As a child, I spent endless hours terrified of my own death.
When I was little, I once fell off my bicycle and hit my head really hard against the edge of the concrete curb. A few days later, I woke up in the hospital. Where was I during that whole period in between? It was a scary thought. When you're unconscious, you don't even realize that you're unconscious. What would happen if you never woke up, and never realized that you were asleep?
What really made me turn away from organized religion as a child is that it all seemed too good to be true. It seemed too much like something people would make up. When fish die, they're just dead. I realized, when I was little, that human beings are the same way. If fish were smart enough to think up an alternative to their own deaths, they probably would. "I saw a swirling, and something like a shining pipe..."
We turn to religion when we feel insecure. Recently, a Japanese friend of mine drowned and I spent an entire evening in a Buddhist temple chanting prayers I could not understand. A Brown student who served in Iraq told my human rights class that he attended Muslim religious services when he returned.
It is no accident that religion's greatest promise is either eternal life or reincarnation. No question is more central to that of religion, and to the inherent suffering of human existence. We are all going to die, and no one knows - or can even imagine - what it will be like. That already ought to be enough to make someone nervous; to contemplate the mind-blowing notion of nonexistence, as I often did as a child, can be terrifying.
The fact that death is almost never discussed in our society reveals how menacingly it lurks beneath the daily reality we have created. Our culture does not acknowledge death. The dying are shunted off into hospitals and retirement homes and rarely die in the company of loved ones. Television commercials and colorful magazines paint for us a reality devoid of disease, sadness or old age.
Death is the elephant in the room. No other subject in our culture is so meticulously avoided. Even when it is mentioned, it is usually caricatured, as in cartoons. It is for the living, not for the dead, that we maintain our silence at funerals. When we do speak of death, we try not to be too serious. Death is too serious not to joke about.
One of the developed world's greatest - and most hard-won - accomplishments has been successfully pushing death out of our daily lives. Medical science continues extending our lifespan until we reach the existential absurdity of the Terri Schiavo scenario. How many of us would hook ourselves to a metal umbilical cord rather than leave the womb of life? By the time we grow old, most people will probably be living more than 100 years, 30 of them on life support.
In approaching death, there are alternatives to organized religion. The great existentialists of postwar Europe grabbed the grim reaper by the scythe when they declared the absence of God (and thus of the afterlife) the starting point of their philosophy. If there is no shepherd looking over us, does that make our existence - and therefore our deaths - utterly meaningless? Existentialism, like religion, cannot work without an element of faith. Confronted by the meaninglessness of our ephemeral existence, we must embrace it fully.
The beginning and ending of this realization is an acceptance of the moment of our death. Like the protagonist of Albert Camus' "The Stranger," we must die with a flourish when faced with the inevitability of our own execution. We are all sitting on death row, after all.
Some individuals have genuinely made peace with their own inevitable death. The neo-indigenous culture of Mexico has an attitude toward death that is almost an opposite reflection of our own. Death in Mexico is celebrated, aestheticized, even worshipped as la SantÃsima Muerte. Death is brought into daily life, rather than erased from it. Mortality can remind us not to take ourselves too seriously. Death triumphs over all genius and topples all dictators.
However, the truth is that acceptance of death is almost always achieved through some psychological self-trickery. When faced with the option of immortality and eternal youth, very few of us would prefer to die.
For those of us who cannot escape the fear of our own deaths, the end of our individuality, the shattering nothingness that keeps children whose minds wander awake at night, there is an ultimate form of escapism. Modern science is already encroaching on the final domain of religion. The science of cryogenics will grant most members of our generation the option of being frozen before death in hopes of waking up to a future where medical science is able to grant us immortality. The cryogenic chamber is the ultimate denial of existentialism.
On this Nov. 1, the Day of the Dead, I leave my readers with a reminder of their own inevitable and eternal encounter with Death. When Santa Muerte comes for you, it makes no real difference whether you accept her with dignity or with terror.
If consciousness is truly explainable scientifically, then we can take comfort in the fact that our brains are made of the same (indestructible) matter and energy as the rest of the universe, of which we therefore form an inseparable part. We may die, but life goes on, and humanity may well prove to be immortal.
Perhaps our ephemeral existence, our individuality, is in itself a chemical illusion. Several major world religions already embrace this view. Maybe what we call consciousness is really just a barrier separating us from a greater consciousness. Maybe we're all just bundles of elements and electrons, ready to come out of the closet and realize that they're not the only ones in the universe.
Perhaps Death is merely an expansion. A loss of individuality. An expansion... to the point of explosion. Bang. The lights go out. And then there is darkness.
Michal Zapendowski '07 plans to be reincarnated as a house cat.
