Remember, O Man

On death and the business of dying

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I only have dim memories of the old priest who baptized me, but they said he was an eccentric soul. His name was Fr. Stevens. He could be stubborn and cantankerous. He could be puckish in the pulpit. He also had a charismatic streak, which made him feel at home when he visited a local black congregation. I remember one story he especially relished about guest-preaching for them at Easter, opening with the traditional Anglican Easter greeting, “Alleluia, he is risen!” As one, the congregation answered back, “He sho’ nuff is!” This delighted him so much I’m sure he repeated the story multiple times.

While I was preparing for confirmation, he was dying, although not yet bedridden. He looks visibly ill in pictures from the day, pale and shedding weight. It felt like he was hanging on just for me, because shortly after the ceremony, he declined precipitously. I don’t remember exactly how soon he died, but it was fast.

After he was gone, a colleague recalled a moment from one of the last meals he shared with friends, maybe the last. He stood up, very weak, but speaking with great confidence, and quoted Psalm 118:17: “I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord.”

My mind went back to old Fr. Stevens this summer, during a seminar in Cambridge, MA where we were discussing techno-futurism, transhumanism, apocalypse—the sort of stuff one discusses at this sort of thing. A young student mentioned a dialogue he’d attended involving Peter Thiel, who’s known for investing much of his considerable wealth in transhumanist-adjacent ventures. Thiel likes to say that if Christians want to criticize transhumanism, we should say it’s not ambitious enough, because it only seeks to remake our bodies, but we want to remake our souls too—whatever he believes that means, exactly. The venture capitalist is especially keen on anti-aging research. Most people are willing to accept death, but Thiel prefers to fight it. And why shouldn’t we? Death is a terrible thing, an ugly, unnatural thing. Why wouldn’t we use all the means at our disposal to keep ourselves as healthy as possible for as long as possible—indefinitely, if we could?

It sounds far-fetched, but Thiel is optimistic enough that throughout this dialogue, by the student’s account, he kept saying “If I die…”

And I thought of Fr. Stevens, and smiled.

It’s not that I begrudge Thiel his fighting spirit. It’s a healthy spirit—to a point. In one sense, it sits in curious contrast with the West’s precipitous slide down the slippery slope of “death with dignity,” aka assisted suicide. The practice is still illegal in England, but that may change soon, as newly minted PM Keir Starmer has just announced he intends to fast-track a change in the law through Parliament.

Yet the transhumanists and the “death with dignity” merchants share something in common: a deep fear of suffering.

British transhumanist and utilitarian philosopher David Pearce coined the phrase “hedonic zero,” meaning a state of complete experiential equilibrium. You’re not in a state of ecstasy, but you’re not suffering either. You’re pain and pleasure-neutral. Pearce’s mission is to unlock the secrets that will allow all living things to exist in a state no worse than hedonic zero. Of course, certain questions always hover over such grand missions: By what means? At what cost? Grounded in what philosophy of the human person? A philosophy that sees no meaning in suffering? Or a philosophy that sees suffering as an inescapable part of what it means to be human?

These questions aren’t merely academic for me, as they aren’t merely academic for just about everyone who’s loved some people and lived some life. My mother has now spent over three years living with an intense chronic pain condition, a result of a vaccine injury. We’ve had many conversations about the horrors of euthanasia and assisted suicide, to which she’s always been fiercely opposed. As a politics and culture writer, she’s documented numerous cases of people who lost their medical care when they lost the ability to advocate for themselves, because they once made comments about not wanting to be a burden, and their families lacked the moral courage to do the right thing. Not that she does want to be a burden, obviously. No one does. But she would rather be a burden than be murdered.

The immortality merchants would say they imagine a future where no one has to make such choices anymore. Not instantly, because it won’t be like that, like some pill from Miracle Max. It’ll be a war of attrition, of accumulated small wins on the way to the great and final Victory. We’ll gradually cure all the worst diseases, all the most burdensome and messy ways of dying. We’ll perfect the technology of transplants, organic and artificial. And eventually, in time, we’ll discover how to make time stop. Just wait.

Except, the death merchants will reply, our grandparents’ generation can’t wait, nor our parents’, nor our own. And if we’re all honest, if we’re waiting for immortality, we’re waiting for nothing. We might have some breakthroughs, cure some things. We might be able to barter with death for ten more years on average, maybe even twenty, twenty-five. Death can be patient. But death comes as the end. It always does. It always will.

And so, since we can’t live forever, and since we all know it, there is a seductive power in the vision of a graceful, serene, mess-free death on your own terms. Writing in The Spectator, Matthew Hall has just penned a harrowing essay about watching his Canadian aunt receive a lethal injection. As a Christian, he had made his own position crystal clear to her, but she was an atheist, and she was implacable. Having failed to prevent her death, he forced himself to be present at the surreal, emotive family gathering around her soon-to-be deathbed, as the affable Canadian doctor injected poison in her arm. Hall calmly read a prayer in Welsh, the language of his aunt’s father, then read other prayers for the dying in English.

Later, the nurse said these prayers had “got to her.” Hall reflects that it’s probably rare for there to be a Christian presence at such proceedings. The interjection of something otherworldly, something “Goddy,” as his aunt would say, had unsettled this woman, for whom putting down people had become a sad but matter-of-fact routine not unlike putting down beloved pets. On this occasion, that process, that removal of a “sacred boundary,” had been met “with a belief in the soul, in God, in consequences.”

And yet, he couldn’t deny that it was all very convenient. The whole thing hummed along like a well-oiled machine, one professional smoothly coming in to replace another. He couldn’t deny that it was all very efficient, very cost-saving—financially, emotionally. And she had made it so pleasant for everyone, laughing and joking to the end. As David Pearce might have said, she had died in a state of hedonic zero.

Not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with dying in a state of hedonic zero, when you’re lucky enough for that to happen in the natural course of things. Immortality merchants and their followers can tend to set up a strawman of Christian techno-pessimists as masochists, not merely enduring pain but in some sense relishing it. Likewise, they fail to understand how we can properly hate death while still accepting it as the end. As one earnest young techno-optimist asked me and a friend on Twitter, why did Jesus weep at the grave of Lazarus? Isn’t this showing us that death is something for us to fight, and, if possible, to conquer? As Thiel suggests, isn’t a truly Christian vision not too dissimilar from the transhumanist vision—no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain?

But of course, this fails to reckon with the full story of Lazarus. It fails to reckon with Jesus’ immediately preceding words to Martha: I am the Resurrection and the Life. I am.

If you read closely, though, you will see that Jesus handles the two sisters differently. Martha comes to him angrily, demanding to know why he came too late to heal her brother. He replies calmly but firmly, with the promise of resurrection. Then Mary comes weeping, saying almost the same thing Martha did, but in sorrow, not anger. And at this, we are told that Jesus is “deeply moved and troubled.” And all he can say is, “Where have you laid him?”

Why did Jesus weep? Why wouldn’t he weep?

The Christian believes our death is neither good nor natural, in the Edenic sense of “natural.” This is true. The Christian likewise believes our painful labor is not natural, whether we’re speaking about the sweat on a man’s brow or the sweat on a woman’s brow in childbirth. It was not always so. Yet, now that this is so, now that this is the natural order of things, painful labor is something to which men and women are called. It is the price of making a life, making a family, making ourselves.

There’s a profound reflection on this theme in a new memoir by a writing friend of mine, Ashley Lande, which traces her journey to Christianity out of a kind of American hippie Buddhism. Before she was a Christian, she was led to think that suffering was a thing to be ashamed of, to escape—through drugs, through mindfulness, through any means necessary. In particular, she was led to believe that childbirth, properly approached, was supposed to be “the trip to end all trips.” Suffering was all in her head, she believed. Concentrate hard enough, and she should have been able to banish it. But she couldn’t. Agony took over. Darkness took over. And it was there that her delusions first began to shatter.

And just as we are called, through pain, to live well, so I believe we are called, through pain, to die well. Which, we can forget, is not the same thing as dying nicely. It wasn’t for Jesus, after all.

Yet even as I believe, I will confess it is mysterious to me, how exactly our suffering is joined with his. I confess that I fail, often, to see the point in what seems like pointless pain. I fail to see the point in pointless death. On the philosophical problem of evil, typically abbreviated in the literature as POE, I’ve thought about a variant—POSE, the Problem of Stupid Evil. The Reddit deaths, the Darwin Award cases, the deaths so dumb they’re funny. I can’t compose eloquent reflection pieces about all these things. I can’t always fit all these things into a philosophy of the universe that makes sense, that feels logical or humane. My only consolation is that, for a few timeless moments, neither could Jesus.

And herein is Christianity: that the only way to Sunday is through Friday. The only way to paradise is through the cross.

I want to end with one of my favorite poems about death, but first I want to introduce the poet a bit. It’s likely you’ve never heard of him unless you’re plugged into a very particular corner of the American Catholic poetry scene, which is where I stumbled onto his work earlier this year thanks to James Matthew Wilson. I would say he’s forgotten, but as one critic wryly put it, that would imply that he was ever remembered. His name was John Finlay, and he died at age 50. He wrote a number of fine poems, but it’s generally agreed that his finest was his last. He dictated it to his sister while bedridden and blind, in the last days of the illness commonly known as AIDS.

Finlay was granted more years than other men of his generation. He spent those years quietly, withdrawing to practice spiritual discipline, study scholastic philosophy, and produce most of his career-best work on his family’s farm in Enterprise, Alabama. Over a decade of slow decline, he kept up such a steady stream of correspondence that his close friends sensed nothing amiss, until he could no longer conceal the truth.

It was, in a way, a grimly fitting end for a writer whose work is haunted by the interplay of the corporeal and the spiritual, and the gnostic impulse to sever the two. In this respect, he consciously diverged from his poetic mentor Yvor Winters, an intellectual theist who rejected Christianity. Though Finlay understood physical temptation and pain all too acutely well, he still believed that body and soul, or “mind and blood,” were meant to be taken and loved together, each no less essential to man than the other. And so unlike the great Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus, who according to his biographer “seemed ashamed of being in a body,” Finlay humbly accepted his own cross of suffering. The nurses who tended him would later say that they had never seen a man die so well.

It was in that state that he composed this, his last poem, by then so weakened that he couldn’t so much as hold a pencil. It is perhaps not the greatest poem about death. But it remains, to me, one of the most poignant. It’s strange that the prayer of a man in mortal pain could be, in its way, comforting. Yet, somehow, it does comfort me. I’ll end with it now, in hopes it does the same for you.

A Prayer to the Father

Death is not far from me. At times I crave

The peace I think that it will bring. Be brave

I tell myself, for soon your pain will cease.

But terror still obtains when our long lease

On life ends at last. Body and soul,

Which fused together should make up one whole

Suffer deprived as they are wrenched apart.

O God of love and power, hold still my heart

When death, that ancient, awful fact appears;

Preserve my mind from all deranging fears,

And let me offer up my reason free

And where I thought, there see Thee perfectly.