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Separation, Sleep

Separation

Death as separation, as departure, is a familiar theme in folklore and literature. The French saying tells us, “Partir, c’est mourir un peu,”—to part is to die a bit. “Farewell,” whether spoken to the dying or by the dying, is a theme that runs from Homer through Shakespeare to Keats and on into the present.

The theme of separation, and its profound impact on human beings of whatever time or place, is evident in the fact that in many societies the primary form of condign punishment is exile. In story and myth, and in personal memoirs, separation from one’s people means incurable anguish.

Can one get close to the inner, subjective meaning of one’s death by thinking of it as eternal separation? I have certainly imagined death as separation forever from my beloved wife, an intimate companion in my own great and trivial moments over many long years. This final separation seems a devastating prospect. My daughter also embodies a part of my life. To imagine departing forever from one so dear is to experience what is unnameably piercing to the heart. I will leave grandchildren, whose lives will move into youth and maturity, lives from which I will be forever cut off. Dear friends—lost forever. And then, too, there are the things in life that give pleasure or joy, or even transcendent beauty—music, literature, philosophy, the sun, the hills—gone. Does the shadow of death mean these things to me?

In my more sentimental moments I have imagined deathbed scenes. I suspect I’m not alone in this. I imagine myself saying “goodbye, goodbye forever” to those dearest to me. In a certain mood I imagine this vividly, concretely; and it becomes heart-wrenching.

Yet this is all confusion.

My death is not really a leave-taking, not really a “goodbye” situation for me. The notion of “goodbye” has surreptitiously taken on a radically different significance here from its normal meaning. Normally when I part from somebody—especially long-term, or permanently—the grief in parting consists in grief at the thought of living apart from that person. It has meant, I shall be without you. This implies I shall be, but without you.

With death, obviously, the situation is otherwise. I will not be at all. It will not be life for me apart from the person since there will not be life at all. After one’s death there is no grief, no suffering, no sense of loss or separation. So to conceive of death as one’s “goodbye” is confusion.

Nevertheless the force of lifelong habit fills in where imagination has no other option. One literally can’t imagine what it will be like to be dead—there’s nothing to imagine. What one does imagine is the nearest analogy—being separated from loved ones. Trying to imagine death, one unwittingly imagines something else instead, something that crucially misrepresents the matter.

This misrepresentation may reflect not only confusion but also a certain unconscious yet purposeful self-deception. To imagine myself separated from others is tacitly to deny my total non-existence. It’s a self-deception in which I imagine a world wherein I am still alive, gazing, as it were, on my loved ones but, being “dead,” I am unable to reach them in any way. This imaginative act is recognizable in the myth that the soul survives bodily death, externally separated from earthly affairs but still able to observe them. Thus the myth embodies the refusal to acknowledge one’s eventual non-existence.

Of course, it’s a different matter for one’s survivors. They can say farewell in the same sense that we generally have in mind in parting forever from a loved one. They will remain alive. Theirs is the tragedy. Condolence should be for them. Their loss is genuine, their grief justified.

In my imaginary deathbed scene, I do grieve for those I leave behind. That’s reasonable because, being still alive, I appreciate their grief, present and future. In my heart of hearts, however, an important element of the poignancy of this imagined scene is that I am also imagining it as if I were parting from them, as if it were my own loss, too. And that won’t be true. I live no loss. I will never live apart from them.

Gabriel García Márquez writes of a dream he had, a dream that was seminal in a sequence of tales he worked at intermittently for several decades. He dreamed he was going to his own funeral, along with many of his young friends, all dressed in mourning, but all actually in a festive mood. As one of the group, he joined in the mood and the ceremony. When the services ended they all began to leave. So did he. But one of his friends stopped him and said, “No, you can’t leave.” In that moment, he says, he realized that “to be dead is to be with one’s friends no more.”

This dream represents the phenomenon I’ve been describing—the pathos of death mistakenly apprehended as an eternal separation from those one loves, from the vibrance of life itself.

Mistaken though it is to view death as separation, the mistake can be productive. To imagine being separated forever focuses the mind on how precious the people and the activities of our life are, and on how vulnerable we are.

There are some elements of comfort in the conclusions I’ve been reaching here, elements perhaps of false comfort. I have said that in regard to oneself death is nothing to grieve over since one won’t exist. Is this too easy, too comforting? Is my reasoning here mired in its own subtle form of confusion and self-deception? It suggests that since I won’t exist, and therefore won’t be caring about my survivors, I needn’t have any concern now about their welfare when I will have died. That can’t be an acceptable conclusion.

Of course, it’s true that the welfare of my sorrowing family won’t matter to me when I’m dead. But it does and surely should matter now. My concern for their future welfare isn’t based on the expectation of my own satisfaction in that post-mortem future. There is satisfaction for me right now, life is more fulfilled for me right now, if I can think of them as faring well after my death. Surely such concern is part of what it means to love someone.

Then why wouldn’t a similar logic apply to my own future welfare? Isn’t it also rational for me to be at least as deeply concerned right now that I, too, should fare well in the future and not be dead? If one can rationally fear now for the future welfare of one’s loved ones, why not for one’s own future?

The analogy is valid. Certainly it’s true that I’m justified in being concerned that I should fare well, not ill, in my own future. I’m justified, too, in my concern that my loved ones should fare well. But while faring well is one thing, and faring ill is another—being dead is quite a different ballgame. As far as death goes, the same holds in each case. Once the person is dead, be it myself or someone I love, why be concerned for that dead person? There is no longer any such person to fare either well or ill. Grief over the death of a loved one, if rational, has to do with one’s own loss. There’s no reason to grieve for the deceased. They don’t suffer.

Someone we care for dies suddenly in the prime of life. What a tragedy! For whom? We answer instinctively: For the person who died. But why? That person suffers nothing. The tragedy is ours. We have lost what would have been a fruitful life. The thought makes us sad. But this comes from imagining a hypothetical future, a future that never was nor will be, but a future we wish would have been real. It is our loss. The person who is dead is suffering no loss. The fact is that there is no such person now. How can a non-existent person suffer loss?

It’s a strange thing to anticipate my death as my being separated from my loved ones, since in the actual event I will not experience any separation whatsoever. I won’t experience anything. I won’t exist.

Sleep

We find similarities and also differences when we examine another age-old metaphor for death: Death as sleep.

Can this be what death in the end means to us—going to sleep? The durability of the metaphor is plain to see. “There she met sleep, the brother of death,” says Homer. “To die, to sleep,” says Hamlet. Shelley muses on the prospect that “death like sleep might steal on me.”

The very self-evident aptness—and solace—of the metaphor induces one to overlook the important ways in which the metaphor is self-deceptive.

We have no word to describe the inner experience of falling asleep. I anticipate “falling asleep” while still awake; and on reawakening I discover what happened. I do experience getting drowsy as the preliminary to falling asleep. Nevertheless, we are never aware of the actual happening, the moment of falling asleep. What is it like, that transition from being awake to being asleep? There is only one correct answer: nothing. What is it like, subjectively, being in dreamless sleep? Nothing.

This point can be generalized to all the ways in which consciousness disappears, whether from sleep, fainting, anaesthesia, or death. These, by their very nature, do not feel like anything because neither the transition nor the condition is an experience. It happens, but it’s not experienced. It consists in the cessation of experience. In this rather strange and important way, sleep and death are surely alike. So dying is like falling into a dreamless sleep. However the two are radically unlike in the very obvious respect that we awake from sleep but never from death.

Why do these obvious features of sleep and death merit explicit attention? Because the metaphor of death as sleep is a comforting one. The point of the metaphor is that one should see death as welcome relief rather than feared catastrophe. After all, sleep is normally followed by awakening refreshed. The overtones of the concept of “sleep” are almost all positive and pleasurable. Death, too, may put an end to fatigue or suffering. But since there is no awakening, much less awakening refreshed, the picture changes radically It is in this way that the intended comfort of the death/sleep metaphor turns out to be false comfort.

In the end, what is it that we seek comfort for?—certainly not for the mere absence of consciousness. Deep sleep and anaesthesia show that there is nothing momentous about mere non-consciousness. However the prospect of death, unlike sleep, signals the cessation of consciousness for evermore. So it is not the prospect of non-consciousness in and of itself that is potentially threatening but the question of what came before and what will come after. In this respect sleep and death are radically unlike, and the metaphor of death as sleep becomes deceptive.