Scatter My Bones across the Earth
I’ve been thinking about death a lot lately. The thought, or really the worry, manifests somatically for me as pain in my chest and arms. I think what terrifies me the most about death is what I expect to be the complete absence of my consciousness, the complete absence of my bearing witness to this world. It’s like all at once and suddenly, I’ve finally become aware of my mortality: I am finite; I will die; I will soon only be so many bones scattered across the earth; and when those bones finally dissolve, I will be nothing. I keep seeing this reoccurring image in my mind of my sun-bleached ribcage lying somewhere in the grass. Red, yellow, and purple wildflowers grow through the absent spaces between my ribs. Intermittently, the overcast sky gives way to rays of sunlight that enliven the scene. This image is beautiful to me, but it is one I will never bear witness to.
I could think of nothing better to do to remedy my terror than to turn to philosophy, specifically the philosophy of the ancients. I had had this quote from Seneca in my mind that I couldn’t ignore: “Unless we are most ungrateful, all those men, glorious fashioners of holy thoughts, were born for us; for us they have prepared a way of life” (DVB XIV.1). [1] What a beautiful thought! I needed to listen to it, and in my search for a cure, I found Epicurus and Lucretius to be the most promising and direct thinkers on the terror of death. They each offer a distinct argument to remedy that terror, arguments which are worth looking over.
The first argument can be called the “no subject of harm” argument. Epicurus writes, “Death is nothing to us; for the body, when it has been resolved into its elements, has no feeling, and that which has no feeling is nothing to us” (DL X.139). [2] In other words, Epicurus is pointing out that existence, or life, is a prerequisite for experience; but you no longer exist after you’ve died, so you cannot experience death. Therefore, death cannot be bad for you. If Epicurus is correct, then his argument would suggest that life and death are irremediably united but diametrically opposed to each other. They are two categories that cannot cross over into one another’s territories, even if you are able to imagine this crossing over. The only thing that death can be for the living is a no-thing.
Unfortunately, this first argument failed to ease my suffering. From a historical lens, it presupposes that my terror of death derives from my belief that pain and suffering may await me on the other side of life (DL X.124–125). [3] This, however, is untrue: I rarely entertain beliefs in an afterlife anymore. Anyway, I can’t help but think that an eternity of pain (if that’s what I be destined for) is preferable to an eternity of nothing. At least there would be an eternity of pain for me, right? So this first argument seemed to miss the mark, the source of my terror, and instead seemed to underscore my worry: when I die, I will be nothing.
The second argument is called the “symmetry” argument, forwarded by Lucretius, who was actually one of Epicurus’s later adherents. He writes, “Look back also and see how the ages of everlasting past before we were born have been to us nothing. This therefore is a mirror which nature holds up to us, showing the time to come after we at length shall die. Is there anything horrible in that? Is there anything gloomy? Is it not more peaceful than any sleep?” (DRN 3.972–975) [4] Lucretius’s aim here is to get you to reflect on your prenatal nonexistence and see that it wasn’t really that bad, so you should feel the same with regard to your postmortem nonexistence to come. Death is nothing to fear: it will be nothing more than the longest, and deepest, of sleeps.
I found this second argument to mollify my terror somewhat better than Epicurus’s argument. I could, to a certain extent, understand that my inevitable return to nonexistence was nothing to dread, since I’ve yet to really mourn the eternity of my prenatal nonexistence. Yet at the same time, the logic of the symmetry argument could be flipped on its head: if I do dread my postmortem nonexistence, then perhaps I should mourn my prenatal nonexistence too!
Consequently, the medicine that both Epicurus and Lucretius offered failed to take, and I was left feeling hollow—helpless and hollow.
In the meantime, I consulted a friend of mine, someone who is completely at peace with death. This peace, I came to learn, he achieved during his time as a soldier in the Régiment de Maisonneuve. I shared my fears about death with him. He listened intently, and when I had finished, he shared an anecdote with me from his time as a soldier. He said he had once heard of a young man who had failed to check the barrel of his rifle for obstructions as he was expected, and trained, to do, and the next time he fired his rifle, the barrel, which was obstructed, exploded, killing him. My friend looked at me and said, “That’s when I realized I never had to worry about death again; I had to worry about being a good soldier.”
I reflected on what my friend had said for some time before the wisdom in his words came to light, for there was wisdom in them, but I was struggling to adapt it to my own life. I was no soldier, after all. Regardless, I believe that the heart of what my friend had meant was this: if you worry about death, then you risk not worrying about those measures you need take to preserve life.
Only after meditating on this wisdom for some time did I finally come to understand Epicurus and Lucretius better—and one of the first things I realized was that they were right about the terror of death. As an aside, some of the best advice I received in my master’s degree is that if you really think you’ve discovered an error in the reasoning of some text, a text that people have been grappling with for thousands of years, then what you’ve really discovered is the limits of your own reasoning and your own profound capacity for arrogance. Humility in one’s philosophical practice is, generally speaking, a virtue. So Epicurus and Lucretius were right about the terror of death, but how?
Epicurus’s point in the no subject of harm argument seems to be that death is categorically meaningless to the living. So I cannot, on pain of contradiction, actually worry about death. It’s impossible, for as soon as I begin to grow terrified by the thought of the complete absence of my consciousness, I am forced to acknowledge that this terror is borne by the thought of a conscious being, namely me. Only a conscious being can imagine its own absence, but even then, this imagined absence is always tainted by thought, by existence, by life. So death is meaningless to me. I can understand it as something that befalls others, but in relation to me, I cannot even begin to understand it. [5] All I know, and all I can know, is life, this life, my life, as it manifests itself to me in the gentle rise and fall of my chest, the shimmer of sweat on my palms when I hold them up to the light, the joy I feel watching these words materialize under the nib of my pen.
Another realization—while the logic of Lucretius’s symmetry argument can be flipped on its head, it nevertheless teaches you, albeit obliquely, that death, in some sense, is actually a condition for the possibility of life. What I mean is that death—in all its manifestations, be it dreamless sleep, forgetfulness, the denial of a possibility, and so on—seems to furnish the possibility of me existing at all. In other words, death, as a kind of nothingness, is the foundation of my consciousness, my life. So, ironically, if consciousness is good, then death, in some abstract sense, is also good. [6]
Having better understood Epicurus and Lucretius thanks to my friend, I realized that I’ve never been terrified by death before; I’ve been terrified by the task of living well. You cannot, for example, worry about dying in a car accent, but you can worry about driving well. You cannot worry about dying from a heart attack at an early age, but you can worry about excellence in diet and exercise. Just the same, a soldier cannot worry about death by gunshot but can worry about successfully clearing a room during a raid.
Earlier, Epicurus’s argument suggested that life and death are irremediably united but diametrically opposed to each other. I see more clearly now that “irremediable” is the correct word: the tension that arises in one’s mind from the connection between life and death is incurable. Nevertheless, correctly understanding that connection can lead to a reconfiguration of one’s thinking about death—at least it did for me. This reconfiguration, given by a truth that can only be grasped on the side of life, has allowed me to understand that death truly is nothing to me and that life . . . life is everything.
I love life. I yearn for it, cling to it, but I also yearn to lead it well. Perhaps in order to do so, I must keep this reconfiguration, this antidote, constantly in mind by every once in a while recalling the image I painted at the outset of this essay. Like a Benedictine monk with his skull, I must linger on that image of my beflowered ribcage, of my mineral-rich bones dissolving into the earth again. My bones—may they be a last will and testament of a life lived well. I hope they scatter my bones across the earth when I die.
- Seneca, Moral Essays, vol. 2, ed. E. H. Warmington, trans. John W. Basore, Loeb Classical Library 254 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 332–333. It is common practice in classical scholarship to cite ancient authors’ works directly as well as to include notation for the books, chapters, sections, paragraphs, or lines cited. I follow that practice here but also provide a direct source for ease of reference.
- Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, vol. 2, ed. E. H. Warmington, trans. R. D. Hicks, Loeb Classical Library 185 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 664–665.
- Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, 650–651.
- Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, rev. ed., ed. G. P. Goold, trans. W. H. D. Rouse, rev. John W. Basore, Loeb Classical Library 181 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975, 264–265.
- At this point, I need to say that I am primarily concerned with death in this essay, not mortality. The two, I believe, should not be conflated, although it is easy to do. For those worried about mortality, I would recommend Simone de Beauvoir’s Tous les hommes sont mortels (All Men Are Mortal) as a corrective.
- I know that my thoughts about the symmetry argument leave a lot to be desired, but I take comfort in knowing they are wholly unoriginal. At this stage, these thoughts are merely a truth I live, not one I give.
