Volume 15 - Number 3 - December 2008
Pages: 107 - 177
Smith, D. I. (2008). Is a good death an oxymoron? Clio’s Psyche, 15(3), 127-128.
Is A Good Death an Oxymoron?
Abstract
This article responds to the question the editor of Clio’s Psyche poses for the issue on confronting death and dying, namely what constitutes a good death, and appears in the section on choices in dying. The author observes that joining goodness and death seems paradoxical, and proposes that death be read like any other text, with works such as the Bible and Shakespeare offering the right questions rather than answers. Drawing on references to Bonhoeffer, Heidegger, T. S. Eliot, Freud, and Ernest Becker’s Life Against Death, he maintains that brushes with death briefly focus the mind but that their lessons are soon forgotten. He links this forgetting to Freud’s death instinct and the compulsion to repeat, and to Heidegger’s idea of being-toward-death. He characterizes it as an existential repression rooted in a fear of living. Citing the exchange of letters Why War? between Einstein and Freud, he contends that hatred of life amounts to love of death, and that absorption into the crowd and public opinion represses both living and dying. He concludes that only a person who has owned his life, and so his death, can speak of a good death.
Clio’s Psyche, deathbed, existential repression, fear of living, good death, oxymoron, psychohistory, self-ownership
The Editor of Clio’s Psyche proposes a most profound and provocative question for our consideration: “What constitutes a good death?” At first blush it seems to be a cruel oxymoron even to locate “good” and “death” in the same neighborhood. After all, is not death the absolute human evil, the total negation of all human good? How can we even bring ourselves to mention in the same breath, goodness and our vaporizing into a black hole of nothingness? Citizens of the Middle Ages who survived the Black Death surely had it right when they sang farewell to the millions of corpses who clogged their streets and fields with the words of their liturgies, “Dies irae, dies illa,” “O day of wrath, O dreadful day.”
The text of death so interweaves with the fabric of our living that it challenges us to read death like any other text, be it the Bible or Shakespeare. We are compelled to look to the literary masterpieces of our civilization, not so much to find right answers to life and death, but rather to uncover the correct questions. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer once cautioned us about the Bible, it is not so much that we question the text as it is that the text interrogates us about our living and dying. We must seriously listen to death before we can answer the question: what constitutes a good death? If Heidegger is correct that we must wait in silence and that authentic speech can spring only from silence, then the response to our question about a good death can emerge only from our living. True or apocryphal, I know not, but I feel the following story illustrates this point.
One Sunday a minister was preaching to his congregation about the meaning of a good death and he told the story of the man who was on
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his deathbed and his whole life passed before his eyes in an instant, and he wasn’t even in it. Is this an instance of T.S. Eliot’s “hollow” man who passes his days in a “wasteland”? In the very first sentence of Ernst Becker’s Life Against Death, he writes, “The prospect of death, Dr. Johnson said, wonderfully concentrates the mind.” Why must our minds be concentrated, if we are to avoid being found “missing in action” when our life passes before us at our final hour on this earth?
Yes, indeed, brushes with death can wonderfully focus our minds on the essential lessons of living, but glancing in this mirror we rapidly turn away and quickly forget what we have seen. The fragile lessons we learn when faced with death are soon forgotten, scurrying into the shadow regions of our souls as we plod along our mundane ways, once again oblivious of the Grim Reaper. The compulsion to forget the lessons taught by our brushes with death may well be what Freud was pointing to with his theory of the Death Instinct. Linked to the compulsion to repeat, this self-destructive instinct blindly compels us to forget the lessons we must learn if we are to live our life to the full. Heidegger insisted that we can live abundantly and authentically only when we remember that we are on a journey toward our own death, or as he would say, we are “Be-ing-toward-death.”
Our refusal to remember—this existential repression—springs from a peculiar fear of living and hatred for life. In an exchange of letters, Why War?, between Einstein and Freud, they concur that whoever hates life loves death. Death reminds us constantly that we must own our own life, take responsibility for it and resolutely refuse to hand our life over to any other. Heidegger sees our human situation as a perpetual flight from the summons to own our own life. Only “Thought-fullness” can save us from losing ourselves in the things of this world, in the impersonal mass—the herd, the crowd—and public opinion. Repression of death thus takes the form of “Thought-lessness.” If I give away my very own self by absorption into the “they,” what they think and what they do, then I live a Thought-less life by repressing both my fully living and my fully dying. Whoever said that if I am not for myself, who am I, and if I am only for myself, what am I, had it just right. Only if I have owned my own death by having fully lived my own life can I speak in any sense of a good death. Otherwise, it is as the Bard said, mere sound and fury signifying nothing.
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How to cite this article
Smith, D. I. (2008). Is a good death an oxymoron? Clio’s Psyche, 15(3), 127-128.
