Death in life

The fear of dying harms our well-being, making existence more urgent in the face of the imminent end...

How many days until the last day? What do you think while you're still breathing?

Look at you.

Touch your face, arms and legs. Visually touch your viscera and imagine their work in the perfect gear that makes up the human body. Now, realize your qualities, your senses, flaws, learnings and dreams not yet fulfilled.

Not everything that constitutes us can be groped.

While composing the text with the questions that initiate this reflection, I asked myself what we are beyond ourselves, and what will become of us, after the final outcome. The supremacy of death in silencing the cry of genesis.

Crying is the first exteriorized chord of existence. The act of crying integrates the baby into the new environment, adapting its breathing and blood circulation to the world.

Long before that, were we “nothing” becoming matter?

But, what about after the matter? Will we be “nothing” again? And what would “nothing” be? Absence of “everything” or anything? The impalpable? Invisible? Soul? Spirit?

Existentialists would say that it's the harrowing feeling that comes over us when we don't get satisfactory answers to existential questions. Heidegger and Sartre think of "nothing" as something real as opposed to "being".

And to “be”... Is it enough to exist only objectively?

Once — in my office, during a routine dental appointment — a 12-year-old boy accompanied by his mother and already sensing his passing due to a degenerative disease, asked me what death was like; if dying hurt.

The issue was essential, as he seemed to ignore "being", going directly to the void, bringing up (unconsciously) issues such as the fear of pain allied to the "nothing" discussed in existentialism. His facial muscles were tense and the labial commissure took a downward path, foreshadowing tears that insisted on keeping reclusive, further increasing the apprehension that consumed him.

I stayed, for a few eternal seconds, absorbed, waiting for I don't know what.

Perhaps I yearned for divine inspiration, while trying to rescue some memory of a time when I don't know if I lived or died.

I needed to think fast, as children are pragmatic and averse to rambling. I pondered, breathing hard and, with my heart tachycardic from the release of the hormone that heralds escape, I stubbornly planted my feet on the ground.

I faced the boy, trying to maintain the same balance that that boy still showed and with the false certainty of some reminiscence, haughtily, I said that dying was the easiest part of life.

From the top of my insecurity and half plastered before the incredulous and dissatisfied look of the child, I realized that even pragmatism has limits.

And notice, reader, how philosophy can be relevant in the most extreme moments of our existence, since – unlike animals – we are aware of our finitude.

I referred to the thought of Epicurus, who treated death as a chimera, that is, while we exist, it does not exist, and when it appears, we will not exist.

Sounds simple? Who said philosophy is complicated?

“Therefore, fear what?”, Montaigne would say when he affirmed that death is a form of liberation and that happy are those who consider it that way.

I turned to the boy again and surrendered to the modesty of confessed ignorance. He said he was still learning to live, and living is painful. That was obvious to the already suffering boy, but it was urgent to make him understand that there would be no greater pain and suffering than those endured in life, death being the disconnection from everything, including our sufferings.

The fear of dying harms our well-being, making existence more urgent in the face of the imminent end - since life is considered short - and such urgency can lead to haste and mishap, masking our senses and the true reason for we'll be here.

For Schopenhauer, man's greatest affliction in the face of thinning resides in the concern for the body above the essence, bringing a metaphysical anxiety. It is the isolated life, surrounded by “nothing”. Thus, the attachment to what we will leave here makes us insecure about the future.

But what if the body were immortal? Would we be able to give meaning to earthly existence?

The perception of finitude should make man the master of his paths and of what should be relevant in this short stay in the worldly. What are we really valuing in this passage around the world?

We live daily with provisional endings such as day, night, tasks, farewells and changes... Therefore, I imagine that small ends are the way found by life in order to prepare us for the most terrifying finitude of all, but what , contradictorily, may represent the only human passport to eternity.

Religion assigns a fate to death in a condemned way, selling the idea of immortality as a reward for the suffering of the body, as you are considered a persistent sinner. Philosophy, on the other hand, clings to free thought, so that we can deal with the anxieties inserted in this thorny subject, freely, and without the dogmatic appeal.

When I mention ''eternity'', I am not surrendering to dogmas, but because I believe that our perpetuity translates beyond the body and soul.

Therefore, for those who believe in the eternal soul, we will live in the ethereal, something discussed in the Phaedo (one of the most beautiful platonic dialogues), which is dedicated to the immortality of the spirit and where the truth would be.

However, for those who disbelieved in infinity — such as Nietzsche, who disagreed with transcendence and claimed that there was no meaning outside of life itself —, even so, our eternity will reside in the achievements and legacies planted and rooted, as well as in the intensity we dispense to life until the final sigh, before the last neural connection and the last chord sung in the cessation of systoles and diastoles.

That dialogue with a boy who was about to leave made me understand death as a sine qua non condition for the search for the best way to live, however, with the superficiality that characterizes our days, we run the serious risk of succumbing without ever having existed fully.

After minutes of reflective silence, the boy tried a shy smile and said goodbye with a discreet wave, while his other hand sought his mother's hands. It was already getting dark and the path to his house was not so safe.

For a moment, the fears of life overcame his fear of death.

And you, how do you deal with your finitudes?

Respond in the comments below.

Marcelo Kassab.

Writer and Dental Surgeon.