Death, can it bring us closer to life?
The Austrian prime minister put it rather bluntly in the beginning of March when he said that within a couple of weeks everybody will know somebody who died of Covid-19. This thought hit a lot of people, including me, quite a bit. Death usually seems to be far away, in another country, time or place, but not that close as it had come in the past weeks.
Of course, Covid-19 times or not, if we know anything for sure, it is that we will all die one day. Nevertheless, we usually succeed to put this uncomfortable truth aside. Indeed, many philosophers consider death as an evil. An evil because it interrupts life and with it all the good things in it. An evil as it cuts the pursuit of our life goals, seemingly stops our relationship with loved ones or interrupts the satisfaction of our pleasures and desires. Others, as Epicurus, argued that death cannot harm us: if death ends everything, it cannot harm us anymore when it occurs as we do not exist anymore. During life on the other hand, death cannot harm us as it has not yet occurred. So, as death cannot harm us, we should not allow it to bother us as long as we are still alive.
But, is this all? Is the solution really to consider death as a necessary evil or to ignore it? To put death aside and live as if we would have endless time for everything? Endless time to start with the unimportant things, endless time to go about our routine as if there is enough time to question and possibly change it later on? Amartya Sen would send back a bottle of wine during a supervision dinner with the words “life is too short for a bad wine”. What else is life too short for? Being reminded that one’s time is limited can give another perspective and meaning. A friend once shared his secret for a happy life with me, “I am living my life from death, actively reminding myself every day that this could be my last one”. I found this a bit too extreme at the time. But is it? Really?
Couldn’t it also be that it makes life more precious precisely because we are aware of its end? That our time becomes more precious, precisely because it is limited? To realise that we do not have time for everything and that precisely this can make us more aware, careful and appreciative of the things we do and the words we say. As Simone de Beauvoir beautifully describes it in her book All men are mortal (1946): immortality, living endlessly through the centuries, without ever being allowed to die, could be like a curse. Things and experiences would lose their value, as we could repeat them endlessly in the time to come. Indeed, many endeavours would not be undertaken anymore as we still had endless time to depart on them. Why drink a good wine today if we could still do so tomorrow? A different approach would be to “live life from death”: Not to ignore life because of death, but to live it more fully in the awareness of it.
These Corona days could be one opportunity to learn this a bit more. When death is more present somehow, in the news, on the radio, in the story of the neighbours, during phone calls or in skype chats. It is not far away, in a distant country, in a distant time; no it is here, right in front of us. Can’t this also be a chance? An opportunity to get closer to life, to realise what matters and what does not and live life more fully again? Personally, I found it difficult but very healthy to ask these questions. Indeed, beside everything else, Corona might have a healthy side effect after all.