Death

Death is nothing -- What an interesting concept. When I've thought about death (and as a young person, oddly enough, I've thought about it a lot), I've always come to a pessimistic conclusion --"Well, you were nothing before you were born, so now you are simply nothing again" -- or to some melancholy conclusion such as the above, though I've never really thought about death as nothing, which I do like.

The problem with this mentality, as I figured out after reading Solomon's chapter on death, is that it seems to infer that life is nothing, it is insignificant. Solomon has a problem with this because he wants to advocate the richeness of one's life as one's primary focus, not the insignificant of one's life. Being an existentialist, it doesn't surprise me that Solomon thinks this way. Existentialism, as I see it, recognizes the cosmic insignificance of one's life, but calls upon individuals to do something with their life and create its meaning, their own meaning.

Because of the cynic of me, I've often missed taking a look at the social aspect of death. How will I be remembered? Who will take care of my family? If I have kids, what's going to happen to them? What's more scary, is recognizing that the world goes on without me. Will anyone remember me? How long will it take for people to forget about me? Will the world be okay without me? Then there is the issue of my body's disposal. Should I donate it to scientific research? Should I allow my organs to be used to save other people's lives? Do I want to be buried or cremated?

Even with these questions, death should not be feared. Fearing something inevitable is self-defeating. After reading Solomon's chapter on death, my mindset is that death may be nothing from my perspective, but to those around me, and to those whom I have loved and will love, I hope my death is something to them. Solomon says it best,

The fear of death easily presents itself as a metaphysical or logical perplexity, as a dread of the unknown, as a confrontation with nothingness. The truth, I think, is much less flattering. We worry about the pain of dying, of the pain that precedes dying. We vainly worry about the disposition of our bodies after death. We worry about the people we care for, but then we also worry that they will be fine without our care, indeed, that they will not even remember us without our constant, even if kindly, reminders. The idea that death is nothing, to may not be so much a matter of metaphysics as an awkward sense of absence. Put in the least flattering way, we might say that my death is a bad thing because it deprives the universe of me. I picture the world without me, like Sartre's characters in No Exist. I see them talk about me, laugh about me, pity me. I watch someone date and marry my wife, raise my children, refute my books. Or worse, I see that they ignore me. Death may be nothing, but it is a nothing that hurts.