The Art of Dying: Anonymous

I HAVE recently undergone an operation for cancer; though it seems successful, the doctors tell me they cannot be certain for five years that the disease will not recur, and there are other factors which make my tenure of life more than precarious. Barely past my first youth, with a completely happy marriage and everything else in life that I could wish for, except health, I looked forward serenely to what seemed an undisturbed future. But I found with Leonardo that ‘when I thought I had been learning how to live, I had only been learning how to die.’

At first I tried to follow my doctor’s instructions not to worry, but the thought of death obtruded itself between me and each of my daily occupations. Not until I had faced and admitted the worst possibility, a painful death within five years, was I able to reach a certain peace of mind. Thousands of others are at this moment undergoing the same ordeal; thinking of them I have written an account of mine, and the meagre comfort I have been able to wring from it; for though I have not the arrogance to believe that any words of mine can instruct them, who must each endure his individual Gethsemane, yet the very knowledge that others have passed by the same road will give to them, as to me, a measure of relief.

It may seem strange that I should speak first of behavior; but, though I have often rebelled against the code that manners are more important than feeling, I have now come to realize that they are actually the mark of civilization, the restraint man imposes on his selfish and useless impulses. Suffering has to be borne; no clamors or complaints can mitigate it for the sufferer, and their only result is to make others suffer also. First, therefore, I resolved to keep my mental agonies and adjustments to myself. I dread and avoid the facile expression of sympathy, because it makes this resolution harder to keep; on the other hand, real affection was never more precious to me than it is now.

Further, there are three unfortunate mental attitudes which I must avoid if I am to keep my self-respect: selfdramatization; a demand for special rights and privileges because of my condition; and another usually caused by one of the preceding, a feeling of isolation from normal life. The first two are private or public ways of capitalizing misfortune; the third can bring nothing but unhappiness. I must not forget that certain things which seem infinitely puerile and ridiculous to one under threat of death are of infinite importance — in fact, the very stuff of life — to those who look forward to years of continued existence; and it is right that it should be so. Who would wish the world in general to resemble a Trappist monastery where the sonorous ‘Memento mori’ takes the place of all the pleasant words men use to convey to one another their interest, friendliness, and affection?

One is lonely enough in one’s abnormal and inevitable preoccupation without setting up egotistical attitudes as further barriers. Suffering should bind, not separate. Since we are men, we must endure the common lot of men; we can never become or do anything that is of value to others until we have understood the common human experiences. Happy love first draws us into the great stream of human life; the shared suffering of the body unites us to the myriads of other women who have borne children; but the mental agony of anticipated death breaks down the last barrier between us and the most alien of human creatures. That we must cease and the world go on without us; that the sun will still shine, and spring still come, though we be not there to enjoy them; that other lives will continue, though the place we filled in them be empty — these are words whose import unites us in understanding and compassion with all who face death as we must face it, whether for a noble cause, in defense of those they love, or simply and unheroically because they must.

This feeling sustains me too in my darkest moments — the moments of panic which must come. Even those who believe in the soul’s immortality fear death; if we do survive, it must be in a very different guise, and because our imaginations are limited we cannot conceive of any other happiness than the one we treasure here. What heavenly pastures, we ask ourselves, can be more beautiful than those of earth’s May, white with drifts of daisies? But for those who, like myself, have no faith in the possibility of survival, the fear of death becomes the fear of annihilation. To dissolve, to vanish, to be forgotten! — this thought strikes the soul with a terror like the paralysis of sudden cold. The thought is bitterest of all that I shall leave so little of myself behind me. Of all my thoughts and loves and sensations and delights and endurances, so vividly experienced, is nothing to be left? I dreamed of serving humanity, of accomplishing great things, but I have done nothing except to produce children as any woman does. I have not used at all my special talents, the qualities by virtue of which I differ from other people, by which I might have made a contribution to the happiness of the world over and above the average human contribution. Have I even attained the minimum, the lowest common denominator, the obligation of all human beings to comport themselves decently and decorously in the various relationships of daily life? The question is not so much whether I have succeeded, but whether I have even honestly tried to be a faithful friend, a careful mother, a loving wife.

One day at a funeral I heard as if for the first time these words: —

Lord, let me know mine end, and the number of my days: that I may be certified how long I have to live. . . .

O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength: before I go hence, and be no more seen.

I thought: Perhaps I am more fortunate than I know to have time to realize my shortcomings. Most of us live in the present with no reason to compute values, to see things in their relative proportions. Only the genius plans his life as a whole; the average person like myself needs a shock to make him realize emotionally as well as intellectually that the time for accomplishment is limited. But how often that shock comes too late! Death suddenly puts an end to him, or he is doomed to invalidism with its handicaps and impaired faculties, and at best a meagre opportunity to redeem himself in further years of normal life.

For me the possibility of death has changed life, as a spotlight thrown on the stage brings objects hitherto unnoticed into relief, and relegates to shadow others which seemed the most important. I have sometimes wondered whether, seen thus, life is seen correctly, or whether parts of it are given an unnatural and false prominence. On reflection, however, it is obvious to me that as a matter of objective fact our small desires, hopes, and aspirations are important in the general scheme only as they contribute to the good of the race. In the light of death, — or, if you like to call it so, of eternity, — this is seen to be true; in normal everyday life our selves and our immediate wishes fill the stage to the exclusion of larger issues.

A psychiatrist has defined the adult as the person who is able to forgo immediate momentary satisfaction in order to attain a greater and more permanent one later on. In the contemplation of death everyone must become really adult who is to find even a measure of serenity. Time for giving happiness is so short — I do not want to waste a moment of it in the gratification of selfish desires. I have no time to spend on disliking people, on being bored, or ill-tempered, or shy. Every action assumes significance because it may be by that action that I am remembered in time to come. Every sensuous impression is treasured because it may not be experienced again. And the trivial things, the dull duties, the mechanical tasks, are all precious; I love them as I love even the faults of my friends. They, no less than the ecstasies and delights, are part of life — life which I adore so much the more passionately now, when there is a possibility that I may soon leave it. And yet, though we all live under sentence, for some it is long suspended; and in living by this death-illumined standard, as by any other, one must beware of demanding that others shall conform.

Having by thought and contemplation dulled the edge of fear (for that which is familiar ceases to be quite so terrible), I began to think about death in its more impersonal aspects. What is death? It is a negation. Science has been able to provide no positive definition; scientifically expressed, death is the cessation of the process called life, no more. It is personified in mythology and poetry as an evil creature, the final conqueror, the triumphant hater of Life; but as good and evil may be regarded as different channels into which human energy is directed, one beneficial to man, one harmful, so death and life can be considered as different manifestations of the same force. Death is notlife; and life, not death, is the great mystery. My personal death will be the incidental result of some processes within me, of which I am now unconscious and over which I have no control, the effect of some intrinsic quality of my body, without which it would be impervious to death as a stone is impervious. But the same quality which makes me subject to death also makes me able to live and enjoy as no stone can. Therefore death is a part of me, death also inhabits my flesh; death is the condition on which I live; death is life.

But death has another meaning also. I am not one who believes in the discipline of pain or the chastening effect of grief; to me such a faith seems to imply an infinitely cruel and infinitely petty Supreme Power. But I do believe that by rising above the personal and attaining the impersonal and detached vision we are able to a certain degree to conquer our misfortunes. Any individual disaster, no matter how great, holds something on which the triumphant spirit may be nourished and enlarged, as it is nourished and enlarged by love and happiness or any other experience to which it has fully surrendered.

It was not by refusing to contemplate the sometimes tragic facts of life and the great tragic fact of death that the liberators of the human spirit — the poets, the philosophers, the artists, the musicians — learned how man might be greater than his fate. It was not by shrinking from pain and evil that they learned how man might transcend them. It was not by denying the conditions on which we live that they learned to create the words and gestures which continue to comfort following generations. They have taught us that nothing in heaven or earth is horrible in itself; it is only in its effect on us that it acquires such an aspect. There is no misfortune that cannot assume a tragic beauty when it is finely endured. If I can ‘make a good end’ I shall have bent death to my uses as the poet bends words, and made of it a work of art. I shall have mastered it; it will be my instrument, my creature; and I, not Death, will be the conqueror.