I am not afraid of death. That is, I do not fear being dead. I suspect that being dead is not like anything (to use the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s terminology, from his famous essay on consciousness and the mind-body problem, “What is it like to be a bat?”). That is, I suspect that when my physical body dies my consciousness will simply cease. I would be overjoyed to be wrong – to discover that there is a world beyond this one, like “The Matrix” (but preferably with less evil robots and better acting). To stumble out of Plato’s cave, rubbing my eyes, to see that this life was but a shadow of reality cast upon the cave wall.
I would love to find that my consciousness could still interact with those of others. It is comforting to think that we might be reunited with our loved ones. I have told Grace that if there is an afterlife, I will be looking for her. I wouldn’t mind if any of her other boyfriends after me were there too, as long as I could be with her again.
I do not believe in heaven or hell, especially hell, but if there were a divine judgment on my life, I would not be afraid to face it. I believe that I have mostly lived up to my own moral standards and those of my community. I may be guilty of sins of omission – I could have done more to fight injustices around the world, more than just my relatively small donations to organizations consistent with my values, such as Amnesty International, ACLU, and NRDC – but I think I have committed few sins of commission – acts of injustice against others. I have no deep dark secrets. I have tried to be conscious of the consequences of my choices.
Sins of omission reminds me of one of the themes of the novel Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, which Eric recommended to me. If you live in a society where the privileges of some people are made possible by the exploitation of others, and you partake of those privileges without fighting for the rights of those less fortunate, that is a moral choice, or rather an immoral one. As a privileged person in our unequal society, I feel guilty of this charge, as are many of us, to greater or lesser degrees.
I am not afraid of death. In fact, the way I have felt lately, death would be a welcome release from this prison of a body. From this life that is no longer worth living. From this constant struggle for survival. An escape from this lumbering robot that no longer obeys my commands. (“Lumbering robots” is how the biologist Richard Dawkins describes human beings, as complicated structures that have evolved simply to support the replication of our genes – the only parts of us that survive our death, via our descendants. Dawkins does note, however, that we can also create “memes” – cultural products and practices, such as the game of poker, the practice of cooking meat, or the belief in God – that survive our death, via their propagation in other people’s minds and behavior.) This lumbering robot is easy to wound but hard to kill. There is no on/off switch. If there were, I would have been tempted to switch it off by now.
I am not afraid of death, but I am not so keen on dying. I am not looking forward to the process of getting from here (life) to there (death). I hope to make this transition as gracefully as possible, but it seems difficult to do well. It feels like trying to cross a rushing river by stepping on small slippery stones.
But when does living end and dying begin? Can they be clearly separated? I don’t think so. All living is dying, in that all life ends in death. But there is a shift in mental attitude from being healthy and death being a distant abstraction to being sick and death being a nearby reality. The challenge, of course, is to continue living with the knowledge that you are dying. To appreciate the present. It is tempting to feel that life is pointless when death is nearby. To lose hope for happiness.
Objectively, I know how I should approach my situation, but subjectively, it is hard to put into practice. I find that my mental/emotional state is closely coupled to my physical state. When I feel good physically, it’s not hard to be happy. But when I feel bad physically, it’s very hard to be happy. It’s hard to appreciate the present when you feel like crap. What is less clear to me is which side (physical vs. mental/emotional) drives the other – which is the cart and which is the horse. Do I feel good or bad physically because I feel good or bad mentally/emotionally, or vice versa? I wish that I could just decide to feel better physically, but I think it’s actually a more complicated interaction.
Sometimes I feel like Ethan has already died. That is, the real me, the Ethan you know and love, died when I got sick, and has been replaced by a fake me – not Ethan 2.0, a new and improved version, but Ethan 0.5, a slower and stupider version. I feel like I am being corroded from the inside out by an implacable parasite. This parasite is consuming me physically and also mentally. It is chomping like a caterpillar through my memory banks. I feel like I have aged 40 years in a few months. I have “senior moments” where I can’t remember something that I know that I knew. Encountering these blank spaces in my memory feels as if you were walking through your house and entered a room, but instead of being furnished, the room was empty with bare white walls. My mind feels like Swiss cheese.
Ethan
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