Death, Grief, and Time
Death has always been a difficult topic to confront. For millennia, cultures have attempted to explain what happened to people after they die, whether they have a soul, and if they go to some different place. I am less interested in all the different beliefs surrounding death, though. There is no denying that death is part of life. Every person to the present has died at some point. I am also not going to debate the existence of a soul, a permanent part of a person that endures beyond death. These don’t interest me very much because I never found them useful in confronting our mortality.
My interest in death is much more pragmatic. The grieving process is already difficult enough without injecting religious or semi-religious concepts of a permanent soul. It seems superfluous to me. In my personal experience, religion did not comfort me in grief.
I want to address grief and death with philosophy. We could take the absurdist path, championed by the French philosopher, Albert Camus and argue that our wrangling with death is an end to our confrontation of the absurd [1]. This justifies a struggle against death and mortality by all means, as though it were a foe to be conquered. While it is tempting to slip into this perspective, it is a very idealistic one. There will be no conquest of death. Absurdism also portrays death as the end of all things for a consciousness, a concept that I personally find more troubling in grief. Camus’ perspective on death is tainted by his preoccupation with the problem of murder, and the justification of death. There is more than only one purpose to life, more than only an interaction between ourselves and the universe in which we live. We cannot explain life or death through a simple reduction to good and evil, as Camus seems to. To him, life is the only good. In the context of murder, this is much more comforting, but in the case of death by natural causes, it flounders to find comfort.
There are other non-religious alternatives. My favorite is one by Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher with a dark background (a discussion for another time). Heidegger’s philosophy relies on a core concept of Dasein, translated literally as “being there.” Dasein is both meant to describe how people live in the world as well as how they understand the world around them. Heidegger noted that “understanding always pertains to the whole basic state of Being-in-the-world” [2]. So when we exist in the world we are understanding; the two concepts cannot be separated. It might appear on the surface that Heidegger would conceive of death similarly to Camus. However, he never wrote on death itself, so it’s very difficult to know whether he believed in an immortal soul (which is unlikely) or if death was the end of all things. At the same time, it is easy to extend his concept of Dasein to mortality.
Let’s delve a bit deeper into what Dasein is. All that we understand in the present is an interpretation of the things “disclosed” to us from the past. Our understanding of anything is based on the past, whether it is memories, pictures, documents, and so on. We interpret these things in the present in only one of a number of possible ways. At the same time, our current perspective is always projected into the future, and our memories and understanding of anything in the past will change in the future. Through Dasein, our experiences received from the past, our present understanding of these experiences, and the potential understandings we have of them are all linked. Now we can apply the concept to the dead.
When a person close to us dies, they do not stop existing. They were a part of our experiences in the past, which we interpret in the present as memories. At the same time, they exist currently in our existence, as a person we remember from our memories, and they will continue to exist into the future as we remember them. When a person who has touched us, no matter how little they have, their existence is recorded in the memories of a person, since nobody lives without a society. Taken on a wider scale, a person who dies is a part of how the society remembers itself, since they have always touched at least one person in the society.
On a personal level, the person we lose is never dead. We are always re-remembering them, our perspective on them always changing, never standing still. They haven’t stopped existing because we are sustaining them by understanding and re-understanding them. If this is the case, one might think that they stop existing as the people who remembered them also die, but a curious thing happens. They are always a part of us, not only as a memory, but as a part of the whole fiber of our being. Because our existence is our very understanding, when we re-understand them, we embody them in our own existence. As memories of us are transmitted to the people we know, they remember us, and the person who dies lives on in us as we are re-remembered. Our existence is inseparable from their memory. Our memory will be inseparable from the existence of the people who know us. It does not matter how little we are remembered, it is always a part of the person, whether conscious or unconscious.
They are a part of our Dasein, and we become a part of the Dasein of others, who will continue this chain of existence into the future. We directly sustain those who are dead by remembering them, and by doing this we take them into ourselves, and then we are taken into others, and so on. To leave you with some comfort, remember a person, an animal, or an object that is no longer with you. They are still here. They still exist. Regardless of what your religious beliefs are, they are still with you, not in spirit, but in your concept of you. I hope that this will help people to see their grief differently, to think of death differently. Perhaps it will be some comfort, at least.
[1] Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage, 1956), 6.
[2] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, ¶144.
