In his wonderful book The Denial of Death, anthropologist Ernest Becker argues that most people are not equipped to deal with death.
In Becker’s words: “As soon as man lifts his nose from the ground and begins to sniff at problems like life and death, he gets into trouble.” How true that is became clear to me recently from the story of a former patient who came by for a boost consultation.
“Within a few weeks I buried two good friends. One died of throat cancer, the other of cardiac arrest. Shortly after the last funeral I had to travel. But I was still so shaken that my wife decided to come with me for a few days.”
“The night she was supposed to fly back home, I couldn’t take it anymore. I could hardly say goodbye to her, had to tear myself away. Back at my hotel I was a mess. In my mind’s eye I saw her craft shatter somewhere over the ocean. And like a heavy blanket the realization fell over me that we will lose each other one day anyway. Every love affair is doomed. There’s no hope. Words that haunted me all night. Everything, even the most dear people sooner or later slip through our fingers or we through theirs. Nature or the universe denies us any permanent right to each other.”
“And then? When you got back to your hotel, what did you do?” I ask.
“Then I took a notepad,” is the answer, “and simply wrote down whatever thoughts and feelings came to my mind.”
“As?”
“Like I imagined she would indeed die. That the woman I love so much, that body that is so familiar to me, that smile that always cheers me up, that nothing would be left of it but a skull and a few bones somewhere between a few layers of earth. I really saw that as well. At one point I was so over my neck that I threw the whole trade aside, put on my shoes and grabbed some solid drinks at the bar downstairs. To dampen that feeling.”
“Did that work?”
“Well… I slept reasonably well. But the next day that feeling was still somewhere inside me and, to be honest, it has never completely gone away. I’ve felt more emotionally fragile, more vulnerable ever since. Sometimes tears in my eyes when I see a goodbye in a movie, for example. And when I look at her I often think: Love, I have you now, but who knows how long? And yet… I don’t know how to put it exactly… it feels like great gain that I now treat the time we can have together as much more important and precious than before. Realizing and dealing honestly with our mortality has become a life goal. I really don’t want to waste time on anything else.”