In the usual course of events, children and teenagers contemplate the big questions of life, determine they have no good answers, and get on with the mundane business of living. This most definitely includes death. We will all die, there's nothing we can do about this inevitability, so wisdom suggests there is little benefit to fretting over what you cannot change. Of course we can and do put considerable effort into extending our lives and improving their quality by way of exercise, diet, and medicines, to name a few. But we know we will fail in the end.
I feel a bit self-conscious writing a post on this subject. I was a teenager a long time ago -- why dig into the inevitable again? Didn't I grow up? And yet while well-adjusted people don't spend much effort on the inevitability of death, some people may recognize that there is inside of us a slow small feeling of dread when our thoughts pass that way. One way I heard it phrased was that no matter how perfect our life might be at any given time, the worm in the heart of the apple remains -- we will die.
I think the dread is fed by some illusions. I'm hoping that by finding them and considering them, I can tame a bit of my own dread when it surfaces, and if it helps any others, so much the better.
1. Whatever vestige of a person remains after death has no existence over the course of time.
If you are buried in a graveyard in the usual fashion, your corpse lies in the silence and darkness, several feet underground. It's tempting to think of that corpse as being "you" -- where else would you be? When scientists perform sensory deprivation experiments, the subjects ultimately feel very distressed. So the idea that you are lying in a box underground, getting no information from the world outside, which continues without you, even for days and weeks (let alone millenia or eternity) sounds like torture, and so it would be. But a corpse looks and feels completely bereft of life. It is not a person. People who know they will be cremated may be protected somewhat from this illusion since cremation so clearly creates something that has no resemblance to living flesh.
I have spent very little time with corpses, but my sense is that concepts like "brain death" may have good scientific backing, but there is a much more certain and unmistakable change. There comes a point when the heart stops beating, blood stops circulating, and all of the tissues in the body die. Not long after, the smallest child can plainly see that this is no longer a human being. It is a collection of dead tissue -- as inert as mud or stone. That is what gets buried, not a person.
But even if you don't think of yourself as located in a grave, you are tempted to think of yourself as located somewhere. Perhaps you can't say exactly where. It might be in some other dimension of reality. But a critical question, I think, is whether you conceive of time passing. Time passing while any vestige of "you" is in this state would be a form of torture. For some comfort in contradicting that idea, you can consider how things were in the millenia before you were born. Were you bored? No, you didn't exist. And the key concept to resist this illusion of existing over time is to truly get that you cease to exist. As living beings we typically do wonder about what the future will bring in the course of years or even centuries. People who think in grander terms may think about the sun turning into a red giant or in some other way making life on earth completely impossible, or go on to think about entropy creating a cold fog of dust after billions of years. But as those events unfold, there will be no "you" tucked away somewhere as it happens. You won't exist, and your nonexistence lacks every vestige of a temporal dimension.
2. Frustration about not knowing the future does not live on after death.
In our ordinary lives, sometimes the movie ends in the middle, or we lose the book or the magazine, and we want to know how it turned out. We may carry a nagging frustration with us, perhaps for years. We may more generally wonder, "What's going to happen to everyone and everything after I die?" This is entirely appropriate, and we can in advance feel frustrated knowing we will not know how it turns out. But this frustration at not knowing is also extinguished at death. There is no entity left to wonder about any such thing.
3. Struggling against death may be all-consuming, but once death comes things are totally different.
Evolution has programmed us, in all ways and at all levels, to live as long as possible. Heights, snakes, and fearsome predators terrify us because they might kill us. Using our human cognitive skills we also put effort into planning months or years in advance so we have food and do not freeze to death or die of thirst. We devise defenses against others, whether animals or fellow humans, who would do us harm. Yet as our bodies actually do get to the point of giving out, our heart beats frantically fast in its last efforts if it can't do its job properly. We gasp desperately when we can't get enough air. In its last acts, the body is screaming that there is severe danger, something to be avoided in any way possible, and when it finally does stop working and die, its message is that we have met the ultimate failure.
You might think that we humans with our cognitive skills could arrange for suicide reliably, but a great many methods are highly uncertain, as the other layers of our biology call forth every trick they know to survive. We will vomit up poisons. When our air supply is cut off, we will by reflex thrash violently in an effort to breathe again, enough to thwart many suicide attempts by that means. You may bleed from a deep cut, but your body tends to limit the loss of blood enough to survive. The prospect of jumping from a high place or throwing yourself in front of a moving vehicle both awaken the deepest instincts of self-preservation.
And while the body's deeply rooted, desperate attempts to stay alive tell us something horrible is at hand, we can use our human cognition to get past that. The dying is quite possibly painful and distressing, but we knew it was inevitable, and the passing of the pain and distress is equally inevitable. There is no longer anyone to be distressed. They do not go to some better (or worse) place, and they do not hang around as a ghost. They may appear in some form to the living, usually in the form of memories. Occasionally they appear as hallucinataions, but this is entirely a phenomenon of the mind of the living. The dead person is not there. There is no dead person. The comforting thought that the dead person has achieved eternal rest is equally wrong -- there is no vestige of a person who exists in time. Non-existence precludes any concept of "rest".
4. Coming at it from a different angle
Years ago a friend sent me a quote along the lines of, "How strange and unusual life is -- how totally unlike anything else!" What's humorous is that "conscious life" is in its own category, and there is nothing that could possibly be like life. When contemplating that, I feel no particular unease. But then I can consider one of the excluded states that is not like conscious life -- and that is death. I suppose if I had any intuitive sense of an afterlife, I might have questioned the original -- maybe an afterlife, where we are assumed to be conscious and aware of our continuity with a former living being, is sort of like life. But lacking any such intuitive sense, "death" as an excluded state can be contemplated peacefully.
5. Summary
Thinking of ourselves as having any location after death is unhelpful. One vital element to the non-existence of death is the absence of any form of duration or passage of time. A day after death, the non-existent dead "person" is exactly the same non-thing that it will be in a billion years. A non-thing without any trace of existence in time.
Our longing to know the future beyond our death dies with us.
The body's deep-rooted and desperate attempts to put off death as long as possible, and the pain and distress that often arises as parts of its final failure, is naturally something we fear and that is simply "bad". But the final state of non-existence, which we humans can grasp with our big brains, is totally different. It is not pain, failure, or decay. It is simply nonexistence.
Of course I'm not saying I've solved the problem. I suspect death will still feel just plain wrong to many or most of us, from the depths of our souls, and that most definitel includes me. But perhaps some of the dread can be set aside.
And my readers may well ask why I never grew up, or why I have regressed to consider big questions that have no good answers. Sorry. When I look inside, that's one of the things I see.
