Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing To Do With God

I cite this piece a lot on my blog, so I decided I should post it here. It was originally published in the Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 29 #2 (March/April 2005).

So here's the problem. If you don't believe in God or an afterlife; or if you believe that the existence of God or an afterlife are fundamentally unanswerable questions; or if you do believe in God or an afterlife but you accept that your belief is just that, a belief, something you believe rather than something you know -- if any of that is true for you, then death can be an appalling thing to think about. Not just frightening, not just painful. It can be paralyzing. The fact that your lifespan is an infinitesimally tiny fragment in the life of the universe, and that there is, at the very least, a strong possibility that when you die, you disappear completely and forever, and that in five hundred years nobody will remember you and in five billion years the Earth will be boiled into the sun: this can be a profound and defining truth about your existence that you reflexively repulse, that you flinch away from and refuse to accept or even think about, consistently pushing to the back of your mind whenever it sneaks up, for fear that if you allow it to sit in your mind even for a minute, it will swallow everything else. It can make everything you do, and everything anyone else does, seem meaningless, trivial to the point of absurdity. It can make you feel erased, wipe out joy, make your life seem like ashes in your hands. Those of us who are skeptics and doubters are sometimes dismissive of people who fervently hold beliefs they have no evidence for simply because they find them comforting -- but when you're in the grip of this sort of existential despair, it can be hard to feel like you have anything but that handful of ashes to offer them in exchange.

But here's the thing. I think it's possible to be an agnostic, or an atheist, or to have religious or spiritual beliefs that you don't have certainty about, and still feel okay about death. I think there are ways to look at death, ways to experience the death of other people and to contemplate our own, that allow us to feel the value of life without denying the finality of death. I can't make myself believe in things I don't actually believe -- Heaven, or reincarnation, or a greater divine plan for our lives -- simply because believing those things would make death easier to accept. And I don't think I have to, or that anyone has to. I think there are ways to think about death that are comforting, that give peace and solace, that allow our lives to have meaning and even give us more of that meaning -- and that have nothing whatsoever to do with any kind of God, or any kind of afterlife.

Here's the first thing. The first thing is time, and the fact that we live in it. Our existence and experience are dependent on the passing of time, and on change. No, not dependent -- dependent is too weak a word. Time and change are integral to who we are, the foundation of our consciousness, and its warp and weft as well. I can't imagine what it would mean to be conscious without passing through time and being aware of it. There may be some form of existence outside of time, some plane of being in which change and the passage of time is an illusion, but it certainly isn't ours.

And inherent in change is loss. The passing of time has loss and death woven into it: each new moment kills the moment before it, and its own death is implied in the moment that comes after. There is no way to exist in the world of change without accepting loss, if only the loss of a moment in time: the way the sky looks right now, the motion of the air, the number of birds in the tree outside your window, the temperature, the placement of your body, the position of the people in the street. It's inherent in the nature of having moments: you never get to have this exact one again.

And a good thing, too. Because all the things that give life joy and meaning -- music, conversation, eating, dancing, playing with children, reading, thinking, making love, all of it -- are based on time passing, and on change, and on the loss of an infinitude of moments passing through us and then behind us. Without loss and death, we don't get to have existence. We don't get to have Shakespeare, or sex, or five-spice chicken, without allowing their existence and our experience of them to come into being and then pass on. We don't get to listen to Louis Armstrong without letting the E-flat disappear and turn into a G. We don't get to watch "Groundhog Day" without letting each frame of it pass in front of us for a 24th of a second and then move on. We don't get to walk in the forest without passing by each tree and letting it fall behind us; we don't even get to stand still in the forest and gaze at one tree for hours without seeing the wind blow off a leaf, a bird break off a twig for its nest, the clouds moving behind it, each manifestation of the tree dying and a new one taking its place.

And we wouldn't want to have it if we could. The alternative would be time frozen, a single frame of the film, with nothing to precede it and nothing to come after. I don't think any of us would want that. And if we don't want that, if instead we want the world of change, the world of music and talking and sex and whatnot, then it is worth our while to accept, and even love, the loss and the death that make it possible.

Here's the second thing. Imagine, for a moment, stepping away from time, the way you'd step back from a physical place, to get a better perspective on it. Imagine being outside of time, looking at all of it as a whole -- history, the present, the future -- the way the astronauts stepped back from the Earth and saw it whole.

Keep that image in your mind. Like a timeline in a history class, but going infinitely forward and infinitely back. And now think of a life, a segment of that timeline, one that starts in, say, 1961, and ends in, say, 2037. Does that life go away when 2037 turns into 2038? Do the years 1961 through 2037 disappear from time simply because we move on from them and into a new time, any more than Chicago disappears when we leave it behind and go to California?

It does not. The time that you live in will always exist, even after you've passed out of it, just like Paris exists before you visit it, and continues to exist after you leave. And the fact that people in the 23rd century will probably never know you were alive... that doesn't make your life disappear, any more than Paris disappears if your cousin Ethel never sees it. Your segment on that timeline will always have been there. The fact of your death doesn't make the time that you were alive disappear.

And it doesn't make it meaningless. Yes, stepping back and contemplating all of time and space can be daunting, can make you feel tiny and trivial. And that perception isn't entirely inaccurate. It's true; the small slice of time that we have is no more important than the infinitude of time that came before we were born, or the infinitude that will follow after we die.

But it's no less important, either.

I don't know what happens when we die. I don't know if we come back in a different body, or if we get to hover over time and space and view it in all its glory and splendor, or if our souls dissolve into the world-soul the way our bodies dissolve into the ground, or if, as seems very likely, we simply disappear. I have no idea. And I don't know that it matters. What matters is that we get to be alive. We get to be conscious. We get to be connected with each other, and with the world, and we get to be aware of that connection and to spend a few years mucking about in its possibilities. We get to have a slice of time and space that's ours. As it happened, we got the slice that has Beatles records and Thai restaurants and AIDS and the Internet. People who came before us got the slice that had horse-drawn carriages and whist and dysentery, or the one that had stone huts and Viking invasions and pigs in the yard. And the people who come after us will get the slice that has, I don't know, flying cars and soybean pies and identity chips in their brains. But our slice is no less important because it comes when it does, and it's no less important because we'll leave it someday. The fact that time will continue after we die does not negate the time that we were alive. We are alive now, and nothing can erase that.

Comments

[Buck Fuddy]

Great article. I think too few people really think through what the consequences would be if their beliefs about life, death and eternity were really true.

We all are instinctively repelled by death. That's only natural. I think it's safe to assume that that revulsion is just one among many mechanisms wired into our brains that tends to motivate us to avoid dying. The fitness consequences should require no elaboration.

So it's only natural for people to prefer not to die, but few people think through the consequences of never dying.

Similarly, some people adopt a philosophy that elevates life to an absolute good and excuses all kinds of horrible behaviors in the name of preserving life or defeating death. The wrongheadedness of this idea was recently evident in the Terry Schiavo case, but it was eloquently illustrated almost 200 years ago by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein.

[anti-nonsense]

I have a very strong fear of death, I have a lot of trouble dealing with the thought of not existing. I rationally relize that I won't be aware of not existing, so it's kind of pointless to fear it, but I can't help it.

I'm also afraid, perhaps equally of living forever, people say they want to live forever, but they don't think about what that really means, it means literally without end. I think you'd pretty much inevitably get bored to tears eventually and then you'd WANT to cease to exist. Sooner or later you'd run out of things to learn and do and then you'd be bored.

[M]

anti-nonsense sums my feelings up nicely - I am indeed 'paralyzed' at the thought of death, but I'm almost as terrified at the thought of living forever!

[Brandon]

Hi, first comment here. Loved this post, few people seem to really face their fear of nonexistence, instead adopting a philosophy of: "Live in the moment, and try not to think about it."

What really drives me crazy thinking about my death is how unimaginable it is. Even your experience of going under general anaesthesia was defined by your "climbing out of the grave". Without that waking up to define the margins, death seems so unclassifiable and unthinkable.

"Your segment on that timeline will always have been there. The fact of your death doesn't make the time that you were alive disappear."

Actually this is somewhat debatable. From what I remember from my old metaphysics class, although the majority of philosophers do accept the notion of time as a kind of fourth dimension, with "eternally" existing points along that dimension, there is a theory known as "presentism" that proposes that the past completely ceases to exist once we "pass through it". According to this theory, the past does not exist in any sense at all, all that exists are memories in the present. If this (decidedly minority) position is true, than death is essentially exactly the same as never being born: even the statement "So and so lived from 1950-2020" is only true insofar as there are still effects left from their life. Once all the influence on the universe is gone and forgotten, they cannot be said to exist or have existed in any sense whatsoever.

[kathryn]

The thing that helped me to handle fear of death was, after six months of theraphy following my dog's death, remembering that I had lived 35 years before be was born. I had been alive and happy without him. Time after his death and mine was frightening. Time before birth, both his and mine, was not. But I think my "existance" or "nonexistance" and his before our births are/were probably a lot like our "existance" or "nonexistance" after death.

It has helped significantly to think of death as a return to pre-birth.

[Ngeli]

Excellent posting! *worships you* (nah, just kidding)

[amanda]

I can't remember where it came from...probably some book...but I always think that when I die, it'll be just like before I was born, which wasn't so bad...

[Brian]

One comment that I read in The God Delusion by Dawkins was the quote that basically went "I was dead for the first few billion years of life on this planet and do not suffer from any ill effects of that now." I am unsure who orginally said but it is amazingly accurate. At some point in time no one alive today existed and going back to that state should not be any more painful then it was the first time around.

[Christian Bachmann]

Great article, hitting many points of my own way of free thinking. I've just added a plug to my own post dealing with death.

[Sid Schwab]

I, too, was comforted when it occurred to me that death would be as I was for the eternity before I was alive, and that seemed to have been okay; or at least I have no memory that it wasn't. Also comforting in some way is the view of life as a continuous river that forms little eddies here and there, which appear and disappear with the flow, and the river goes on...

[mark dohle]

I found your post very interesting. I guess we are on opposite poles when it comes to the God question, for I am a devout catholic, though I am open to other beliefs systems, especially Buddhism which has a long history of studying the mind, how it works etc.

Yes death, it is the big event in all of our lives and I don’t know anyone who does not fear it; both believers in an afterlife and those who do not. Some say they do not fear death, but when saying that I think they are merely observing someone else die when they think of it, it is an experience, a lonely one perhaps, and the last thing that will happen to all of us, so it can’t really be contemplated in any real sense.

I believe in an after life, though I of course have my doubts, so your post also applies to me as well perhaps as the majority who come to this blog, who seem to be atheist or agnostics.

We simply have to live each day to the fullest, try to love, and leave the world in a better place. I do that, or try to by allowing God’s love to fill my heart, making me a channel of his love for others. Those without faith have to find another way; in any case, we are all brothers and sister on the road.

Peace
Mark

[Duy]

Hi Greta,

I just remembered to stop by your blog. Very interesting article. When I have more "time" I want to address some of these points, as it seems we've been thinking a long time about many of the same things. In particular, this passage: "Do the years 1961 through 2037 disappear from time simply because we move on from them and into a new time, any more than Chicago disappears when we leave it behind and go to California? [p] It does not. The time that you live in will always exist, even after you've passed out of it, just like Paris exists before you visit it, and continues to exist after you leave." I've always struggled with this paradox (it started with a very nice childhood vacation that had to *end*) and I haven't been convinced by the analogy to 3-dimensional space. Time, for whatever unfathomable reason, is different - for one thing, you can go back and forth and back and forth to Paris - not so to 1961.

[stevie]

Lately I Have Not Stopped Thinking About Death And Thinking How When I Die There Will Be Nothing Not A Glance Not A Bit Of Emotion Or Thought Not A Word Nothing And It Really Scares Me But Reading This Has Made Me Think It Through Preoperly And Even Though I Will Always Be Scared To Be Confronted With Death I Atleast Have Realised That The Time I Have Been On Earth Has Been Sacred And I Think Good On Those Silly Arguments Or Fights With People And Cherish The Happy Moments !!