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By George Chesterton
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I want to talk about the thing we never talk about anymore. We hate talking about it so much we don’t even say the word. Death. There, I said it. Not "passing," but death.
In middle age, death starts to peep his little benighted head over the wall. When a person is engaged in what we can call "life"—working hard, maybe raising children, building a home, having fun (remember that?)—it’s remarkably easy to forget death. But at a certain age death appears in your peripheral vision. Now I’m not suggesting that I can provide an answer that has eluded humanity’s greatest souls, but in midlife it’s still worth asking yourself, how should I approach the subject?
In Britain, there is a common phrase used to make light of a bad situation. "Cheer up mate, it might never happen" can be said on almost any occasion. The one subject for which it does not apply is mortality. "It might never happen" is unfortunately not the case. It is going to happen. And as you age you push the possibility of death harder and harder to the back of your mind as the reality of it gets closer and closer.
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Rather than turn to a religious figure or bearded philosopher for guidance, my first thought was to consider, as I do in all things, the words of Captain James T. Kirk in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
I thought about death a lot more as a child that I have done for the past 30 years. It was rather traumatic if I recall. In three short years I had to deal with finding out Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker’s father and the death of Spock. It was a terrible time. But Kirk did say this: "How we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life." You cannot separate one from the other.
Then in my later teenage years I watched Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, which despite its Swedish gloom, suggested that looking death in the face—or at least playing chess with him—was preferable to pretending he wasn’t there or screaming like a frightened child every time the idea popped into your head.
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But after that I did forget death for a while. It was only recently, as middle-age coincided with a life crisis of my own, that I started to think about death seriously again. For reasons that I could not fathom—perhaps it was coincidence, perhaps it was a cosmic plan—I had to deal with more than one personal crisis at exactly the same time. And it was in the eye of this storm that I wondered "What can I take from this nightmare?"
I wanted to find a way to make sense of life, and part of that was thinking about life’s connection with death. I was, after all, now probably closer to death than birth and I didn’t want to be defined by a negative. I didn’t want to revisit the teenage angst of Morrissey, who sang (with lashings of English irony) "I think about life and I think about death and neither one particularly appeals to me."
Some people face death through their faith. Others through a defiant scientific rationality. In the middle of one of the worst periods of my life, I found a way to reframe life with a clarity I had never known before.
On a single day—again perhaps coincidence, perhaps God’s will—I happened to be reminded of several visions of what happens after death. The first was Dante’s hell, in which sinners are punished according to their sins. The second was the hell outlined in James Joyce’s Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, in which a Jesuit tortures his young students with descriptions of eternal damnation. The third was the idea of the "beatific vision," where you stare at the face of God for eternity, a concept that sounded quite like hell but more boring. Then finally there was the cold, brutal prospect of non-existence that wakes you up at night in a cold sweat.
When I thought about all these possibilities, I realized I had everything upside down. Life is much better than all of them. Even a hard life is preferable to heaven. Even a life in which terrible things happen has value. Death sucks because it means the end of life, but it does make you understand what life actually is. Life is paradise.
Captain Kirk was right all along*. Star Trek II* isn’t about space battles and the revenge of a genetically enhanced psychopath. It’s really a movie about becoming middle-aged. Kirk has to face aging and death for the first time in his life and he comes to the same conclusion I have. However you chose to do it, use death to help you live.
At the end of the movie when a grieving Kirk is asked how he feels, he says: "I feel young." That’s all a middle-aged person can wish for.
George Chesterton is Newsweek’s Director, Publishing & Subscriber Strategy.
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