difficult for me than acknowledging that you are not mine to cherish forever. There is nothing more difficult than truly believing that I will never again get to hold those that I’ve lost. But despite the difficulty of living a life under the crushing weight of those beliefs, I can say with confidence that I never knew how to truly love another human until I held this fatal framing of our existence. It was so easy to be frustrated with my parents when I was a child, for I thought these were minds with whom I was to exist alongside forever. Knowing now that our time together on this Earth may come to an end any day, the way I think of them has been radically transformed. What a gift to have had such loving parents in this one lifetime. What a gift to have had such magnificent, interesting friends. My love for everyone in my life blossomed into full form only once I dropped the eternal framing and came to see them all as but fleeting passengers through this life, flung up out of nothingness into somethingness, only to plunge back into the void again some day. To my fellow humans: what a strange gift it’s been to have crossed paths in such an inexplicable world. I didn’t ask to come into being but it’s been glorious to have been here alongside you all, albeit only briefly. I certainly won’t be asking to leave when my time comes—but then again, I won’t be expecting to stick around either.
As I hope I’ve made clear, in no way do I find death itself beautiful. I find it horrible—horrible beyond belief. It’s simply unspeakably awful that all those I’ve known, all the thoughts I’ve enjoyed, and all the places I’ve come to love will dissolve for me someday with the rotting away of my brain. But I’m ultimately grateful to have found—if not peace—some sort of tenuous and painful acceptance of this process. I still grapple with it every day. It hurts a good deal and has made me far more anxious about the loss of my own life or of my loved ones than I was when I thought we all were going to be here forever in some form. But I can say with certainty, through the use of a kind of dark sorcery, that I have come much more strongly into life by affirming the finality of death and denying the eternal framing of our time here. By my conception, life is not a ray of light starting at some natal point and extending on forever—a gift never to be revoked. It is instead more like a miraculous net of pearls floating in the void, intertwining amongst itself, with each conscious mind as one of the insane points in space that happen for a period of time to be experiencing the gift of life. And the whole thing is scintillating like stars do when low in the sky—scintillating as minds are brought forth to glow brightly for a flash before fading back seamlessly into the darkness.
. . .
My heart beats slowly in my chest, and goosebumps rise upon my flesh. A light rain begins to fall outside and already the leaves wear a glossy patina. Droplets fall from the sky only to be buried unceremoniously in the soil. If I could evangelize but one message for the remainder of my time on this Earth, it would be this: that the mystery of this all is not to be found in what is to come. The mystery is found in this body, this world, this tapestry of human connections. The mystery is this life that we each have been given, and understanding that is the promise of death. Death—that black rose upon the far trellis that we are everyday drawing nearer. Her beauty is measured only in the depth of each step we take to reach her.