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Death as the Mirror Image of Life

True, death itself is nothing; but the thought of it is like a mirror. A mirror, too, is empty, without content, yet it reflects us back to ourself in a reverse image. To try to contemplate the meaning of my death is in fact to reveal to myself the meaning of my life. In this connection I think of one of the most powerful attempts to probe the meaning of one’s own death, Tolstoy’s story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.”

Initially, Ivan Ilyich reacts to the possibility of impending death in a way that I suspect most of us do: with denial. Maybe, he thinks, this isn’t death after all. Maybe this pain is merely the effect of some malfunctioning organ. The doctors can probably put it right. Ivan Ilyich soon realizes these hopes are feeble straws. But he’s impelled to grasp at them, impelled to continue hoping. He clings desperately to any sign that this is not It.

The final phase of the story begins when at last the evident futility of the doctors and his increasing suffering compel Ivan Ilyich to confront his terror. The confrontation begins abruptly. A voice within him suddenly speaks and asks: “What do I want?”

“To live,” he answers instantly.

“How do you want to live?”

“Pleasantly, as before.”

This inner dialogue leads Ivan Ilyich to a re-examination of his life, to review the “pleasures” he has lived for. He had seen himself as a cultured, dignified, and useful public servant of high rank, enjoying all the civilized pleasures such a life affords. Self-deception. Now he sees that his life has been an increasing commitment to a polite but mean-spirited and selfish inhumanity. He has evaded humane contact—and the obligations that go with it—by means of continuous, but burdensome, role-playing. He has enjoyed exercising power with “justice”—that is, without compassion. Facing death, Ivan Ilyich comes to understand the truth of his life.

What strikes me here is not the particulars of Ivan’s way of life. It is the fact that his “confrontation with death” turns out to be a retrospective exploration and revelation to him of the meaning of his life. Seeing the truth of his life, he is able at last to face death and see its truth. At the end, the dying Ivan Ilyich asks himself, “Where is it?” “What death?”

Tolstoy answers, “There was no fear because there was no death.”

Tolstoy probably had in the back of his mind a religious theory to account for “There was no death.” We know the total Christian commitment that came to dominate his life. Still the story itself carries its own independent truth. The story merely announces the facts: The confrontation with death is in fact a confrontation of life; death itself has no meaning. The “fear of death” is in reality an agony that concerns life. The subjective truth that “there is no death” is not a statement about immortality, not an objective assertion contradicting the objective truth of death. It is a way of expressing the point that so far as anything I can experience is concerned—one might say, from the standpoint of the soul—there is no meaning to “my death.”

There is a truth in this that bears reflection, a subjective truth: I, this consciousness, will never know death first hand. In the end, I’m invulnerable. From the subjective point of view my deepest wish is guaranteed—I am immune to death. (‘Death,’ said the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “is not an event in life; we do not live to experience death.”)

Of course, I feel the logical strain such comments induce. The temptation is to return to “common sense,” to be objective, “realistic,” to face the plain truth that I’ll die. This commonsense reaction, though objectively true, obscures the inner truth as I live it. The inner truth that I live is that my death will not be an event in my life.

I think it’s fair to put things this way: There are two absolutely certain facts about this existence. From the objective point of view I am mortal—it is certain that I will die. From the subjective point of view I am immortal—it is certain that I will never die. Or to put it slightly differently: Never in my life will I experience death.

Obviously the immortality of which I speak is not the everlasting afterlife promised by some religious doctrines. It’s a simpler, secular thesis. It’s just the undeniable truth that I will never know an end to my life, this life of mine right here on earth.

This truth is for me the ultimate truth. For it is my consciousness, my subjectivity, rather than my body, that is to me my very existence, my existential identity, me as I most intimately know myself. I am not alone in this. The idea that one’s consciousness could continue to live in some form even after the body dies is an idea that has ubiquitous and enormous appeal among human beings everywhere. The belief is false, but its appeal attests to the fact that the supreme subjective value is the life of consciousness, not the life of the body.

So people desperately hope never to know the end of consciousness. But why merely hope? It’s a certainty. They never will!

So then if my being dead is a concept with no meaning subjectively, what do I have in mind when I think I’m confronting the idea of my death? If I’m confronting anything at all, it must be something in my life. In fact what it turns out to be is a vivid, imaginative capturing of what life is for me now, what my life has been—and most importantly, what it may yet be. It is an experience that tears through the veil of routine, awakens me from the complacency of taking life for granted.

Even when unexpected and spontaneous, the apprehension of death transforms the moment, be it the sound of my wife in the kitchen, or sitting at work in my study, or turning to watch dawn arrive. This momentary apprehension of an eventual end to my life, insofar as it has any imaginable content, is in fact an appreciation, a clearer, brighter vision, of what is here and now. I may recall glowing—or terrorful—moments in my past, or envision the life I have been aiming toward. In any case it’s my life I’m exploring, appreciating. I cannot imagine death itself.

Why, one may ask, should it be important to imagine being dead? Obviously, I can’t imagine what it is to be dead, since being dead is total non-existence. But there are a lot of things that I know are so and yet can’t imagine. Why isn’t it enough just to think about it, to describe to myself its nature?

The answer lies in the fact that imagination is the only way one can get the “feel” and grasp the inner significance of some past or possible experience. Thought alone is abstract, verbal, not experiential. The only alternative to imagination is actual experience. Actual experience is, of course, limited to the here and now. Tenuous and imperfect though it may be, the vicarious experience afforded by imagination—whether through memories or projection of possibilities—is the only way to experience what the future would feel like, or to recall the feel of the past.

I think of a trip we were planning to make to Paris. We lived there quite some years ago, but haven’t been back recently. Should we make the trip? We try to picture (imagine) what it would be like for us under the conditions as we now understand them. Our travel agent says it’s very congested. At first we are inclined to dismiss this: “That’s true everywhere.” But now we call up recollections—we imagine what it would feel like to be in our old leisurely neighborhood, a neighborhood we now picture as jammed with traffic and supermarkets. To imagine being there under those conditions is to find the vicarious experience displeasing. It is imagination that gives us the flavor of reality, and that is the basis on which we make our choice.

Yes, tenuous and imperfect, nevertheless imagining is genuinely a form of experience. One reacts directly to what one is imagining—not merely in thought but also in emotion and feeling, though in lesser degree than when actually experiencing it. I can think coolly about the possibility of my being in an auto accident. I buy insurance; I wear my safety belt. But if I truly imagine myself being in an accident I feel a kind of vicarious quiver of terror.

Imagining can also be viewed as a kind of role-playing. If I genuinely imagine myself walking down the street, it’s a form of mental role-playing. I’m imagining I am walking; I’m imaginatively doing it. I imagine it as one of our long walks, and so I feel tired. At least I’m having some of that feeling if I’m successfully imagining it. If I don’t feel it at all, then I’m not imagining doing it; I am at most thinking about it. It is one thing to know I will be tired if we walk. It is quite another to imagine myself as being tired.

Even when I imagine a scene where I’m absent, I’m playing the role of hidden observer, right there at that time and place. I “see” it happening right in front of me. If, for example, it’s a horrible scene, and I’m genuinely imagining it, I actually have some of the same feeling of repulsion that I would have were I really there.

It is precisely because we can be engaged with a situation through the medium of imagination, even though not physically present, that we are emotionally involved in novels, films, dramas, stories. It is one thing to know the story—Desdemona is killed by Othello. It is a different matter to be emotionally, imaginatively gripped by the pathos and horror of it. Only if the story engages our imagination can we genuinely appreciate it.

So I come back to the sudden acute pang which arises when I contemplate my death. It must arise from confusion. I know that I’ll be dead, but since I can’t imagine being dead, I imagine, unwittingly, that I am conscious, a presence in that future world, conscious of it and yet utterly cut off from participation in it.

That way of imagining my “death” is confusion because in reality I would not be there to suffer such alienation and longing. Nevertheless, in its negative way, it does compel me to see and appreciate the people that mean much to me, the activities that fill my life, the true significance to me of the joys and the sufferings in my life. I am imaginatively living cut off from all this. The more imaginatively we confront “death,” the more we are in fact envisioning, in the perspective of loss, the meaning to us of the people and activities that fill our life.

Of course, we also appreciate our life in positive ways. We thrust ourself into the things in this world that are of real value to us, into being and working with people, into activities we relish. A little while ago I was totally immersed in one of the late Beethoven piano sonatas, one of the sublimely beautiful offerings of this world. A few days before that I was completely caught up in play with my grandson: I played the villain, his mother was the princess, and he was the hero rescuing her from my clutches. We were all totally immersed, totally delighted.

On the other hand, I get a different, and important appreciation of life through the via negativa, the mirror image of life that death holds before me. This act of imagination shows the meaning to me of what I have by representing it as lost, wrenched away from me by death. It is in imagining their loss to me that even the trivia of daily life glow with a new radiance. Seeing life in the mirror of death is a revelatory experience.

There is the ancient teaching that tomorrow we die and so we should make the most of today. The paradox I saw in this teaching is that fear of death is not a motive that can engender truly carefree joy and fulfillment. Now I see the teaching from a somewhat different perspective. In recalling that tomorrow I may die, I discover, intensely illuminated, what it is today that makes my life full, that gives it meaning. That vivid revelation may enable me to live in a more focused way.

In this context I have new insight into an often mentioned puzzle. Why is it that my not having existed prior to birth causes me no distress, and yet the thought of my eventually ceasing to exist has such portentous meaning for me? The very question itself reveals that the mere fact of non-existence is not the issue. If it were, then we would feel the same about both periods of our personal non-existence. So there must be something at work here that goes beyond the mere matter of non-existence. Now I see what it is.

My relationship to the past before I was born is a matter of hearsay, not actual experience. I’ve read about, heard about, been taught about what happened. Whatever I may have learned and admired about the attractions of a Cleopatra or a Madame de Pompadour, I have never lived with them and loved them. Whatever the admiration I have for Jefferson, he was never a personal friend of mine.

The contrast is sharp when I imagine the post-mortem future, the future of people I’ve lived with, loved, disliked, respected, feared, dined with, worked with, fought with—the future of activities and projects into which I’ve put my heart. Suppose I do envision some situation where my wife and daughter are together, and I imagine they understand that I have died. They are sorrowful. While I don’t imagine myself as present with them of course, still it’s I who am doing the imagining, and so I react to the scene that is present to me. It’s not a scene with people from history whom I’ve read about in books. I react to the sorrow of persons with whom I have had the most intimate relationships, the thought of whom inevitably arouses vivid memories, desires, hopes, and feelings of every kind.

The more powerfully I react to their relationships to me, the more intensely do I react to my imagined absence. It’s akin to missing people in anticipation. I do that when I’m about to leave on a lengthy business trip. Even before leaving, I imagine being far away from home and I already feel longing for my wife and family. I may know that when the time comes I’ll be so busy that I won’t have time to miss them. That thought helps, but it doesn’t by any means eliminate this feeling now. I am inevitably reacting now to what I now imagine, although I am imagining a future situation. To imagine my family at home and myself apart is to react by wanting to be there with them. It is imagined, but the feeling aroused is strong.

So the post-mortem future I imagine is the future of the life I’m living, though I imagine it going on without me. I “miss” all that has filled my life. The historical past I imagine is of a life I never lived. I don’t miss any of these people or activities. I may wish I’d known them, but that’s very different from missing people I have known and loved. No wonder I have the attitude I do to my prenatal past, which is empty of personal engagement. No wonder this differs so dramatically from my experience when I try to imagine my death. In the latter case it is a poignant experience rich with intimate meaning from the life I have lived.