Death is something inconceivable

Death is something inconceivable

Posted on January 19th, 2010 by Frank Wilson

“Death is the mother of beauty,” Wallace Stevens declares in “Sunday Morning.” Put that together with Keats’s dictum that ” ‘Beauty is truth, truth Beauty’ — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” and it all adds up to a pretty grim poetic assessment of life.

Stevens’s point, of course, is that a satisfying cadence is an aesthetic necessity:

Is there no change of death in paradise?

Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs

Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,

Unchanging …

“To philosophize is to learn how to die,” said the redoubtable Montaigne, and I’m sure he was right. But to philosophize is also to think, and death, when you come to think about it, is pretty hard to think about. That’s because death in the abstract is altogether different from what it actually amounts to: the complete and permanent cessation of one’s life signs.

Getting, as they say, up-close and personal, death in general is one thing, but my death is something else again. As Karl Jaspers put it, “Death is something inconceivable, in fact really unthinkable. What we conceive and think about it are only negations and subsidiary aspects” (which makes it, oddly, a little bit like God). Of course, whether we choose to think about it or not, it’s going to come our way one of these days.

My own introduction to the reality of death came in rather a peculiar way. The house I grew up in was for many years where the street dead-ended. One morning — it must have been a Saturday, because everyone was home — I noticed a car parked under one of the maples in front of our house. I went out and noticed further that there was someone in the car, and that he was looking poorly: His face was puffy and purple. There was also a vacuum cleaner hose in the window by the driver’s seat. That window was rolled up as far as it could go and all the other windows were rolled up as well. The hose ran from the window to the back of the car.

I was, by the way, still in grade school, about 11 years old. Anyway, I called to my older brother and he looked a little more closely, then came in and called the cops. Some guy had committed suicide.

Please don’t think this was some grievous trauma that haunted me forever thereafter. The only thing I remember feeling was curiosity. It inspired no nightmares. Even when, years later, I held the hand of someone I loved who was dying, I found myself strangely impassive. Perhaps that incident in front of our house so many years before rendered me impervious to the shock of death. It is more likely, though, that detachment in such cases is simply a defense mechanism.

As I near the Biblical age, the question of my own inevitable demise grows less and less academic. Oddly, I don’t feel any more frightened of it now than I ever have. I am simply aware that it’s nearer now than it ever was before. I think I fear decrepitude more than death. I also wish I could say I had arrived at some insight I could pass along to ease any anxieties others might have on this score. But I haven’t.

So I shall give the last word to Montaigne: “He who would teach men to die would teach them how to live.” A life well lived may not be prophylactic against death — nothing is — but I suspect it makes the going easier. I sure hope so.