Death Anxiety

Today I’ve been reading and writing about death anxiety in  Irving Yalom's book  Staring at the Sun..

I have noticed how in European art writers and mystics often are painted contemplating a skull or death’s head to remind them of our mortality and finitude as humans.

Cicero said that to philosophize is to prepare for death.” And St. Augustine wrote that “it is only in the face of death that man’s self is born.” Many thinkers have observed that although the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death saves us.” But how does the idea of death save us one may ask? Well, take Dickens’ story of old Scrooge in The Christmas Carol as an example. At the end of the story Scrooge, who had been so selfish, underwent a remarkable transformation. What happened? An awakening experience. The Ghost of the Future visits Scrooge and delivers a powerful intervention, a dose of SHOCK THERAPY. By offering him a preview of the future. [My closest analogy experience was the change I felt in myself upon awakening from open heart surgery in 1993.] Scrooge observes his neglected corpse and overhears members of his community discussing him and his death coldly. As he gazes at his tombstone, he fingers the letters of his name and at that moment experiences a spiritual awakening and a transformation as did Ivan Illich in Tolstoy’s story of that man’s death. In the next scene Scrooge is a new and compassionate person. Facing the reality of death reflecting on its imminence and your mortality, you are inclined to face and grapple with your life history and further prospects, and your responsibility to construct a life worth having been lived, an authentic life of engagement as our mutual friend Martin Heidegger says. A life of connectedness, authenticity, integrity, and self-actualization.

As Oscar Wilde observed, “You might as well be yourself since all the other roles are already taken!” 

 Heidegger defined death as “the impossibility of further possibility.”I like the injunction from Heidegger’s contemporary, Jean-Paul Sartre, who insists  like Zorba the Greek that you: “Consummate your life. Leave death nothing but a burned out candle.” As Sartre put it at the end of his autobiography: “I was going along happily going quietly to my end,  certain that the last burst of my heart would be inscribed on the last page of my work and that death would be taking only a dead man.”

 Thinking now about my recent birthday I have begun to question why we all celebrate our birthdays. So far as I can determine this popular custom is of relatively recent origin. In ancient Egypt, Greece and in the Roman Empire only the birthdays of “divine” beings like pharaohs and emperors birthdays were celebrated.

The practice was strictly forbidden by early Christians, thou they did celebrate birthdays of popular saints and eventually celebrated their nameday rather than birthday. This custom still prevails in Europe today, particularly in the Mediterranean and Latin world.

So how and when did our practice of singing the birthday song and having a cake and blowing out candles and making a wish come from?. Seems that like The Christmas tree it originated in 18^th century Germany and was brought into practice in Victorian England by Queen Victoria’s German consort, Albert.

The Happy Birthday song dates back only to the early 20^th century, the now familiar words to 1935.

Blowing out the candles and making a wish on the rising smoke goes back to an ancient Germanic custom of making a prayerful wish over the smoke from a sacrificed animal, a wish that the smoke might convey to the gods, a wish for good health, prosperity, abundance of food, crops, herds, etc.

But why all this fuss about birthdays. Originally I believe it was to give thanks that one was still alive for another year, that one had avoided (survived) the various dangers confronting the growing individual in a world of high infant mortality and threatening disasters that could catch one up at any moment during the precarious journey from the cradle to the grave.

In the post and neo Romantic  20th century, the Age of the Common Man, celebration of one’s birthday came to mean honoring one’s own unique genius, once individuality, at any rate, but from the jokes one reads in birthday cards I feel there is still a “Whew! Glad I made it through another year!” element as well as a Denial of Death and Aging through humor. In short, in my opinion, birthday celebrations, at least for people over 30 or 40 is an attempt to dispel the inevitable/inexorable rush of time and the gradual decay of our bodies and its physical beauty and peak sexual functioning