Mortality, and How Best to Avoid It

When was the first time you were confronted with your inevitable demise?

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I remember my first.

Nineteen years old, away, at college, in the sweet part of the semester, the part before classes start. A room full of friends—talking, lounging, bullshitting, and doing these with aplomb. Until, a decision to go, at which we all start getting to our feet. Though one of us doing this more slowly than the rest, also sighing and grunting until, at last, he has something to announce: “We’re getting old.”

I laughed, and yet recall that my laugh soon gave way to a tremor, and stab of fear.

Had something else just happened? I wondered. What could I have missed?

Yet, that was it. There could be no certainty. I remained unsure. Except, that is, for a single thing.

My laugh had been far too loud.

***

“You know, man, death is really a hip thing now. It’s in.”

This bit of dialogue is from All That Jazz, the late Bob Fosse’s award-winning biopic, released in 1979. The lines, voiced early on by a character based on Lenny Bruce, sets mortality as the film’s central motif. A motif that culminates in the finale: a lush, ten-minute, knowingly-over-the-top song and dance fantasia cum death scene of the film’s main character, i.e. Fosse himself.

Death was in…There was even a name: The Death Awareness Movement.

In the mid 1990’s, the movie became a favorite of mine. I owned a VHS copy and played it in repertory with a handful of other movies (something for which the VHS format seems conducive). And yet, thinking back to this time, what strikes me most is despite how familiar I became with the movie, an interesting detail, related to the above dialogue, escaped me.

Its truth.

Death was in.

There was even a name: The Death Awareness Movement. A social-historical event that began in academia in the 1950’s before bleeding out to the wider culture, especially by way of blockbuster books like On Death and Dying, by Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, with its iconic “Five Steps of Grief” formulation (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance).

Nor did matters end there.

In fact, the Death Awareness Movement would seem to be the kind of phenomenon quietly disappeared by its own success. Perhaps due to the nature of the topic. That there was no natural constituency—no “anti-death awareness” camp—standing in opposition.

Nonetheless, the post-World War II repression around the topic, from which the movement purportedly arose, has cleared. Evidenced not only by phenomena like hospice care, assisted suicides, “Death Cafes” (popular events wherein strangers come together to eat cake and talk about death) but also the sheer ubiquity of death as subject matter across all media and narrative formats.

Then, too, there is what laid beneath and extended beyond the Death Awareness Movement.

Because of course the fact of death has always been paramount to human beings. Funeral rites predate Homo Sapiens. And Charles Darwin made famously clear what anyone who has ever been in a life-threatening situation has viscerally felt: for animate creatures, the instinct to avoid death comes before all.

Which is not the worst segue back to a certain 19-year-old, in a certain room, circa 1985. How was it, one might wonder, considering all the information then available, both in the air and in his bones, that he was able to so easily shake off the ill feelings by which he’d been visited, and go about his merry way?

***

This all ends.

At perhaps the most disputatious moment in human history here is a claim upon which all might agree.

It did for Bob Fosse. Heart attack. 1987.

And of course, too, it was the thorn of this information that pierced my 19-year-old self. Serving notice, at least in retrospect, that mortality was not just for other people. In fact, that I too was party to human life’s special relationship.

Special because what other relationship exists mostly in the form of denial? Special too in how dynamic, fluid, at once unique and common it is, the planet comprised of eight billion distinct relationships with mortality, each as singular as a snowflake, non-fungible token, the peaks and valleys of an EKG.

This all ends…At perhaps the most disputatious moment in human history here is a claim upon which all might agree.

As for my own, picking things up in my twenties, it’s perhaps best characterized by what it was not: particularly conscious or instrumental in the way I lived my life.

To wit, though I’d lived through the loss of relatives, including two grandparents, it was not until I was 35 years old, and experienced the death of a friend, that I came to have the first iteration of a mature sense of mortality. An admittedly dodgy thing to define, but what in my case was a kind of psychological shift, from that of existential guest or renter, to full-on ownership.

But there is a counter narrative to this. One revealed to me through the act of writing this essay.

In this version, a crisis of my early twenties should rightfully be seen in the context of mortality. The result of an unconscious collision.

Not long out of college, gradually then suddenly, I found myself in a very bad way; depressed, near-suicidal, self-medicating, in therapy.

And to some extent I could point to causes: the milieu I’d found myself in, whose guiding stars were making money, mating, high-tailing it out to the suburbs. How’d I end up here? I wondered. What vision and way of life might be better? And oh, by the way, are there others like me? Played by reality itself as a total fool?

Then, certain aspects of my self, hitherto low resolution and retiring, came to the fore.

First, just out of college, an impulse to write. But also, a kind of intuition that a part of the world around me upon which I’d not previously assigned much value, nor truly understood, might going forward play for me a crucial role. Function, if such a thing were possible, as something of a cure.

***

Jerry Garcia would have understood, too.

In a 1991 Rolling Stone interview, given fourteen months after the lethal overdose by bandmate Brent Mydland, Jerry was in a characteristically candid frame of mind. In addition to lamenting the loss of a friend and colleague, he spoke to extenuating causes:

“But Brent had a deeply self-destructive streak. And he didn't have much supporting him in terms of an intellectual life. I mean, I owe a lot of who I am and what I've been and what I've done to the beatniks from the Fifties and to the poetry and art and music that I've come in contact with. I feel like I'm part of a continuous line of a certain thing in American culture, of a root. But Brent was from the East Bay, which is one of those places that is like nonculture. There's nothing there. There's no substance, no background. And Brent wasn’t a reader, and he hadn't really been introduced to the world of ideas on any level. So a certain part of him was like a guy in a rat cage running as fast as he could and not getting anywhere. He didn't have any deeper resources.”

Though I’d lived through the loss of relatives, including two grandparents, it was not until I was 35 years old, and experienced the death of a friend, that I came to have the first iteration of a mature sense of mortality.

And so, it’s nice to feel at one with Jerry Garcia.

Because, of course, in the midst of my own crisis it was toward the stuff Jerry was alluding—culture, art, ideas, and the way of life herein contained—to which I turned. A reorientation, for me, of the most immediate utility. Not only by its provision of resources for coping with life as I found it, but also toward making it better. While at the same time affecting a bit of comfort, exhilaration, salvation even—merely from knowing that however alternately strange, great, horrible, untenable, ecstatic I found being alive, in this I was not alone.

Further, back to Jerry, luxuriating in this under-appreciated aspect of his legacy, i.e. his intellect, it’s worth highlighting another theme or two evoked in this 1991 interview.

Concerning, for example, luck. That invariably people adept at cultivating the realms of culture and ideas to their benefit come to do so through the influence of other people—and getting that influence is sheerly a matter of luck. Then, too, there is the matter of stakes. That for certain types of people, not developing the kind of psychic musculature and habits under discussion is no mere inconvenience. Indeed, as Brent Mydland’s fate illustrated and I suspect my own as well, what we’re ultimately talking about is life and death.

***

It can’t be kept from the kids, either.

Disappearance, extinction, oblivion—the whole death thing.

Apprehension is tempered only by a child’s graduating capacity to grasp the related concepts. A process that begins around age 4 and reaches a level of coherence, at least in terms of the facts, around age 10.

As to the consequences of this information for kids, this is best considered in a broader context: how consequential ultimately is death awareness for human beings of all ages?

Moderate to total, that’s the answer the social science literature suggests.

The moderate position reflected in the fact that Thanatophobia, or “death anxiety”, does not even rate inclusion in the current iteration of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5); whereas, by contrast, “social anxiety” does. From this perspective, as encapsulated in Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death, fear of death is something both unnatural and acquired.

All to which the “total” camp says fat chance.

This orientation, though represented formally today in the academic discipline of Terror Management Theory, is originally a twentieth century affair; a major tributary of the prevailing Freudian and related intellectual currents. And from here, the significance of mortality upon human affairs is seen much differently: what people say, what we do, what we value, what we believe—the fact of death informs all.

Personally, I tilt toward this take.

How consequential ultimately is death awareness for human beings of all ages?

Not only does it gibe with my experiences at age 19 and in my early twenties—in which my unconscious mind and repression were so clearly at play—but in the present, too, it seems to hold. So that at any given instant I can choose to contemplate death—both my own and the concept in general—and have it proved again and again and again what an at once all-powerful and unassimilable data point it is.

***

My Art of Dying

Ars Moriendi, Latin for The Art of Dying, are two medieval texts composed for the purpose of disseminating proper Christian behavior to both the dying and their attendants. Appearing in 1415 and 1450 respectively, and thereby laying claim as the granddaddies of death-related publishing endeavors, the books soon inspired others of similar stripe, including a particularly popular mid-1600’s work, Holy Living & Holy Dying, whose literary influence can be traced into last century.

In related spirit, though flipping Christianity into Secularity, I offer my own contribution to the genre. And while mine bears more resemblance to an index and/or Rorschach test and/or culture war micro-aggression, nonetheless, the function of the projects can be seen as one. That of imperfect resource (and for me, record) around the most basic of problems. What might be the possibilities of life? How best to think, do, feel, be?

Joan Didion / Bill Irwin / Hannah Arendt / David Berman (Silver Jews) / Kenneth Lonergan / Allan Bloom / Sufjan Stevens (Carrie & Lowell) / Nina Simone /Shakespeare / Egon Schiele / James Baldwin / Frida Kahlo / Pete Townsend / Henry Miller / Gillian Welch / Saul Bellow / Craig Finn / Isaiah Berlin / Norman Mailer / Adam Gopnik / Marshall Berman / James Salter (Light Years) / Anais Nin / All that Jazz / Glenn Loury / David Rabe (Hurly Burly) / Elaine May / Eugene Ionesco / Dostoyevsky / David Mamet / Rachel Kushner (The Flamethrowers) / Bruce Springsteen / Christopher Hitchens / New Yorker Magazine / Stephen Fry / Krista Tippett /Susan Sontag / Socrates / Jordan Peterson / Paula Modersohn-Becker / Oscar Wilde / Ernest Hemingway / Goethe / Simone De Beauvoir / Bento De Spinoza / Samuel Beckett / James Thierree / Joni Mitchell / Leonard Cohen / Camille Paglia / Francois Truffaut / Anton Chekhov / Jonathan Lethem / The Grateful Dead / Siddhartha / Rickie Lee Jones / Coleman Hughes / Matisse / Charles Bukowski (Barfly) / London Review of Books / Terence McKenna / Marcel DuChamp / Anthony Bourdain / Niki de Saint Phalle / John Cheever / Bugs Bunny / All That Jazz / Elaine DeKooning / Allen Ginsberg / Edward Albee / Sam Harris / Louise Nevelson / Phillip Roth/ Emerson / Ram Dass / Friedrich Nietzsche / John Updike (Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralolgy) / Alex Katz / Cornel West / Monty Python / Ben Lerner (The Topeka School) / Robert Hughes / Patti Smith / Bach /Claude Lanzmann / Tom Waits / Gertrude Stein / Wes Anderson / Deborah Eisenberg / The National / Frank Ostaseski

***

“We’re getting old.”

Funny how some punchlines go stale.

As by the time I was 28, these words could be understood as nothing more than a dull declarative sentence. Twenty-eight, after all, riding the bumper of 29, and 29 no more than a slow-motion collision with what for many is the first unambiguous reckoning with the aging game.

Though personally the term that best described turning 30 would be “anti-climax.” Mostly because by then I’d meaningfully re-arranged my life. Not only by my reorientation toward culture and ideas previously described, but also, for example, by stepping off the corporate track I’d naively stepped on in childhood, and making friends with people of simpatico sensibilities to my own.

Which is not to say that mortality was now done with me.

To the contrary, for myself as I believe it is for many, the sweep of life then in front of me, call it 35 to 45, proved to be especially difficult. One whose trial and challenge was overwhelmingly caused by the all too human attributes of ambition and expectation.

Ambition and expectation, by the way, defined as broadly as you like.

Though in my own case it was the usual suspects: professional and of the heart.

From here, the significance of mortality upon human affairs is seen much differently: what people say, what we do, what we value, what we believe—the fact of death informs all.

Professional insofar as by this time I had not only recognized writing as that which I needed to do, and was doing—but also something at which I wanted to be successful. To make my living by, at the very least. Also, too, like many in their twenties and thirties, I came to be sure of something else I wanted: to be all in on the legend of romantic love. Combine my life with another, perhaps get married.

One out of two.

That’s what I got. With that “one” being a sustaining intimate relationship and family.

And while this may seem a glib summation of years and even decades of life, and the story of my creative life is not so easily conveyed (nutshell version: I need to be, therefore I am), nor fully written, the point nonetheless is this: regarding the topic at hand—my awareness that I will die—it was up against these two pursuits—meeting the right woman and making a career—that I felt it the most.

I tried not to. As feeling these two pursuits so acutely ran counter to all my professed values and beliefs. But alas, it’s true. Caught in the vise of my perceived failings and the passing of time, I experienced a full litany of soul-snuffing stuff: rage, dread, despair, did I mention rage? How about the voice? The one rising up with regularity to point out one more thing I’d never do or be at X, Y or fucking-Z age?

Fortunately, however, this is not the entire tale.

There are countervailing measures one can employ to dilute or even nullify mortality's incessant beratement. Example, if you take to heart the Buddha’s teaching as to the relationship between desire and suffering (spoiler alert: it’s tight), or Nietzsche’s, as to the optimal attitude an individual should cultivate toward their allotted fate (unconditional love or, as he put it, Amor Fati), and live with these ideas and others of similar valence for enough time, ultimately they become you.

At 56, I’m surprised at how rosy living conditions can be. Life has difficulties—life always will. But, all due disclaimers made regarding privilege and good fortune, I have found this time of life peak in terms of most things worth knowing or having: relationships; equilibrium; empathy; depth and frequency of experienced gratitude, love, joy.

But let me now pause, lest things get too sunny.

Because I’m under no illusion as to where life goes from here. The horrors. The relentless bad news. The utterly undeniable fact of what is really, truly, definitely coming.

And you know, too.

***

I lied, of course.

In the title of the essay.

Mortality, the great, immutable, supremely democratic fact of life. There is no work-around.

Caught in the vise of my perceived failings and the passing of time, I experienced a full litany of soul-snuffing stuff: rage, dread, despair, did I mention rage? How about the voice? The one rising up with regularity to point out one more thing I’d never do or be at X, Y or fucking-Z age?

At least for now. Because there are in fact wild claims being made from credible sources, including the likes of David Sinclair, a Harvard genetics professor, and Ray Kurzweil, a Futurist and Google engineer, about “Coming Soon” advances in human life extension, even up to the point of effective immortality. And yet…

So what?

For us, now, none of it means a damn thing.

Assuming one would even want to live forever (traditionally, artists have warned against), odds are if you’re old enough to be reading this, your death is a matter of when, not if.

But now, for some good news.

Really.

As mortality, as a topic if not actual phenomenon, has far more to teach us than take from us. And is in fact possessed, paradoxically, by the most life-giving of properties. Properties accessible to anyone at any time and enacted by a mere act of cognition. Wherein every measure of confrontation, acknowledgment, acceptance, is returned in kind in terms of courage, gratitude, presence, deeper life.

Encountering this theme, this claim, this truth, time after time in my research for writing this piece was one of the project’s pleasures. And so deciding it would be both the best and most honest note to end on, I started to keep an eye out for the perfect quote.

First I considered the following, by Rainer Maria Rilke, for its clarity, poetry, truth: “Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.”

But then, wanting to include Frank Ostaseski, a Buddhist teacher, hospice pioneer and “End of Life Guide,” and also finding his words thought-provoking and profound, I considered this: “…in Japanese Zen the term shoji translates as “birth-death.. There is no separation between life and death other than a small hyphen…”

Yet ultimately I decided on the following, from Albert Camus, which like a sudden bright flare in the dark illuminates all the improbable magic that courage and honesty bring to bear in this matter.

“Come to terms with death. Thereafter anything is possible.”