Annihilation
Many of us feel annihilated by the prospect death because we lack the cultural tools and mythologies to infuse it with meaning.
A living culture provides an affirmative meaning for death through its myths and rituals. But today, in the West at least, death is a feared and loathsome thing because it means annihilation — something TS Eliot put his finger on almost a century ago when he said we no longer have the cultural tools or mythologies to infuse death with meaning.[i]
In a post-religious era, death is a kind of desolation and without a mythological or cultural story to feed or sustain us, we feel obliterated. We imagine dying means vanishing into the void. That all is lost.
As a result, death phobia lies at the heart of our institutions and endeavours, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the training of our health professionals and the services rendered by healthcare.
Our fear of death is like a frenetic engine, driving the development of limitless pills and potions and procedures engineered to deny and delay the inevitable, at great cost to everyone involved.
But resisting death is a denial of nature. If we look out the window into a garden we can see the cycle of life and death everywhere. Life feeds on the death of everything, and death comes to all, whether by accident, design, disease or predation.
But we’ve conspired against ourselves to live and die outside nature’s lore, without tutors or guides to help us navigate a journey none can avoid. So, we have no affinity, or intimacy, or adequate language to bring to our decline and dying.
This is why we come to death and dying as rank amateurs: we’re ignorant and alone, and too often afraid. It’s why we struggle to tell each other, even long before death comes calling, that we feel broken-hearted by death — by ours and the deaths of those we love.
But the broken-heartedness experienced by the living and the dying isn’t the same thing. The secret theology of our rational, secular age is that the dead don’t need anything from the living. If people who’ve died have lived morally then believers in a hereafter say they’re qualified to enter their heavenly reward. And if they haven’t, then eternal damnation awaits.
For atheists, the dead are simply dead, full stop. Either way, the living cannot and need not intercede on behalf of the dead, nor have a relationship with them. So, we’ve come to believe death ruptures our capacity for a relationship with the dead because they’re gone. They’re gone because the past is gone. They’re gone because our lives are bounded by duality and our concept of time, which is linear and always moving from the present into an infinite future.[ii] [iii]
But it’s the consignment of our dead to a time-bound concept of the past which is the source of their gone-ness. And the consequences cut both ways. Dying people know they’re about to disappear from the lives of the living. They know because, like us, they have been able to ‘move on’ from the deaths of old friends and loved ones by putting them into the gone-ness of the past.
Most of us don’t foresee our annihilation when we consider the end of our days. We imagine our worst fears to be uncontrolled pain, losing control, dying alone, and maybe judgment day, or a fear of the unknown.
But what really hits hard for dying people is that soon they’ll be forgotten. They learn that the living will mourn for a time and move on. And if the bereaved have trouble adjusting to grandpa’s death, then drugs and sympathy and counselling are readily available.
So, the language of loss has infused the language and meaning of death. The upshot is we imagine the past and the dead are gone. And we grieve because our imaginations have been colonised to believe the dead have vanished.[iv]
This is why we carry mementos like photos and trinkets and objects — to remind ourselves of those we call the ‘dearly departed’. It’s why dying people these days are so fond of making farewell video clips — so we can summon their digital presence from the void of death at funerals and wakes and anniversaries.
In name, these memorial services are about the dead but they’re not really for them. They’re for us, the living, because they’re about our mourning, our loss. So, when dying people come to this awareness, they realise there can be no relationship between the living and the dead. They’re about to enter the void of the long forgotten — where life and death go separate ways.
According to this mantra, death ends relationships and reciprocity — that is, the mutual responsibility we have to the world and to each other that’s rooted in the infinite interdependence of all matter, all phenomena.[v]
But if death ends relationships and reciprocity, it makes for a long and lonely experience for everyone concerned.
However, there are countercultural stories that wonder about the river of time and the past, and what it means to be eternal. Some, like Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul wonder whether life flows towards the past and all that came before us.[vi] In this story, the dead aren’t gone; they’re destiny.[vii]
This theme recurs in what might be called ‘spiritual’ art and literature. In Herman Hesse’s classic novel, Siddhartha — the story of a young man on a spiritual quest during the time of the Buddha — his protagonist comes to see time as an illusion and that all things are unified and connected by the cyclical unity of nature.[viii]
In the three-faced Trimurti sculpture inspired by Hindu and Buddhist writings, the central face is the mask of eternity that transcends time and duality. By contrast, the second and third faces represent opposites — a reminder that antitheses are the product of dualistic thinking in the field of time: good and evil, male and female, past and present.[ix]
These narrative and artistic insights regard our ideas of loss as illusion — a consequence of an ideology that obliges us to feel orphaned when the people we love and care for die. But the trance of ‘loss’ is just that — a kind of daze, camouflaged as something rational and reasonable that consigns the past and the dead to the void of annihilation.
One impact is that if we don’t speak of dead people in the past tense soon after they die, people around us start getting worried; they start wondering about our mental health. Another is that annihilating our dead compounds our homelessness — meaning the felt experience of belonging to nothing and no one — a devastating reality known to countless people around the world.
Life and death are mysteries. But knowable mysteries. Shakespeare reminded us that life is more than a human thing. It’s something we participate in. Life is the play, he said, and the play’s the thing … we’re merely players.[x]
Death is knowable too, but understanding it means awakening from ignorance — remembering who I truly am so that I can embody my true nature.
Our human life is as brief as a ‘lightening flash’, said the Buddha. What if you came to your dying moment and still didn’t know who you were? The Sufi poet, Rumi, said knowing who we are is the ‘one thing’ we must do. Do this, and there’s ‘nothing to worry about,’ he said. But forget this, and you’ll have ‘done nothing in your life.’
This story is edited an extract from Dan Gaffney’s new book and podcast series titled, Journey Home — Essays on Living and Dying, published in November, 2019.
[i] Eliot, TS (1922). The Waste Land. New York: Horace Liveright
[ii] Eisenstein, C (2013). The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible. North Atlantic Books, Scarcity (ch 18)
[iii] PBS documentary (1988). Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, episode 2
[iv] Jenkinson, S (2013). Time is religion: The Haiku Sessions. Orphan Wisdom
[v] Lovelock, JE (1972). Gaia as seen through the atmosphere. Atmospheric Environment; 6(8): 579–580
[vi] Jenkinson, S (2014). Op cit, p2
[vii] Jenkinson, S (2018). Op cit, p293–297
[viii] Hesse, H (2018). Siddhartha, Penguin Books, London, United Kingdom
[ix] PBS documentary (1988). Op cit, episode 2
[x] Shakespeare, W. As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII: The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature (3rd ed), 2013: Margaret Drabble, Jenny Stringer, Daniel Hann. Oxford University Press
