Humans are gifted with the ability to imagine and plan for the future. And we are part of those plans. Our presence is the source of agency in the world, to get things done for whatever purposes we want to get things done, typically starting with the welfare of our descendants. But we are also cursed to know that not long into that future, we will die. The future will no longer contain us, but it will contain the things and people we care about.
I remember being troubled by the prospect of death in the past. The ones I remember are -- as a child of 8 or 9, as a teenager, and at some point in the early "decade starting in 2000". I was troubled enough to write this post: http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2007/11/cosmic-subtraction-problem.html, which still captures a lot of truth as I see it. It suggests thinking about the issue of death a bit, and then putting your analysis on the shelf. Indeed in the last 15-odd years I have largely ignored the issue. I do not recall it troubling me on the eve of my heart surgery in November of 2020. It has come up now once again -- perhaps in conjunction with some minor health scares.
I once read an explanation of how death figures in our lives. No matter how happy we are, no matter how successful or loved or at the peak of whatever we think of as the good life, there is that little worm gnawing away at the core: We will die someday. It's associated with a feeling: a little strand of dread if we think about it. That resonated with me.
So I write, "There is no such thing as a dead person." What could I mean? Be patient.
There surely is such a thing as a dead body. One way to feel bad about death is to imagine yourself as with your body -- bored, cold, alone, underground in a cemetery. Imagining yourself cremated might be a bit easier, as past the imagined traumatic even of incineration, there is less to imagine? But those who have examined a body that has been dead for any length of time can plainly see that there is no person left. I find it fairly easy in feeling as well as thought to dismiss the idea of us as dead people having any location in the world such as a graveyard. In part that's because what we mean by "person" is some entity with the same memories and thought processes as we have now -- our mind.
A distressing idea of death that I think arises naturally is imagining ourselves in silent darkness, as time ticks along, knowing things are happening that we will never be aware of, with nothing but infinite boredom. Those are both possibilities that I think arise just from feelings, with little rationale but still perhaps power.
Another vital ingredient of the situation is that the living must have some theory about what happens to their loved ones when they die. Religions would imagine heaven, hell, or reincarnation. I would suggest that sober people who look hard at reality rather than being guided by vague realms of hope and feelings will understand those are just not true.
Yet even those who accept that perspective have images of the dead. Our respected forebears in particular we can imagine looking over our shoulders at us, and they can inspire us to act according to our better nature as opposed to our lower instincts. In some cases (particularly true in the past, say around 1700), people traveled long distances and might well have no communication at all with those left behind. They might well not know whether their parents were dead or not, and if your parent in the flesh might appear to judge your life, you might be motivated to have lived a life they would approve of. It might be adaptive to think that way even if you know they are dead.
When we imagine our dead ancestors perhaps judging us, we envision them as immaterial observers of reality as it unfolds. I suppose this is one of the better ways you can imagine being dead, though again I think a sober person would say this is unrealistic. And there are problems. How long does this state last? Have we pushed off to the future the same problem of what happens after death when this dead person dies again?
One natural objection to death is, "But I want to see how it all turns out!" It's hard to address that one, to the extent it's our current, perhaps terminallly ill, self that is thinking it. We can reflect that over time "how it turns out" will be less and less relevant to our imagined dead self observing the world. When everyone we care about, and their descendants, die, and the world is concerned with new things we never even considered, we would care less. One future milestone is that scientists say it is certain that our planet will be incinerated when our sun becomes a red giant, in 5 billion years or so.
I guess my key point (if I have one) is that while it's natural and sensible for the living to imagine the dead as continuing to exist somewhere, this is no help at all as an individual person approaches death. Then it is time to throw off that idea, and emphasize the reality that when the living imagine the dead living on, this is happening in one place only -- inside of their living heads.
The sober reality is that none of these things will happen when we die. We will not even be in sweet oblivion. We simply no longer will be. There will in no sense be an "I' to be anywhere.
One way to possibly get a handle on this is to look at the other end of life. If we see a living, breathing baby, do we wonder where they were before they were born? Did they live in boredom through the eons, hoping some day to be born, to inhabit a body, and have a time in the world of life? No, they simply did not exist, in any sense of the word. They as a conscious being came into existence through the interplay of extremely complicated biochemical events that we are nowhere near understanding. One's nonexistence after death is just as complete and unmysterious as the nonexistence of a baby before conception.
Phrases like "Mr. Jones passed in July" are harmful in suggesting that Mr. Jones went from here to somewhere else. They presume an afterlife. "Mr. Jones passed away in July" is better, because "away" at least allows for the possibility that "away" is nothingness. "Mr. Jones died" is better still, though it leaves open the question of what happened to him. "Mr. Jones ceased to exist" might be best of all.
Corpses, ancestors who judge us, entities that hang around to find out how it turns out -- they are all natural thoughts. But when we face our own demise with the natural anxiety that comes with it, we do better to discard those ideas completely. We will cease to be. There will be no clock ticking to measure our nonexistence. There is no way to measure nonexistence. Nonexistence is... How do I finish that sentene? Nonexistence isn't. For me, entertaining this thought makes my emotional self calmer as I consider death. There is no seuch thing as a dead person.
Note: I've probably never had an original thought in my life, but that is especially clear on a subject like this, which has been debated by great minds for millenia.
